The Secret Data Within

posted by Jett Loe

Via Metafilter comes this most intriguing video by Chairlift:

Chairlift – “Evident Utensil” Music Video from Data Mosher on Vimeo.

It’s intriguing because the majority of ‘effects’ seen in the video are created by manipulating the means of video compression used to ‘encode/compress’ the video, (if you’ve ever done digital video editing you know what I mean).

What this does is reveal the secret data structures within the moving image – cause you know, when we record digital video the machine doesn’t actually record what’s in front of us, like film and analog video used to do – instead common codecs often only record changes that occur. From Wikipedia:

“Video compression typically operates on square-shaped groups of neighboring pixels, often called macroblocks. These pixel groups or blocks of pixels are compared from one frame to the next and the video compression codec (encode/decode scheme) sends only the differences within those blocks.”

What does this mean?  Well, take a look at the video below – I’m moving, so new information is being recorded on a regular basis – but the background is not moving – so the bricks behind me are not in the same time-frame as I am, they are the exact same bricks, (frozen in time), from the first second of the video – it’s a composite of past and future:

Well, so what?

I tell you what:  stills from your digital camera, video, YouTube, cable, DVDs, whatever – anything that uses these compression technologies, are not recordings of the world – they’re approximations, or more accurately , imagined models/representatives of the world.

This is so new that we’re still using the old language of the photo-chemical/analog – recordings – as if we’re taking an accurate snapshot of the world, (and no, I’m not going to go into the whole cropping = photos are not ‘reality’ thing here – even with cropping there’s the underlying assumption that in the initial photo the events exposed in front of the lens actually happened, actually existed).

Well, no more.  With these new technologies we’re stepping away from the real and inserting an additional decision maker, an artificial brain, in-between us and the subject.  In cinema we’ve seen the effect clearly that new technology has on the actual work product itself, (films becoming more ‘cutty’ as non-linear editing systems like Avid became the norm – yikes it was slow-going cutting film, gluing it/pasting it, now BAM ZOOM, CSI up in here); these new technologies will have a far more profound effect.

It’s happening gradually and stealthily, but the merger of humans with the machine is happening, and the emergence of self-generated machine creativity is now underway.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 13th, 2009 at 11:53 am. It is filed under Blog, Jett Loe, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.