Bleeding Pixels

This chapter examines the aesthetic properties and phenomenological effects of compression glitches—blocky image distortions that momentarily deform digitally compressed video. As visible expressions of the invisible processes of digital video compression, compression glitches offer unprecedented encounters with the technological production of cinematic motion. Two distinct consequences of these encounters are explored in this chapter. First, because compression glitches are more likely to occur when the compression algorithm is overworked by large volumes of onscreen movement, the ubiquity of compression glitches has yielded a spectatorial sensitivity to the magnitude of movement on screen. Second, because compression glitches extract movement itself (i.e., algorithmic motion instructions) from its original visual context, the visual qualities of such glitches heighten our attention to the formal qualities of movement as distinct from the actions and events that such movements comprise. Taken together, these two spectatorial effects of the compression glitch illuminate new orientations toward cinematic motion in the digital era. Describing these orientations, the chapter argues, can model a form of inquiry that bridges the gap between technologically oriented and phenomenologically oriented accounts of “digital cinema.”