Glitch effect; datamoshing
Deliberate digital breakage, including blocky smears where compressed motion from one shot gets applied to the wrong frame.
See it
What it is
A glitch effect borrows the visible mistakes of damaged digital media: block breakup, frozen slices, channel offsets, dropped scan lines, and torn frames. Datamoshing is the codec-driven member of that family. Remove or damage an I-frame and later P-frames can apply their motion vectors to the wrong picture, smearing one shot's blocks into the next.
Reach for it as a brief transition, a signal-loss cue, or an aggressive accent in music and technology work. Two 2009 music videos put the look on the map: Chairlift's Evident Utensil and Kanye West's Welcome to Heartbreak. A simulated glitch gives exact timing and repeatability; actual datamoshing gives stranger motion but less control. In either case, a clean image before and after the burst makes the corruption legible.
Gotcha: real corruption is decoder-dependent. A player may repair it, skip it, or refuse the file, and a later upload transcode may erase the artifact. Keep an untouched master, capture the successful mosh into a normal delivery codec, and do not leave essential captions or faces unreadable for more than a moment.
Ask AI for it
Create a real datamosh transition between these two short clips. Encode them to AVI with the Xvid MPEG-4 Part 2 codec, join them, and open the result in Avidemux. Remove the I-frame at the second clip's boundary while retaining the following P-frames so motion from the new shot smears blocks from the old one. Save in copy mode, keep the corruption under one second, then transcode the successful result to H.264 for delivery while preserving the untouched source files.