I’m kicking off the Glitches in Motion series with the music video for Are You the One? by The Presets. This was directed by Kris Moyes back in 2006, and won the Australian Dance Music award for Best Music Video in the same year. Since then Kris has gone on to do work for Wolfmother, Franz Ferdinand, Cut Copy, Hercules and Love Affair, Architecture in Helsinki and Beck.

Kris uses artifacting as a transitional effect and a way of intensifying the video’s retro, lo-fi digital aesthetic. Interestingly, a lot of the technology he features in the imagery predates these sort of compression artifacts. Though fast-forwarding certain tape formats will result in some interesting blocking around areas of movement, these are definitely the result of modern datamoshing type techniques in which the I and P frame structure of a digital video file is intentionally (or unintentionally) broken.

The first major digital video codec was H.261, which was developed in 1990, and it wasn’t until 1993 and 1995 respectively that the VCD and DVD were standardized, which marked the first widespread distribution of digital video files. This is a good number of years after the NES (1983) and Reel-to-Reel (1930s) technologies depicted between shots of the band, as well as the great array of TV sets from the opening. Then again, from our perspective in the new millennium all of these things may be defined by various shades of “retro”.

Regardless of historical cohesion, I think the artifacts fit beautifully with the crunchy beat and VHS-like color saturation. And, most importantly, they don’t fully take over the visuals. This is a good example of glitching in moderation which helps to tie together other elements of the video rather than tear them down into abstraction.