Jens Hesse - Paintings influenced by datamoshed videos

"Datamoshing" is a digital process in which videos are accidentally - or more commonly, intentionally - distorted and damaged as files. It is a process that changes and damages the different types of frames within a video, leading to images to overlap and drag onscreen, creating interesting aesthetic effects.

German artist Jens Hesse creates oil paintings based on these pictures.

I love these paintings a lot. The "taking back" of the digital aesthetic, often popular in internet culture, to the traditional aesthetic of oil paintings fascinates me. The artistic process becomes a game of tennis - constantly being batted back and forth, swapped between art forms and processes. The convention of an oil painting is that something is being painted from life - yet with this digital distortion, we can begin to ask questions of what is real life, and how influential the digital world is in our realities.