BEAUTY: Digital Art--David Kraftsow

Programmer and visual artist Dave Kraftsow created a Twitter bot that monitors YouTube videos within a specified parameter and creates amazing digital art out of YouTube's MP4 motion compensation algorithm. YouTube uses H.264 motion compression on MP4 videos, which fully captures only select frames (i-frames), filling in the rest with b-frames or p-frames that save the temporal differences between frames. While that conserves space, the image breaks up if any of the i-frames are missing. So Kraftsow's Twitter bot deliberately removes i-frames and then fills in the gaps with what it thinks should be there. Machine-made art. The results are really quite stunning: a beautiful, feathery smear of color until closer inspection reveals the jagged edges of pixels.

The bot automatically creates a new image every 3 hours. Check out the Twitter feed to follow the stream of these painterly glitches.
https://twitter.com/youtubeartifact/media