The perception of our world is mediated through images. Now more than ever, those images are viewed on a screen, online, often in video. .h264 and .h265 video compression codecs are used on virtually all web video. These compression algorithims chop up, average, and process images spatially and temporally. While compression makes videos stream faster, it also reduces image quality. In the worst cases, it obscures the imagery on screen.

 

I took this notion as a starting point for a project, thinking: what if I compressed video hundreds of times? Would there be a point at which the images became beautiful again?