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Herald: Resolution is always a compromise we have got used to. Why not talk about it
again this is why the next talk is entitled: "Institution for Resolution
Disputes" and our speaker is Rosa Menkman a Dutch artist, curator and researcher, and
founder of IRD or "the Institute of resolution dispute". A big applause for
Rosa, please. And the stage is yours!
*applause*
Rosa Menkman: Thank you. Thank you for being here on this like - very late part
of the whole conference and I mean when I was checking in everybody seemed so tired
it was really funny to experience this like latency in everybody. So I'm Rosa
Menkman, I'm from the Netherlands everybody speaks German to me here, it's
really funny because my name sounds German but actually when you say something in
German I will speak back in English. But please speak to me when you want to.
In 2015, I'm gonna talk from 2015 onwards, I was invited to be a research fellow in a
big Institute in the Netherlands to do research on resolutions and this was a
huge honor for me and I dropped everything in London where I used to live at the time
and went and moved back to Amsterdam which actually was not my favorite city in the
world at all. So I went there and three days before my, my contract started which
we had already signed like a month back and everything: I was fired because the
head of the department had looked into my accreditation and my PhD that I was doing
at the time, had started somewhere else and had not the right accreditations since
I ported it from Cologne to London and so I would have to revisit the whole
institutional network and get my stuff right in time to start. Now that was not
possible. And so I was,... how do you say that "properly for a live stream". I was
like dropped the kitty dead. So I got really,... how you say like - sad in
Amsterdam. Alone, without a cause and kind of angry with institutions and this is
when at a certain time I got out of my darkness and went to the Californian
desert to live alone in the middle of nowhere and this talk will be about two
works that I made, or two institutions, two exhibitions: one is the institution
institutes - like a double or a plural - for resolution disputes and then the
second one which is kind of a more in- depth research is behind white shadows.
And I made these and the research kind of started in the deserts where I was looking
from my house into this little village. You have to imagine the desert there's not
a lot but straight from my patio I could see this - this is from Google Street for
you - so you can't really see it very well but this is a Little Baghdad and Little
Baghdad as a military place where people bomb the hell out of at night so you wake
up you hear and feel this infrasounds then you know the military is having some fun
or something like that. So I was inspired by a research that was
done in the zone by Trevor Paglen - Trevor Peglon you all should know is a Hacker and
artist - political artist and technologist and he made a work called "symbology".
That's a research on all the military patches in the U.S.A. He went to Area 51,
drove around it and interviewed people to see what all those patches meant and he
found out there is a secret language in these patches and so while I was there and
I could see and hear and feel all these secret military operations I still had no
idea what was happening so I was really inspired by like not really understanding
all the data, all the information, all the feelings you have while you're sitting on
your patio. And this with the symbology research made me to create these two
patches which are kind of like the keys to two works of the institutions: "Institutions
for Resolution Disputes" and "Behind the White Shadows". One is the black on black
patch which is an encrypted patch and the second one is a white on white patch and
it glows in the dark, because I like that. With this started also because you know
the Institute had dropped me but I still wanted to do my research. I started to do
it by myself and I started to call it "Beyond Resolution" mostly because I was
dropped from the school but also because you know I wanted to understand what was
happening between these things that I can sense but that are not resolved for me to
be read. So I started this "beyond resolutions" the website and I research
resolutions from vernacular, a habitual, genealogical, a tactical and a skill
perspective. So I think these are five very interesting ways to break resolutions
down and to understand that resolutions are not always ways to "solve" an image, a
text, whatever. But also a way to compromise certain data and to not be able
to understand it, to make things unintelligible or to obfuscate or even cut
out particular pieces of information. So this was not the first time I had a fight
with an institutional network. When I was young already, I was really inspired by,
you know like all kids actually, I was inspired by the universe and specifically
sound in space and I wanted to research sound in space but my teacher told me it's
not possible because there is no sound in space. Only years later I found out that
there is actually sound in space. You need to just transcode it in the right way. You
can transcode specific frequencies and that's when I started to understand
there's much more to data than just the ways we normally show it, so I have
started in my classes to explain to my kids I've been teaching this year to
colloquia here in Germany and also some in other countries, just visiting
lectureships there. I was starting to teach about the rheology of data. A
rheology is a term from physics and it means kind of the fluidity of matter and
the siphoning of data so here you see you know just a normal spectrum that you can
listen to but you also see a little rainbow - very simplified rainbow - and I
teach my kids in one of the first classes that you can actually listen to rainbows
if you just sonofy them and what that means because there's a whole political
field here in medicine and in big data research sometimes so sonofing certain
pieces of data gives us a completely new insight. This year I had to teach a class
of painters and they don't do computation at all. They're actually scared of it: one
of the kids told me a "but you know, you make arts or you make artistic work with
your computation, how do you find emotions in that? How can you - I mean it's not
possible computers are without analysis, where is actually the emotion in paint? You
know you put it in there". so I have all these like very basic problems that I
encounter when I teach these kids about very complex ways of thinking about your
data or complex or maybe so not complex that it becomes complex for them like
taking away all the institutional frameworks and really going to the core
and how can you translate them- So this is a work by Beflix and I try to use it as an
example of how data and painting can come together this is a string of data that he
painted on a piece of fabric, but then he gives you the program that can be any
object and you can wrap it around the object and then it becomes a painting
depending on the program that, you know, shows that that piece of data. I think
it's a very interesting way to connect the materiality of paint and the materiality
of data and to kind of bridge the gap and I'm kind of explaining these things also
because I think all of us are educators in a certain way. Specifically if you're a
hacker you're dealing a lot with opening up information and trying to make it like
understandable for other people or yeah obfuscated then you have to understand how
other people read it. So what I'm trying to do is also give you some problems that
I've been running into while I've been teaching this whole year like crazy to
make some side money since I have no more money. Now you've been thinking probably
like "What is this crazy presentation she's giving with the clouds and weird
slides?". It's part of a work that I've made a few - wait I have to go to here -
yeah it's a 3d work it was inspired by work that was called "compressed process"
it was a way to get my videos out of the quadrilateral frame because one way that
resolutions make us think about our media is the way they are embedded so if I put
my video for instance on Vimeo I know it's a work of video that I can probably skip
through. If I want to make a piece of video arts and I want to really think
about materiality of that piece of video arts and then put it on Vimeo I kind of
defeat this purpose, right? It becomes this like really boring object that I mean
if I watch a video art online which I rarely do but if I do it I skip every 15
seconds or maybe minutes. I mean if I look through my own videos on Vimeo then I have
hardly any full place. So I started to feel really like this is defeating the
purpose of my research. So starting to make applications to put videos in: to
make weird slideshow things and this is a work that I released and I release it and
got a really WIRED review by WIRED Germany - thank you very much. and they said:
"it's a flop as a video game: it's super annoying" now I was just making a piece of
video art in a 3d environment but what I realized is that you can never escape your
resolution. Video is what is in a flat screen: the moment I put my videos in 3d
as a texture that you can navigate: it becomes a video game even if there's no
goal but just to watch some silly stuff float around: so you can never escape your
resolutions every time you're deconstructing a resolution, you're also
reconstructing a new resolution so you're always building compromises and debuilding
compromises. So that said, I was really annoyed with the Institute that fired me
and I started the "Institutions for Resolution Disputes" and this was really
to show them like "Look: I want to win from you" - basically I don't know how to
say this properly. I will skip a few slides because I am going through time
very fast. This is a resolution target: I'm using this slide because this is
actually an aerial photography target from 1951 for analog photography. It was used
also in the Californian desert by the American military I was living two hours
drive away from this, so one day I drove through the desert in my little car and
almost got stuck but I survived and I saw it and realized later that there is a work
by Hito Steyerl inspired by this pattern. And it's beautiful and all about
resolutions and in this work she is saying: "this is a resolution target. It
measures the resolution of the world as a picture, resolution determines visibility
whatever is not captured by resolution is invisible and what I'm trying to do is
expand the visibility and make things visible that are normally not visible". I
gonna skip a few slides and go to a work that I made when I was finally coming back
from the desert and invited by Transfer Gallery in New York to make a solo show
about my anger. At that time I was actually approached by the Museum of
Modern Art in Amsterdam to buy a big work of mine "venacular file format" - it's a
work that kind of deconstructs different kinds of compression languages and shows
what is the basis and the politics of these compressions so I used the same
image I put a similar glitch in it or similar data abstraction and see what
comes out and by this, these aesthetics that come out on the surface, I try to
explain how this compressions are built. When the museum wanted to buy it they
wanted to buy the research archive which means 16 gigabytes of broken data
basically all put into folders of like this is a JPEG when it's broken like this.
So what do you do when you sell 16 gigabytes of broken data and how do you
show it? I started to research what else was happening in this work. I'm going to
boot up a new presentation because unfortunately,... yeah I started to
realize that my work actually has lived beyond this particular research. This is
also my face but I started to see it in many places I started to see it on
teacups, I started to see it on sweaters, a lot of glitch iPhone and Android apps
use it as their icon, I started to see that people used my face and clicked on it
and then they were making a glitch. So this work expanded from its research
archive and the PDF that was constructed out of it to something completely copied
without copyright and commodified and strange for me. I lost my own face in a
way and then I started to realize that - this is not - I'm not the only one that
has lost their face so I did a little bit of research and found for instance this
work by James Bridle, who's been doing research on the render ghosts. If you're
walking through London and you see all these billboards of new architectural
constructions being built then you always have these render ghosts put inside of
them. And he made a whole archive of trying to understand who these people are.
This is his render research blog in which he has a whole archive of different kinds
of people and when he finally researched where these people came from he came to a
kind of a company that sells render BOTS or render images that were based in New
Mexico. And so he went to New Mexico to see if you could find these people and to
ask did anybody ask you if they could use your face. But he found nobody that looked
like these people of course - of course - because... Finally he found somebody in a
bar that told them like look if you really look close to these people they really
don't look like people in New Mexico these are fancy people and most of them are -
maybe Asian - but definitely not very much looking like the people that walk the
streets of New Mexico and finally he never got the answer but he did realize that
these people were probably never asked to be used. So this is one example of the
line in which I've seen this kind of co- optation of or objectification of humans.
This is a research by Constant Dullart, he presented it in the 32c3. It's called
"Jennifer in Paradise". It's part of "a possibility of an army talk". If you ever
want to look it back it's a beautiful talk. Here Constant found the photo of
Jennifer. Jennifer was the soon-to-be wife of John Knoll the programmer of Photoshop
and John tried to test his Photoshop software on an image and that image was
the image of his - not so very properly dressed girlfriend Jennifer at the time
and one of the lines that I think are most striking of this work is when he says "did
you ever ask permission to Jennifer? Do you realize that you're objectifying your
own soon-to-be wife?". It's an open letter to Jennifer but there are some remarks in
an other article in which he says these things. So I realized I mean this
tradition but worse even.. switching again because there's not I cannot port a lot of
slides in my strangely build software. Part of a more longer tradition or a
longer tradition of Caucasian test carts while I was using my face as a test card
for glitch so how do images fall apart - there's actually a long tradition of the
use of the white face or the white model in photography and other image processing
technologies. So here are some "normal" test images these are very pretty ladies.
Here is an image of Teddy. Her name is Teddy Smith she was the Playboy centerfold
of the 1960s and she was used for a paper on theatre. Here is Lena.jpg. Lena was a
Playboy centerfold of 1973 and when in 1972 and then in 1973 Nasarah Met a
researcher originally from Bangalore tried to write about a new compression standard
using DCT - discrete cosine transform - which became later the basis of JPEG he
was not really met with a lot of enthusiasm. However when he finally did
publish his paper on DCT. California picked up really fast and in one of the
labs a few guys found an image to test his premise of the DCTs and this was Lena. And
Lena was the basis of the compressions that we still use most often in art. If
you walk through for instance the kebab or whatever and you see these big photos of
kebabs on on the front of the for instance if you go to Sonnalae you will see a kebab
printed out really big and you serious like kind of blocky kebab parts that is a
block that has been tested on Lena but only tested on Lena.So the people in this
particular research place they were using an image of the 1972 centerfolds scanned
it in with their own Moorhead scanner. They had a self-built circuit bent
Moorhead scanner with three channels a red, green and blue, but one of the
channels or one of the that the scanning mechanisms was a little bit slower. So
they lost one line - she got a little bit thinner even in the photo so she looked a
little bit better and they used only this photo it's 512 by 512 pixels. So from a
media archaeological perspective this is a very strange object but also if you think
about politics they use just this image as a one-size-fits-all, but compression in our
daily lives is not one-size-fits-all. It's not "physics it's just physics" we're
using different objects to compress our images with. So what would it mean if we
now use still the Lena compression when it's just another kind of image is there
maybe a racist undertone in this kind of compression? There was a lot of research
and a lot of like kind of like.. not anger, but, like, criticism from mostly the female
community. Finally this is not the end of the Caucasian test card, we still have
this kind of usage of white images in all our technologies for instance in the HP
webcams a few years ago. They were only tested on white people and once they went
to sales, to retail they would not track any black images and any black faces because
they were never tested on this. There was also the Nikon Coolpix Camera that always
would ask Asian features: "Are you maybe closing your eyes?". So they were never
tested on any but Caucasian faces so this whole history of using a Caucasian test
object is still apparent in everyday technologies. And it's really problematic
and I realized that I kind of - unknowingly - kind of was playing a role
in this by also using my own face and letting this be the face for
deconstructing facial or vernacular file formats the compression of images. So by
behind the white shadows I showed my research archive I also showed the
research archive of other image,... images that used by Caucasian females. And I
finally showed the work that I made for the whole... I said when I do a lot of
research on compressions I realised that when I try to explain it often when I
really got into the mathematics I lose my students completely. So I was starting to
try to build kind of works that would not just be mathematical but try to get the
emotions that the painters wanted in my work back and so I started to kind of
anthropomorphize my object. So for instance JPEGs are built out of blocks. I
started to really make works in which the blocks works talking about the experience
of compressing a particular image. One of the works was DCT siphoning. I will play
it in the background really quickly - if it wants to. Yeah, there it is: So that
doesn't really want to play but that doesn't it's because it's also playing on
my own screen. Anyway: In DCT siphoning there is two blocks it's inspired by the
Roman flatland by James Abbott. And in flatland there's an object in a flatland
that has to learn about different complexities of space, Euclidean space. In
this particular inspiration I'm taking two blocks that have to learn about different
complexities of compression so they go from the dots to pixels to the lines which
are for instance the basis of GIFs to the blocks their own space for JPEGs to
wavelets and to vector objects or even lidar technologies. And they experience it
how humans would experience it. The little one sometimes gets really scared, while
the big one kind of knows what to expect and tries to hold him by the hand and
tries to explain like look you don't have to be scared here: It's just lines, it's
just vectors etc. So it's kind of like, how humans experience things that they
cannot read that are a eligible to them and how when we see something that we
cannot understand, often just dismiss it and don't want to read it and I find this
really important. And I think also just to... to try to explain that when you
dismiss stuff, you're dismissing actually a piece of information. It might be really
important and it might be eligible, I cannot just show the kids that I'm
teaching like "Look, there is something you just don't understand it" so what I'm
trying to do is build these works to show how they are acting towards their
compressions and there are digital technologies and explain them like "Look,
you're acting just like this little block that runs away from the compression". So
what I wanted to close with is the conclusion of the two exhibitions: The
"Institutions of Resolution Disputes" and "Behind White Shadows" and that's the
question: every time we're using technologies they're following particular
resolutions - resolution sets through standards for instance by the ISO or other
standardizing institutions. We have to always ask who set these standards, who
made these resolutions and what are they compromising. Because if we're not asking
what are they compromising we might become blind to other options. For instance,
video is not just the quadrilateral object, right? if video would be something
more than just what's happening within this quadrilateral frame, this window,
then I would have different, I could make different shapes of video. I could put
them on top of each other I could make collage of videos that would have
different timelines and different soundtracks and I could really play with
what video also is. Because in the end video is just a moving story that can have
different levels. But because of computer technologies and other technologies before
it, we've become stuck in the resolution of video and we've compromised the other
options and these compromises are not just in fun: They are in actual real-life -
realities that give problems to us or that make problems for other people. And that's
why we need to ask, always: who is setting the accordances of our resolutions and
what is being compromised. Who is casting the shadows behind our technologies. And
so I wanted to close with a quote by Hannah Arendt which is "Define and create
the future - do not be defined just by your past" and I think we should also use
our technologies these ways. We can still define and create our futures we can
create our own PowerPoints in weird 3d technologies and we can make videos that
are not quadrilateral and then get burned by like WIRED's reviews or whatever.
That's okay. You know it's actually fun to get an angry review because people are
just really boring. So the work these designing is downloadable from my
websites. The paper "behind white shadows" also and I would like to end here and
maybe take a question if there is a question. Thank you.
*Applause* Herald: We have about two minutes for
questions. There are four microphones two on this side two on this side and yeah
microphone 2 - please ask your question. Mic2: Thanks for a great talk. It's great
to see a concept like discrete cosine transformation and run length encoding
being a present in art work and also I found out many years ago that in the JPEG
standards there's an optional way of compressing JPEGs instead of Huffman encoding
you can use rhythmic encoding and it's never enabled by any browser so those
JPEGs are never used that are should be mostly smaller and use more... less
bandwidth. Have you seen any people that actually would like to introduce a
rhythmic encoding or other compression standards or variants of it. Just to well
use more computing power and save bandwidth?
Rosa: I think one of my favorite artists working with JPEG is Ted Davis. He's based
out of Basel and he's been doing really breaking the JPEG compression down really
from like the basics and then you can really write into the JPEG compression.
But I don't think he tackled even a rhythmic encoding. Yeah actually I did, I
didn't show this but in the end I wanted to and I will show it to you because
you're asking about JPEGs. This is a work that I made when I was actually fired by
the Institutes and it uses the DCTs and when I was fired they made it cryptography
Design Awards and I thought now you fired me I will make a game with you. I would
send you some cryptography. So I made my own kind of like encryption which is of
course I mean even cryptography design seems like really silly so I thought okay
I will do something really silly I use the DCT that you're asking about. DCT it is
discrete cosine transform consists of 64 macro blocks. I mapped every macro block to
every glyph of the alphabet so the 64 most used characters and then I wrote them a
message a really angry message actually one of the institutions is completely
against them is one of the five institutions of the exhibition. And guess
who won that competition. I don't think I ever read it because they're too lame to
read the shit. But I think they did something nice back. "Nice" means that I
got one tenth of the money they were supposed to pay me in this silly computer
here but I feel like in a way I fucked up. I said it anyway. So I won a little bit
that day but just 1/10 of what I lost. Thank you.
*Applause* Herald: Is there another question from the
internet, signal angel? No. Then I I would like to have the opportunity to ask a
question myself because I did work in super resolution microscopy. Did you ever
look into super resolving biological structures I've seen some Moire patterns
in your work, in your presentation right now did you ever touch that or what did
you do with Moire patterns? Rosa: Moire patterns? Yes oh yeah okay so
for me I was talking a little bit about the nicology of compression complexities.
So really going from the line to the dots to the lines to the blocks to the wavelets
to the... you know like very complex, I would say also zip files are part of that
complexity like when everything just gets chaotic when we as humans don't have
Euclidean space necessary to compare to it then it becomes really messy. But anyway,
they go through line environments and in this line environment the little one gets
really excited because he can play through the Moire patterns and actually he's
having a little romantic moment with one of the Moire which is also a joke because
you know a lot of people only like to like things they understand already. They, I
mean the exercise is always in understanding something that is more
complex but that's what most people are scared of. So it's easy to fall in love
with a line if you're a block it's hard to fall in love with the wavelet right. So I
mean but anyway that's not really your question you're asking about Moire in
biology and I've never worked with Moire in biology. Was that an answer?
Herald: Yeah, yeah thanks! Ok any question left? I think we are out of time. Yes a
big round of applause for our speaker Rosa Menkman.
*Applause*
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