34C3 - institutions for Resolution Disputes

34C3 preroll music

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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