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34C3 preroll music
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Herald: Resolution is always a compromise
we have got used to. Why not talk about it
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again this is why the next talk is
entitled: "Institution for Resolution
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Disputes" and our speaker is Rosa Menkman
a Dutch artist, curator and researcher, and
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founder of IRD or "the Institute of
resolution dispute". A big applause for
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Rosa, please. And the stage is yours!
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applause
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Rosa Menkman: Thank you. Thank you for
being here on this like - very late part
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of the whole conference and I mean when I
was checking in everybody seemed so tired
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it was really funny to experience this
like latency in everybody. So I'm Rosa
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Menkman, I'm from the Netherlands
everybody speaks German to me here, it's
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really funny because my name sounds German
but actually when you say something in
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German I will speak back in English. But
please speak to me when you want to.
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In 2015, I'm gonna talk from 2015 onwards,
I was invited to be a research fellow in a
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big Institute in the Netherlands to do
research on resolutions and this was a
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huge honor for me and I dropped everything
in London where I used to live at the time
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and went and moved back to Amsterdam which
actually was not my favorite city in the
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world at all. So I went there and three
days before my, my contract started which
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we had already signed like a month back
and everything: I was fired because the
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head of the department had looked into my
accreditation and my PhD that I was doing
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at the time, had started somewhere else
and had not the right accreditations since
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I ported it from Cologne to London and so
I would have to revisit the whole
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institutional network and get my stuff
right in time to start. Now that was not
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possible. And so I was,... how do you say
that "properly for a live stream". I was
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like dropped the kitty dead. So I got
really,... how you say like - sad in
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Amsterdam. Alone, without a cause and kind
of angry with institutions and this is
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when at a certain time I got out of my
darkness and went to the Californian
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desert to live alone in the middle of
nowhere and this talk will be about two
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works that I made, or two institutions,
two exhibitions: one is the institution
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institutes - like a double or a plural -
for resolution disputes and then the
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second one which is kind of a more in-
depth research is behind white shadows.
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And I made these and the research kind of
started in the deserts where I was looking
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from my house into this little village.
You have to imagine the desert there's not
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a lot but straight from my patio I could
see this - this is from Google Street for
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you - so you can't really see it very well
but this is a Little Baghdad and Little
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Baghdad as a military place where people
bomb the hell out of at night so you wake
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up you hear and feel this infrasounds then
you know the military is having some fun
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or something like that.
So I was inspired by a research that was
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done in the zone by Trevor Paglen - Trevor
Peglon you all should know is a Hacker and
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artist - political artist and technologist
and he made a work called "symbology".
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That's a research on all the military
patches in the U.S.A. He went to Area 51,
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drove around it and interviewed people to
see what all those patches meant and he
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found out there is a secret language in
these patches and so while I was there and
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I could see and hear and feel all these
secret military operations I still had no
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idea what was happening so I was really
inspired by like not really understanding
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all the data, all the information, all the
feelings you have while you're sitting on
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your patio. And this with the symbology
research made me to create these two
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patches which are kind of like the keys to
two works of the institutions: "Institutions
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for Resolution Disputes" and "Behind the
White Shadows". One is the black on black
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patch which is an encrypted patch and the
second one is a white on white patch and
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it glows in the dark, because I like that.
With this started also because you know
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the Institute had dropped me but I still
wanted to do my research. I started to do
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it by myself and I started to call it
"Beyond Resolution" mostly because I was
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dropped from the school but also because
you know I wanted to understand what was
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happening between these things that I can
sense but that are not resolved for me to
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be read. So I started this "beyond
resolutions" the website and I research
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resolutions from vernacular, a habitual,
genealogical, a tactical and a skill
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perspective. So I think these are five
very interesting ways to break resolutions
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down and to understand that resolutions
are not always ways to "solve" an image, a
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text, whatever. But also a way to
compromise certain data and to not be able
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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
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with an institutional network. When I was
young already, I was really inspired by,
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you know like all kids actually, I was
inspired by the universe and specifically
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sound in space and I wanted to research
sound in space but my teacher told me it's
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not possible because there is no sound in
space. Only years later I found out that
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there is actually sound in space. You need
to just transcode it in the right way. You
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can transcode specific frequencies and
that's when I started to understand
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there's much more to data than just the
ways we normally show it, so I have
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started in my classes to explain to my
kids I've been teaching this year to
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colloquia here in Germany and also some in
other countries, just visiting
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lectureships there. I was starting to
teach about the rheology of data. A
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rheology is a term from physics and it
means kind of the fluidity of matter and
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the siphoning of data so here you see you
know just a normal spectrum that you can
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listen to but you also see a little
rainbow - very simplified rainbow - and I
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teach my kids in one of the first classes
that you can actually listen to rainbows
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if you just sonofy them and what that
means because there's a whole political
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field here in medicine and in big data
research sometimes so sonofing certain
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pieces of data gives us a completely new
insight. This year I had to teach a class
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of painters and they don't do computation
at all. They're actually scared of it: one
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of the kids told me a "but you know, you
make arts or you make artistic work with
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your computation, how do you find emotions
in that? How can you - I mean it's not
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possible computers are without analysis,
where is actually the emotion in paint? You
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know you put it in there". so I have all
these like very basic problems that I
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encounter when I teach these kids about
very complex ways of thinking about your
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data or complex or maybe so not complex
that it becomes complex for them like
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taking away all the institutional
frameworks and really going to the core
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and how can you translate them- So this is
a work by Beflix and I try to use it as an
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example of how data and painting can come
together this is a string of data that he
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painted on a piece of fabric, but then he
gives you the program that can be any
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object and you can wrap it around the
object and then it becomes a painting
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depending on the program that, you know,
shows that that piece of data. I think
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it's a very interesting way to connect the
materiality of paint and the materiality
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of data and to kind of bridge the gap and
I'm kind of explaining these things also
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because I think all of us are educators in
a certain way. Specifically if you're a
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hacker you're dealing a lot with opening
up information and trying to make it like
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understandable for other people or yeah
obfuscated then you have to understand how
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other people read it. So what I'm trying
to do is also give you some problems that
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I've been running into while I've been
teaching this whole year like crazy to
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make some side money since I have no more
money. Now you've been thinking probably
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like "What is this crazy presentation
she's giving with the clouds and weird
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slides?". It's part of a work that I've
made a few - wait I have to go to here -
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yeah it's a 3d work it was inspired by
work that was called "compressed process"
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it was a way to get my videos out of the
quadrilateral frame because one way that
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resolutions make us think about our media
is the way they are embedded so if I put
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my video for instance on Vimeo I know it's
a work of video that I can probably skip
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through. If I want to make a piece of
video arts and I want to really think
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about materiality of that piece of video
arts and then put it on Vimeo I kind of
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defeat this purpose, right? It becomes
this like really boring object that I mean
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if I watch a video art online which I
rarely do but if I do it I skip every 15
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seconds or maybe minutes. I mean if I look
through my own videos on Vimeo then I have
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hardly any full place. So I started to
feel really like this is defeating the
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purpose of my research. So starting to
make applications to put videos in: to
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make weird slideshow things and this is a
work that I released and I release it and
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got a really WIRED review by WIRED Germany
- thank you very much. and they said:
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"it's a flop as a video game: it's super
annoying" now I was just making a piece of
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video art in a 3d environment but what I
realized is that you can never escape your
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resolution. Video is what is in a flat
screen: the moment I put my videos in 3d
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as a texture that you can navigate: it
becomes a video game even if there's no
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goal but just to watch some silly stuff
float around: so you can never escape your
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resolutions every time you're
deconstructing a resolution, you're also
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reconstructing a new resolution so you're
always building compromises and debuilding
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compromises. So that said, I was really
annoyed with the Institute that fired me
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and I started the "Institutions for
Resolution Disputes" and this was really
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to show them like "Look: I want to win
from you" - basically I don't know how to
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say this properly. I will skip a few
slides because I am going through time
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very fast. This is a resolution target:
I'm using this slide because this is
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actually an aerial photography target from
1951 for analog photography. It was used
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also in the Californian desert by the
American military I was living two hours
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drive away from this, so one day I drove
through the desert in my little car and
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almost got stuck but I survived and I saw
it and realized later that there is a work
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by Hito Steyerl inspired by this pattern.
And it's beautiful and all about
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resolutions and in this work she is
saying: "this is a resolution target. It
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measures the resolution of the world as a
picture, resolution determines visibility
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whatever is not captured by resolution is
invisible and what I'm trying to do is
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expand the visibility and make things
visible that are normally not visible". I
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gonna skip a few slides and go to a work
that I made when I was finally coming back
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from the desert and invited by Transfer
Gallery in New York to make a solo show
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about my anger. At that time I was
actually approached by the Museum of
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Modern Art in Amsterdam to buy a big work
of mine "venacular file format" - it's a
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work that kind of deconstructs different
kinds of compression languages and shows
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what is the basis and the politics of
these compressions so I used the same
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image I put a similar glitch in it or
similar data abstraction and see what
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comes out and by this, these aesthetics
that come out on the surface, I try to
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explain how this compressions are built.
When the museum wanted to buy it they
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wanted to buy the research archive which
means 16 gigabytes of broken data
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basically all put into folders of like
this is a JPEG when it's broken like this.
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So what do you do when you sell 16
gigabytes of broken data and how do you
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show it? I started to research what else
was happening in this work. I'm going to
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boot up a new presentation because
unfortunately,... yeah I started to
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realize that my work actually has lived
beyond this particular research. This is
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also my face but I started to see it in
many places I started to see it on
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teacups, I started to see it on sweaters,
a lot of glitch iPhone and Android apps
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use it as their icon, I started to see
that people used my face and clicked on it
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and then they were making a glitch. So
this work expanded from its research
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archive and the PDF that was constructed
out of it to something completely copied
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without copyright and commodified and
strange for me. I lost my own face in a
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way and then I started to realize that -
this is not - I'm not the only one that
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has lost their face so I did a little bit
of research and found for instance this
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work by James Bridle, who's been doing
research on the render ghosts. If you're
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walking through London and you see all
these billboards of new architectural
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constructions being built then you always
have these render ghosts put inside of
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them. And he made a whole archive of
trying to understand who these people are.
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This is his render research blog in which
he has a whole archive of different kinds
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of people and when he finally researched
where these people came from he came to a
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kind of a company that sells render BOTS
or render images that were based in New
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Mexico. And so he went to New Mexico to
see if you could find these people and to
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ask did anybody ask you if they could use
your face. But he found nobody that looked
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like these people of course - of course -
because... Finally he found somebody in a
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bar that told them like look if you really
look close to these people they really
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don't look like people in New Mexico these
are fancy people and most of them are -
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maybe Asian - but definitely not very much
looking like the people that walk the
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streets of New Mexico and finally he never
got the answer but he did realize that
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these people were probably never asked to
be used. So this is one example of the
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line in which I've seen this kind of co-
optation of or objectification of humans.
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This is a research by Constant Dullart, he
presented it in the 32c3. It's called
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"Jennifer in Paradise". It's part of "a
possibility of an army talk". If you ever
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want to look it back it's a beautiful
talk. Here Constant found the photo of
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Jennifer. Jennifer was the soon-to-be wife
of John Knoll the programmer of Photoshop
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and John tried to test his Photoshop
software on an image and that image was
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the image of his - not so very properly
dressed girlfriend Jennifer at the time
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and one of the lines that I think are most
striking of this work is when he says "did
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you ever ask permission to Jennifer? Do
you realize that you're objectifying your
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own soon-to-be wife?". It's an open letter
to Jennifer but there are some remarks in
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an other article in which he says these
things. So I realized I mean this
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tradition but worse even.. switching again
because there's not I cannot port a lot of
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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
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for glitch so how do images fall apart -
there's actually a long tradition of the
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use of the white face or the white model
in photography and other image processing
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technologies. So here are some "normal"
test images these are very pretty ladies.
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Here is an image of Teddy. Her name is
Teddy Smith she was the Playboy centerfold
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of the 1960s and she was used for a paper
on theatre. Here is Lena.jpg. Lena was a
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Playboy centerfold of 1973 and when in
1972 and then in 1973 Nasarah Met a
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researcher originally from Bangalore tried
to write about a new compression standard
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using DCT - discrete cosine transform -
which became later the basis of JPEG he
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was not really met with a lot of
enthusiasm. However when he finally did
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publish his paper on DCT. California
picked up really fast and in one of the
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labs a few guys found an image to test his
premise of the DCTs and this was Lena. And
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Lena was the basis of the compressions
that we still use most often in art. If
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you walk through for instance the kebab or
whatever and you see these big photos of
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kebabs on on the front of the for instance
if you go to Sonnalae you will see a kebab
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printed out really big and you serious
like kind of blocky kebab parts that is a
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block that has been tested on Lena but
only tested on Lena.So the people in this
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particular research place they were using
an image of the 1972 centerfolds scanned
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it in with their own Moorhead scanner.
They had a self-built circuit bent
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Moorhead scanner with three channels a
red, green and blue, but one of the
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channels or one of the that the scanning
mechanisms was a little bit slower. So
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they lost one line - she got a little bit
thinner even in the photo so she looked a
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little bit better and they used only this
photo it's 512 by 512 pixels. So from a
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media archaeological perspective this is a
very strange object but also if you think
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about politics they use just this image as
a one-size-fits-all, but compression in our
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daily lives is not one-size-fits-all. It's
not "physics it's just physics" we're
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using different objects to compress our
images with. So what would it mean if we
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now use still the Lena compression when
it's just another kind of image is there
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maybe a racist undertone in this kind of
compression? There was a lot of research
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and a lot of like kind of like.. not anger,
but, like, criticism from mostly the female
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community. Finally this is not the end of
the Caucasian test card, we still have
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this kind of usage of white images in all
our technologies for instance in the HP
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webcams a few years ago. They were only
tested on white people and once they went
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to sales, to retail they would not track any
black images and any black faces because
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they were never tested on this. There was
also the Nikon Coolpix Camera that always
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would ask Asian features: "Are you maybe
closing your eyes?". So they were never
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tested on any but Caucasian faces so this
whole history of using a Caucasian test
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object is still apparent in everyday
technologies. And it's really problematic
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and I realized that I kind of -
unknowingly - kind of was playing a role
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in this by also using my own face and
letting this be the face for
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deconstructing facial or vernacular file
formats the compression of images. So by
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behind the white shadows I showed my
research archive I also showed the
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research archive of other image,... images
that used by Caucasian females. And I
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finally showed the work that I made for
the whole... I said when I do a lot of
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research on compressions I realised that
when I try to explain it often when I
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really got into the mathematics I lose my
students completely. So I was starting to
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try to build kind of works that would not
just be mathematical but try to get the
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emotions that the painters wanted in my
work back and so I started to kind of
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anthropomorphize my object. So for
instance JPEGs are built out of blocks. I
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started to really make works in which the
blocks works talking about the experience
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of compressing a particular image. One of
the works was DCT siphoning. I will play
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it in the background really quickly - if
it wants to. Yeah, there it is: So that
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doesn't really want to play but that
doesn't it's because it's also playing on
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my own screen. Anyway: In DCT siphoning
there is two blocks it's inspired by the
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Roman flatland by James Abbott. And in
flatland there's an object in a flatland
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that has to learn about different
complexities of space, Euclidean space. In
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this particular inspiration I'm taking two
blocks that have to learn about different
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complexities of compression so they go
from the dots to pixels to the lines which
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are for instance the basis of GIFs to the
blocks their own space for JPEGs to
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wavelets and to vector objects or even
lidar technologies. And they experience it
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how humans would experience it. The little
one sometimes gets really scared, while
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the big one kind of knows what to expect
and tries to hold him by the hand and
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tries to explain like look you don't have
to be scared here: It's just lines, it's
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just vectors etc. So it's kind of like,
how humans experience things that they
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cannot read that are a eligible to them
and how when we see something that we
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cannot understand, often just dismiss it
and don't want to read it and I find this
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really important. And I think also just
to... to try to explain that when you
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dismiss stuff, you're dismissing actually
a piece of information. It might be really
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important and it might be eligible, I
cannot just show the kids that I'm
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teaching like "Look, there is something
you just don't understand it" so what I'm
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trying to do is build these works to show
how they are acting towards their
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compressions and there are digital
technologies and explain them like "Look,
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you're acting just like this little block
that runs away from the compression". So
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what I wanted to close with is the
conclusion of the two exhibitions: The
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"Institutions of Resolution Disputes" and
"Behind White Shadows" and that's the
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question: every time we're using
technologies they're following particular
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resolutions - resolution sets through
standards for instance by the ISO or other
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standardizing institutions. We have to
always ask who set these standards, who
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made these resolutions and what are they
compromising. Because if we're not asking
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what are they compromising we might become
blind to other options. For instance,
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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,
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then I would have different, I could make
different shapes of video. I could put
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them on top of each other I could make
collage of videos that would have
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different timelines and different
soundtracks and I could really play with
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what video also is. Because in the end
video is just a moving story that can have
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different levels. But because of computer
technologies and other technologies before
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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 -
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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
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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
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maybe take a question if there is a
question. Thank you.
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Applause
Herald: We have about two minutes for
-
questions. There are four microphones two
on this side two on this side and yeah
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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
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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
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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
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rhythmic encoding or other compression
standards or variants of it. Just to well
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use more computing power and save
bandwidth?
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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
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from like the basics and then you can
really write into the JPEG compression.
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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
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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
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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.
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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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