 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 thank you 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 is 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 accreditation 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 drop the kitty that 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 institutions institutes like 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 desert 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 little Baghdad and little Baghdad is a military place where people bombed the hell out of night so you wake up you hear and feel this infra sounds then you know the military is having some fun or something like that not from yeah so I was inspired by a research that was done in the zone by Trevor Peglin Trevor Peglin you all should know is a hacker and artist and yeah political artist and technologist and he made a work called symbology that's a research on all the military patches in the USA he went to area 51 drove around it and in 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 the institution institutions for resolution disputes and behind the white shadows one is the black on black patch which is a 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 to 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 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 as 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 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 sonify them and what that means because there's a whole political field here in medicine and in big data research sometimes so not sonifying 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 yeah but you know you make art 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 whereas 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 B Flix and I tried 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 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 in 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 shots 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 art and I want to really think about the materiality of that piece of video art 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 video art online which I rarely do but if I do it I skip every 15 seconds or maybe a minute 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 I was starting to make applications to put videos in to make weird slideshow things and this is a work that I released and I released it and I got a wired review by our 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 the building 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 was skip a few slides because I'm 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's a work by Hito style 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'm going to 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 the vernacular 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 obstruction and see what comes out and by this by these aesthetics that come out on the surface I try to explain how these 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 tea cups 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 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 Bridal 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 they 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 an 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 he 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 you know 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 our objectification of humans this is a research by a constant del art he presented it in the 32nd C3 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 Constan 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 and it's an open letter to Jennifer but there's some remarks in an other article on in which he says these things so I realized I'm in this tradition but worse even switching again because there's not I cannot port a lot of slides in my strangely built software I'm part of a more longer tradition or a longer tradition of Caucasian test cards 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 dither here is Lena JPEG Lena was the Playboy Centerfold of 1973 and when in 1972 and when in 1973 Nasir Ahmed 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 DCT's and this was Lena and Lena was the basis of the compressions that we still use most often in our and if you walk through for instance the kebab or whatever and you see these big photos of kebabs on on the front of the if for instance if you go to Sonale you'll see a kebab printed out really big and you'll see this 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 Centerfold scanned it in with their own Muirhead scanner they had a self-built circuit bent Muirhead scanner with three channels a red green and blue but one of the channels or one of 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 is 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 in 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 in a few years ago they were only tested on white people and once they went to seal to retail they would not track any black images and any black facials because they were never tested on this there was also the Nikon cool pics 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 playing a role in this by also using my own face and letting this be the face for deconstructing facial or funicular 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 white Caucasian females and I finally showed the work that I made for for the whole I said when I do a lot of research on compressions I've I realized that when I try to explain it often when I really go 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 my objects so for instance JPEGs are built out of blocks I started to really make works in which the blocks were talking about their 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 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 the pixels to the lines which are for instance the basis of gifts to the blocks their own space for JPEGs to wave floods and to factor objects or even lead our technologies and they experience it how humans would experience it the sun gets or the little one sometimes gets really scared well 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 lit 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 legible 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 their 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 were 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 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 a quadrilateral objects 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 an actual real-life realities that give problems to us or that make problems for other people and that's why we need to ask what is always who is setting the affordances 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 power points in weird 3d technologies and we can make videos that are not quadrilateral and then get burned by like wires 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 these siphoning is downloadable from my website 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 we have about two minutes for questions there are four microphones two on this side to on this side and yeah microphone to please ask a question thanks for your great talk it's great to see a concept like discrete codes and transformations and the run-length encoding being a president artwork and also I found out many years ago that in the GPAC standard there's an optional way of compressing GPACs instead of Huffman encoding you can use arithmetic coding and it's never enabled by any browser so those GPACs are never used but there should be more smaller and use more less bandwidth have you seen any people that actually would like to introduce arithmetic coding or other compression standards or variants of it just to well use more computing power and save bandwidth 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 arithmetic 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 Institute and it uses the DCTs when I was fired they they made it cryptography design awards and I thought now you fired me I will make a game with you I will 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 used the DCT that you're asking about DCT's discrete cosine transform it consists 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 as one of the five institutions of the exhibition and guess who won that competition I don't think they 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 fuck I said it anyway so I won a little bit that day but just one tenth of what I lost thank you is there another question from the Internet signal I don't know then 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 moye patterns in your work in your presentation right now did you ever touch that or what did you do with moye patterns more a pattern yes I yeah okay so for me I was talking a little bit about an ecology of compression complexities so really going from the line to the dots to the lines to the blocks to the way floods to the you know like really 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 a Euclidean space necessarily to compare to it then it becomes really messy but anyway they go through a line environment and in this line environment the little one gets really excited because he can play through the more patterns and actually he's having a little romantic moment with one of the mores 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 a way flood 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 a yeah thanks okay any question left I think we are out of time yes a big can round of applause for our speaker Rosa Menkman