ROJO®nova Rio de Janeiro second week: Flash vs. avi Cinepak

Last month, I prolonged my stay in Rio for one week, during which I got the chance to work together with Rafaël Rozendaal, ISAN, Evan Voytas, Elen and Jeffers Egan. It is pretty hard (if not impossible) to develop a 70 minute performance in 5 days, with a group of people you have never met before; working methods, perspectives, aesthetics and aims differ per artist. This is why the artist talks that were given at Parque Lage, were (albeit a bit late into the week) very useful for me. 

During his lecture, Rafaël noted: "normally we are used to interactivity as a goal, but I am more interested in interactivity without a goal." A conceptual use of meaninglessness that kick-started my wish to connect my methods with Rafaëls work.

Rafaël also said that for our performance, he wanted to use already existing flash work, because "Flash works are both scalable without quality loss and have a very small file size" - which he described as some of the most important material qualities of his work (and which reminded me of some neo-demoscene-gen). Besides this, the development of a new concept and a new work would take much to long.

Normally I also take a long time for the creation of a work, but given the purpose of ROJO®nova, I decided I wanted to take the chance and make something new. Rafaëls talk inspired me to base all the visuals for the final performance on badly compressed remixes of his work (to counter his arguments for flash use and to show my favorite digital material - the avi Cinepak compression). Our visuals were on either side of the screen of the performance, framing Jeffers projections, to try and let the whole visual element of the performance come together. 

Here are some gifs of the remix-visuals I made and above is an excerpt of the final performance.

Flash vs. Cinepak pugilism T.K.O.

TowardsAndBeyond.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (avi cinepak 256 greys).

From the Rafaël Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro.

original: 90kb, interactive, scalable and endless, now: 1.7mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

beefchickenpork.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (.mov animation 1000 colors).

From the Rafael Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro.

original: 12kb, scalable, interactive and endless, now: 1.7mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

beefchickenpork.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (gif with dither).

From the Rafael Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro.

original: 12kb, scalable and endless, now: 3.9mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

aestheticecho.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (avi cinepak 256 greys).

From the Rafael Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro.

original: 74kb, scalable and endless, now: 1.6mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

electricboogiewoogie.com by Rafaël Rozendaal (flash), compressed by Rosa Menkman (avi cinepak 256 greys).

From the Rafaël Rozendaal remixes I made during our residency in Rio de Janeiro

original: 16kb, scalable and endless, now: 1.9mb, linear, scalability limited, and looped.

//Residency at MuseumsQuartier in Vienna (Wͦͪ̓̈̓͒ͭ̏̏҉͎̲̲̣̜͙͚͉̯̱̙͇̣̝̦̰̀ORM moddr_lab in Vienna)

The coming month (june) I will be living in Vienna, where I will work on the Collapse of PAL (spoiler alert - the form will change dramatically in the coming 6 months) and some more. If you are in the neighbourhood, drop a line!
Duration: June 1 to July 7th, daily 10:00-22:00
Location: WORM_space, Electric Avenue, Vienna.
Free admission!

Collapse of PAL at Xrt Xmsterdxm, 2011.

Here are 13 mins of excerpts of my performance during Xrt in Xmsterdxm 2011, at Trouw. It was a funky night, some friends and family came and I really had a great time seeing them. Thanks mom for making the video.

For the performance I used two screens; on the left side there is an emphasis on analog glitching and on the right side is on digital glitching. This way, I tried to show that the two ways of video broadcasting (PAL vs. DVB and its different file formats) both have different but still kind of similar glitches. I have also developed the story line further (it now consists of 7 chapters, instead of 5):

1. Introduction to PAL
2. Eulogy (but a revised version) 
3. Into the Tulgey Woods (which you can see at the new psychadelia @ MU & some stills are here)
4. Spoils of the Hype Cycle (based on the Vernacular of File Formats)
5. Requiem for the Planes of Phosphor (but this one has the pieces of the glitch studies manifesto in it)
6. Dear mr PAL (based on Dear mr compression but with another poem)
7. Shouts outs to NTSC, SECAM, Karl Klomp and Walter Benjamin.


In the end, 2nd, the 5th and the 6th (partially) were still old, the other chapters were completely new (I deleted a couple of old ones...). In the future I aim to incorporate the Glitch Studies Manifesto more and make the Angel of Histories hypotheses and conclusions more clear.
 

So yea, the Collapse of PAL is still developping and I think this time it had grown from what I showed at Transmediale - although I was nervous (cause of the friends and family), and made a lot more mistakes because of that, especially in the beginning, ha!
Next time, glitches are going to be perfect!

//Tomorrow: The Collapse of PAL @ Art in Amsterdam.

Tomorrow during Art in Amsterdam at the Trouw Building I will perform the Collapse of PAL (from 22:50 – 23:20), a solo AV show about the television signal PAL and its demise.

TCP was first developed as a live television broadcast, that I did a year ago in Denmark. Besides this, a small reference to the TCP was published with my Glitch Studies Manifesto in the Video Vortex 2 reader. After the television broadcast I was asked to develop the screening into a live performance, which I performed last at the Transmediale in Berlin and which was reviewed as "the media archaeological highlight of Transmediale" by Jussi Parikka.

Tomorrow will be a special event, because for me (working practice and theory based) it has at times been hard to come from a university in the Netherlands and get any kind foothold at or in-between the art institutions here (atleast, up until recently). It seems that art and Science are still very much separated. Besides that, I am working with glitch, which often did not make my case easier either.

During my University career I never expected to develop a solo performance that I would get to show in the places that I am. It kind of happened by chance and it still feels like a roller coaster ride that is not safety-guaranteed at all - its actually sometimes very frightening.

Now for the first time I get to show the Collapse of PAL in the Netherlands. I am not sure if I am ready for it because its a huge step to stand in front of people that I might actually know and whose opinions matter, both personally and professionally - but since it is this special occasion for so many different reasons, I wanted to invite you. To celebrate PAL and other (potentially) lost relations and opportunities.

I hope to see you there if you can make it (its only 7,50 euros, ahmmnnnn.,,)

warmly,

Rosa

Monglot opensourced!

Download Monglot // Monglot source code at Gitorious - update: Gitorious lost, code downloadable here 
This is a part 2 of the powerpoint presentation I gave two weeks ago during my workshop "A Vernacular of File Formats" at Steim. In this workshop I taught about the basic characteristics of the different most commonly used file formats and how these characteristics can be exploited (by for instance altering or glitching the hex code), to make glitch design. Most of the images can also be generated with the use of Monglot, a glitch software me and Johan Larsby developed last December.

Johan and I  opensourced the code of Monglot. Yeay!

Monglot is made to standardize the Vernacular of File Formats. If you never heard about Monglot before you can read some more about it here

Intervista a Rosa Menkman L’esperienza dell’interruzione di Daniela Cotimbo

Following the last post about publications in languages I dont master, here is another text; an interview with Daniela Cotimbo from Italy, for the luxflux website. There was one specific question about the future (of glitch) that I have been asked over and over and that is still very hard to answer, that I will rewrite here. For the rest of the Italian interview you could check the luxflux website through google translate.

Daniela Cotimbo: What were your overall impressions at the Transmediale festival (February, 2011) and what is the future for media relations?
Rosa Menkman: In general, people asked a lot of questions in the festival; the festival was centered around liveness, what boundaries are there to acceleration and what responsibilities come with the future, politics, the power of data, new flows, materialities, openness, control and freedom?
Besides questions focused on ‘the future’ or movement, there were a lot of inquiries about (preserving) the past; about media archeology, curating, preservation and archiving. The answers given to questions where many and very different, although not mutually exclusive, sometimes almost opposing. In general I think these kinds of electronic art festivals demonstrate how complex and multi-layered the field of media relations has become.
The Transmediale festival build up a core framework that gave space to some of the different dynamic structures or sets of genre based codes or conventions for research (libraries) that try to tackle the questions from their own perspectives or agendas; there were (amongst others) the tech (or HacKaWay) zone, the bodily/biomedic zone, a media histories based part and a zone that focused on interfaces.
This is why, after Transmediale I think it is not possible to voice one singular answer to any of the questions asked. The festival instead offered a (partial) framework to research the old questions and develop new questions about media relations.

I think the future of festivals and conferences lies in offering these kinds of open frameworks from which new and old questions can be developed and/or answered. Besides this, these festivals will continue to give an insight into how the different audiences, like for instance artists and theorists incorporate or handle the libraries of these open frameworks in their working methods.
Personally, people often ask me what the future of glitch is. I think this is a very interesting question, because it touches on the tension that is inherent to glitch; the tipping point of failure or the turning point on which an unexpected, unaccepted outcome becomes appropriated and accepted. I don't know the future of glitch, but I believe (and hope) that the futures of glitch can be found in places where both researchers and artists work together to create unique, unstable or flexible, ever changing frameworks that both generate and answer new questions about media relations.
Right now, I am researching and trying to draft the shape of the current framework(s) of glitch art-/-research. I believe that the different glitch events, like GLI.TC/H 2010 and hopefully GLI.TC.H 2011 will give an opportunity to draft new open frameworks and give space to implement unexpected dynamic libraries from other unconventionally coupled research frameworks or canons. I hope that these new frameworks will finally become more widely accepted paradigms within media theory-/-art-/-histories.

Paper by Marcin Komorowksi (Student from Racibórz, Pl)

"Menkman pisze za Paulem Hegarty, że różnica pomiędzy konfrontacją z szaleńcem a konformacją z kimś, kto mówi w innym języku tkwi nie w strukturze jego mowy lecz w postrzeganiu aktów mowy szaleńca jako bezzasadne, złożone z niedorzecznych dźwięków, z nie-komunikatu. Zatem estetyka, której syntaktyczna i semantyczna sfera zostanie skonstruowana « błędnie » jest nie-fotografią, szaleństwem."

A while back Polish Student Marcin Komorowski approached me for some images for his glitch paper. Now Marcin finished it and I am happy with it; it looks like an excellent example of scholarly-Polish-madness. It is kind of hard to understand for non-Polish readers, but the English abstract and the full Polish paper are availabe here.