Obituary of PAL :: Prologue and Eulogy

I recommend watching this with headphones. This is a render of part 1. of the Collapse of PAL (1. Eulogy, 2. Obsequies and 3. Requiem for the blue plains of phosphor), as performed at TV-TV on the 25th of May 2010, Copenhagen, DK. SOUND & TELEVISION is a transmission art project that explores the performativity of television in light of the challenges brought about by a converging mediascape. Signal, noise, liveness and flow along with standardized production formats are all aspects of the television medium which are reshaped in digital, networked media. Rather than a stream-lined sound-image of digital convergence, SOUND & TELEVISION strives to act as a springboard for an aesthetic "media-clash" reflecting on the political-aesthetic of old and new media forms. SOUND & TELEVISION invited me to work with the materiality of audiovisual flows to realize a performance exploring the performativity of television. In this performance, the transmission itself became the artwork. The performance reflects on different significant aspects of the changing conditions of broadcasting. In the new DVB-T (digital terrestrial television) environment, the very transmission format of TV has changed, from symmetric analog to asymmetric data flows, encoded in the MPEG format and decoded through software implemented in everything from flat-screen TV's, set-top-boxes and PC's. "The cracking of LCD screens" ...all is not smooth in this world of digitally compressed TV. In "The Collapse of PAL" (Eulogy, Obsequies and Requiem for the planes of blue phosphor), the Angel of History (as described by Walter Benjamin) reflects on the PAL signal and its termination. This death sentence, although executed in silence, was a brutally violent act that left PAL disregarded and obsolete. However, the Angel of History has to conclude that while the PAL signal might be argued death, it still exists as a trace left upon the new, "better" digital technologies. PAL can, even though the technology is terminated, be found here, as a historical form that newer technologies build upon, inherit or have appropriated from. Besides this, the Angel also realizes that the new DVB signal that has been chosen over PAL, is different but at the same time also inherently flawed. The Collapse of PAL was first developed as a commission for SOUND & TELEVISION (Copenhagen, Dnk). “A transmission art project that explored the performativity of television in the light of the challenges brought about by the converging mediascape.” The video footage is based on the analogue PAL video signal, compressions, glitches and feedback artifacts that are complimented by (obsolete) soundscapes that originate from both analogue and digital media. For the video I exploited the analog PAL signal from a NES, image bending, a broken digital photo camera, teletekst, digital compression artifacts, video bending artifacts (DV, interlacing, datamoshing and black bursts) and feedback. For the sound I used a cracklebox, feedback, a telephone eurosignal, morsecode an old Casio keyboard, feedback filters and a couple of DV-compressed video soundbends. //////////////////////////////////////////////////

▄▄─Going Beyond the collapse of pal in The Collapse of PAL

It was a really good experience to collaborate with Optical Machines - they play with a midi synced shadow play instrument (and self build audio synthesizers), which takes the history of PAL actually way back beyond its coming about. This gave me the opportunity to think about the history of PAL starting with shadow play, then growing into pal and other analogue glitching (we exploited syncing issues (by putting signals together) and with the circuit bent AVE-3, and finally connected these methods to digital glitch.
Besides this Bernhard Fleischmann also played with us, my old time Morr Music Heroe : ) 

In the end (the climax) of the performance I invited Defi (Argentina), to destroy the screens by the black strokes of his paint brush (breaking the image somehow and getting the kids really upset - they tried to stop him!). 

It was a good battle of the screens wrapped up in one big performance.  

▄┘─▀┐─▄──▄─Interview: Time Out Sao Paolo

Interview with Dom Philips for time out Sao Paolo

Collapse Collapse of PAL - The Torch song epilogue.

Collapse Collapse of PAL - The Torch song epilogue. 

Rosa Menkman (video) and Áron Birtalan (music)

For Gogbot 2011

//Collapse of PAL at Cinemateca Brasileira, Sao Paolo.

Artists: 20:00 // Saturday // 15/10/11 //
FOYER Cinemateca Brasileira, Sao Paolo, BR.██─▀─▌█
Rosa Menkman, Optical Machines, B.Fleischmann, DEFI.─██─▀─▌█

Trailer: Music by little-scale─██─▀─▌█
I am super excited to announce that the Collapse of PAL will be part of Rojo Nova cinematic installations - in which it will feature Optical Machines and B. Fleischmann! (some of you might know I have been a fan of Fleischmann soundscapeyy-music for years so its an absolute honor to work on this project together with him).
The Optical Machines will bring an analogue-installation component to the whole. ─██─▀─▌█

The fourth “cinematic installation” to happen at the BNDES Foyer inside Cinemateca Brasileira. A technological set-up… all “collapsing” with the many analogical ways of generating the information, the music, the story telling. A session where you will read, listen, watch, but most of all, you will be surprised on how the whole installation is generated.─██─▀─▌█

Plot: Collapse of PAL tells the story of the PAL signal and its termination. This death sentence, although executed in silence, was a brutally violent act that left PAL disregarded and obsolete. While it might be argued that the PAL signal is dead, it still exists as a trace left upon the new, ‘better’ digital technologies. PAL can, even though the technology is terminated, be found here as a historical form that newer technologies build upon, in- herit or have appropriated from. Besides this, the Angel also realizes that the new DVB signal that has been chosen over PAL is different, but at the same time also inherently flawed.─██─▀─▌█

Rosa and Áron Birtalan // Collapse of PAL // longtailtour

Here is a video of me and Áron playing at the glitch gallery show in Budapest. If you are not happy about quality, you better come and see us for real!┘─▀┐─▄┘─
The Collapse of PAL will have a couple of installments in NL before the big show in Brazil and to make it more more beautiful I invited Áron Birtalan to join me. Áron and I have played some of the most traumatic shows I have ever been through in my life, not just musically... and its really good to have him at my side.█▄┘─▀┐─▄─

Áron Birtalan [HUN] is a musician / media artist from Budapest, Hungary, currently living in The Hague, NL. His works and interests primarily focus on minimalist music, sonic environments, failure aesthetics, DIY ethics, romanticism, religious art and music, medievalism, Greek and South- East Asian mythology and lo-fi electronic media.▌█▌█▀─██▌█─▌

† 19.11.11 - with Áron @ TBC, STRP - Eindhoven, NL

† 24.09.11 - with Áron @ TodaysArt - The Hague, NL

† 09.09.11 - with Áron @ Gogbot - Enschede, NL

At Gogbot I will also do some visuals in the church and some vj-ing with Eavan Aiken aka Roborant.██▄┘─█
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//Opening TCOP electric avenue, Museums Quartier with _̲̲̲̲̲̅̅̅_ _̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̅̅̅̅̅̅̅_̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̲̅̅̅̅̅_̲̲̅ ̲__̲̅̅̅̅_̲̅_─ ̲̲̲̲̲̲͋̅̅̅̅_̲̅

This friday the Collapse of PAL will be opened at the WORM_space at Electric avenue, in the Museums Quartier in Vienna. There will be some wine and possible surprise concert ....  @#^&*()_

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

Collapse of PAL at Transmediale [a review by Jussi Parikka]

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photos by Jonathan Gröger and David Szauder (thank you!)

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A couple of days back I performed the Collapse of PAL at the Transmediale. I edited a lot for this version to make it fit with the theme (:Live). It was full, it went well and today I was made aware of this very nice review by Jussi Parikka:

For me, last year it was Gebhard Sengmuller’s A Parallel Image, and this year Rosa Menkman’s The Collapse of PAL: the media archaeological highlight of Transmediale. Menkman’s performance dealt with obsolescence, death of media, and what is most interesting, media archaeology of signals and signal formats. Instead of the focus on devices, even if at times lost and outside mainstream, we are seeing new perspectives that take in their focus components, processes and such “minor elements” of media history.

The performance was a two-screen installation with Menkman using various audio and video sources and the signal twisted, modulated, bent. She combined the signal with a Cracklebox, a Eurosignal (a zombie-signal), Morse code and an old Casio keyboard among other things (info from the Transmediale 2011 programme book). The screens were filled with electronic signal landscapes, of waveforms and at times recognizable Gestalts. The angel from future, a Benjaminian figure of critique of progress, was the protagonist through whose mouth the Collapse of PAL painted a history of the PAL signal as loser to for example the DVB signal. The terms such as losers of history, history excavated in midst of rubbles, storm of progress which works to hide the multiplicity in history all point directly to Benjamin’s famous On the Concept of History text.

Despite the fact that I loved the performance, I also sensed the danger of nostalgia in this strong defensive reaction of history of losers – which was framed through an idea of progress as the force that blindly abandons all that it considers inefficient. A critique of rationalism and progress, the other aspects of the media archaeological gesture of the dialectics between losers and emerging media is not grounded enough. To what extent are we in danger of celebrating past media just for the sake of our emotional attachment to them as childhood memories and part of the collective media memories that are now in danger of being lost with new signal solutions and media environments? How to differentiate the media archaeological critique from nostalgia, and hence from a crucial part of the late capitalist consumer media sphere that Fredric Jameson pointed out as one crucial affective feature of contemporary culture?

Requiem for The Planes of Phosphor + a Love Story remix!

Part 3 of The Collapse of PAL (rendered version)

Music and video by Rosa Menkman

I used different glitches and compressions to get to the sounds and the music.

The beginning 10 sec. is a sample Daniel Wilson used in our last music video, "Digital Ate the Cassette Tape".

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Remix of Requiem for The Planes of Phosphor by Rosa Menkman, Pixelnoizz and Russian Disco by Low Bob and Mamiko Motto during Satta Outside festival 2010, in Lithuania.
 
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//The collapse of PAL. An obituary by the Angel of History

Tuesday 25/05, 21.30-22.00: Audio visual television performance within the program "Sound and Television" on Danish nation-wide regional television. To honor the deceased PAL signal. The collapse of PAL. A triptych. 1. Eulogy 2. The collapse // obsequies 3. Requiem for the planes of phosphor "The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." - Benjamin. Shout outs to SECAM and NTSC!

// Sound & Television, Denmark

Tuesday 25/05, 21.30-22.00: Audio visual television performance within the program "Sound and Television". On Danish nationwide digital television on the regional channels. Copenhagen: Kanal Hovedstaden. Fyn: TV Fyn. Midtvest: TV Midtvest. Bornholm: Kanal Bornholm. Nord: Kanal Nord. Syd: Kanal Syd. Øst: Kanal Øst. Østjylland: Kanal Østjylland. "As a Transmission Art series, Sound & Television invites artists who work with the materiality of audiovisual flows to realise performances exploring the performativity of television: not live on TV, but live as TV. During six half-hour long television transmissions, a group of Danish and International artists develop performances where the transmission itself becomes the artwork. The performances all reflect on different significant aspects of the changing conditions of broadcasting. In the new DVB-T (digital terrestrial television) environment, the very transmission format of TV has changed, from symmetric analog to asymmetric data flows, encoded in the MPEG format and decoded through software implemented in everything from flat-screen TV's, set-top-boxes and PC's. "The cracking of LCD screens"...all is not smooth in this world of digitally compressed TV, as ROSA MENKMAN shows in a performance based on her Glitch Studies Manifesto, creatively appropriating the hidden error-spaces accidentally opened up in new forms of encoding-decoding." 27-04-2010___AYMERIC MANSOUX 
04-05-2010___DEMOCRATIC INNOVATION feat. LAMBURG TONY
 25-05-2010___ROSA MENKMAN 
01-06-2010___SVEN KÖNIG 
08-06-2010___JACOB KIRKEGAARD 
15-06-2010___VICKI BENNETT aka PEOPLE LIKE US |||I|I|I|I|I||II|I|||||I|I|I| I|I||II|I|||||I|I|I| I|I||II|I|||||I|I|I|I|I||II|I||||||I|I|I| I|I||II|I|||||I|I|I|I|I||II|I|||||I|