The Tipping Point of Failure - exhibition catalogue

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The exhibition catalogue of The Tipping Point of Failure, my solo show that is still showing in Łódź, Poland (until December the 4th)

The Catalogue has texts by jonCates, Michał Brzezinski and me!

Check it out!

jonCates - The Tipping Point of Failure - a solo exhibition by Rosa Menkman

My dear friend jonCates wrote a piece for my exhibition  The Tipping Point of Failure catalogue. If you dont like pdfs you should read it here.

jonCates - The Tipping Point of Failure: a solo exhibition by Rosa Menkman

Rosa Menkman is the consummate theory-practitioner of the ever moving/flowing media art known contentiously enough as Glitch or Glitch Art or Noise or Noise Art or Error or Disruption or Corruption or Loss or Failure or Obsolescence or Disappearance or a not so subtle dance between all these possible poles of existence in, of and between unstable categories...

Glitch - “A form of low frequency interference, appearing as a narrow horizontal bar moving vertically through the picture.”
- Video Preservation: Glossary of Terms - Rebecca Bachman (1996)

As Menkman has written, this flow follows a movement over time through media from celluloid to CRTs to phosphor burn-ins to LCD cracks to file formats. Perhaps this flow is not so linear in chronologies but rather is distributed across multitudes of moments. And perhaps these are moments that cannot be recognized immediately as they occur but rather only from the perspectives of Last Angels of Histories.

This flow forward in reverse results in the Glitch or as 'the spirit of that time of what the glitch was' or had occurred. At that moment in time and of time-based media... of traces of tracings of what has past... we are left with all hat has been left (behind) and embedded by digital and analog systems, all of which include and express themselves over and over again, in times, as specific as formats failing or found to be debris, broken bits of histories awash and washing up against the shores of what we thought we knew, against the grains of our expectations.

These are the vector-views that Menkman's work travels for me or takes me traveling along, pulled into the wake of a movement as UCNV has said in response to Menkman: "Glitch is not dead" but can be rather claimed to be alive and kicking online, decenteralized and internationally networked in a network of social ghosts made real to the tunes of a eulogy for broadcast standards and a poetry of errors.

Time base error - “A variation in the synchronizing signals. When time base errors are large enough, they may cause skewing or flagging distortion of the video picture.”
- Video Preservation: Glossary of Terms - Rebecca Bachman (1996)

In the field of Noise Music a definition exists and is mobilized by Noise musicians to identify "Harsh Noise" from other forms of Noise Music. The harshness of Harsh Noise musics relates to the music itself (i.e via volumes, amplitudes, frequency ranges, rhythms, shifts in tempo, pacing, etc) as well as the experience of listening to the music. Harsh Noise is harsh. Glitch Art is glitched. But is it harsh? Or, is it necessarily always harsh, hard-edged or crunchy? Such were the questions posed by New Media artist and Media Art Histories scholar Paul Hertz to Rosa Menkman recently in Chicago during the GLI.TC/H festival of Noise & New Media.

Menkman's response (as we walked along Wabash Avenue beside and underneath train tracks that recall the trains that travel in her "The Collapse of PAL" performance/video) was "no, not necessarily..." and i would say yes she had already answered this question earlier with and within her work. "The Collapse of PAL" is at once harsh/hard-edged/crunchy Glitch Art, filled with broken edges and torn/bleeding pixels, and also simultaneously elegant and elegiac in it's slow electronic forms of cyberpsychedelic transformation. I use the term cyberpsychedelic to refer to the combinatory effects of mixing Cybernetics and Psychedelics as cultural influences, technologies and aesthetic principles from the 1960's to the present. Menkman's cyberpsychedelic transformation remind us of earlier Media Art made with small scale cyberpsychedelic technologies of personal transformation as well as the sense of movement and travel embedded in many of these projects. Or as Kodwo Eshun says of Kraftwerk and their Trans Europe Express project in Iara Lee's documentary Modulations: “...as soon as you travel in a train, you're in a musical instrument. The sense of being effortlessly being pulled along through stations across Europe, was a very exciting world, opening new world of automotion...” Or, as in the classic quotation from Walter Benjamin in his Theses on the Philosophy of History as he describes the Angel of History: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet... The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” Or to begin again:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Neuromancer
- William Gibson (1984)

"200 years into the future, the data-thief is told a story. If you can find the crossroads, a crossroads, this crossroads, if you can make an archeological dig into this crossroads, you will find fragments, techno fossils, and if you can put those elements, those fragments together, you will find a code. Crack that code and you will have the keys to your future..."
- The Last Angel of History - Black Audio Film Collective (1996)

The Black Audio Film Collective introduces their speculative present of the cyberpsychedelic Afrofuturist project, The Last Angel of History, with these words. Their project focuses on reconstruction of lost, repressed or stolen histories constructing alien futures. Painting herself white, Rosa Menkman attempted to blank herself, attempted to get lost or erased between the lines of the vertical blanking interval, that flickering time difference between the last line of one frame or field and the next frame or field rendered on a display. And the results, as rendered in her instantiation of this source material, a video called "Dear mister Compression", say "Now it is too little too late [system shut down]". We are told in public talks and personal chats that this white painting that Menkman undertook to blank herself also resulted in an extreme allergic reaction which threatened her eyesight, temporarily blinding her, in a literal whiteout and erasure. In these process and moments are a confluence of emotional and technological states in the databent and brokenness of white noise to signal ratios against pink skin. As "i fail to understand you completely" is written on screen, typed out, character by character for us to see, the typist/artist (Menkman) is thinking and feeling out loud as if we are on IRC or in a live chat with her, "the noxious angel of history", while she moves through these failures of systems, systems that we now know to be both simultaneously intensely personal and computational.

The computer is a syncretic device/environment and context. computational space is social, networked and we interface with these forms socially. this is the meaning of the term: technosocial. The term technosocial arises from the field of Science, Technology, and Society Studies (STS) in discussions of the social construction of technology as related to the histories and sociologies of the Sciences. this term is of key importance to the consideration of Menkman's work undertaken in this text because we must acknowledge the depth and intensity of feeling found in her work. Her work is not cold analysis but rather it is made up of hot confrontations with computational spaces and personal experiences through Glitch Art theorypractices.

Returning to last angels of histories, data-thieves, crossroads and social networks, I find Menkman's "The Collapse of PAL" here in real and in rendered time, performing states of criticality in terms of her theorypractices. Through various technological states of collapse, she performs as The Last Angel of History, flowing through deconstructed signals; humming over the water, wherein a broken cityscape stands as if submerged, as if flooded by "connections that were just not good enough" in an apocalyptic blue phosphor. Ruins amidst lost signals losing sync, flicker and crossfade through the "storm you call progress" as the the Last Angel of History reappears and redisappears in loops replayed and instantiations remixed through unstable states of being glitched. "The Collapse of PAL" is composite signal itself, composed of a instants that are and have been previously remixed and reworked by Menkman herself.

“Remixology is the science of continuation and the art of drastic remaking, total remaking, remodelling.”
- More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction - Kodwo Eshun (1999)

Menkman has publicly stated her first experiences with glitch and Glitch Art as being inspired and informed by JODI, the Dutch experimental New Media Art collective who have inspired so many of us as well. Menkman first encountered JODI's work through their deconstructions of Quake, a project called Untitled Game, which has become an almost iconic work of Glitch and New Media Art. She is the leading international theory-practitioner of Glitch Art. She is as much of an inspiration for us, the international 'glitch scene' (as she calls us) or the the experimental New Media Art networks, as JODI has been for her and for our communities.

She offers us criticality through creative practice by tracing the effects of our technologies as the break, bend and disappear into forced obsolescent deaths. She cracks open and apart our expectations and asks questions through her artworks and projects. If Carolyn Forche's The Angel of History, a highly regarded poetic work, underscores that we humans have memories that we piece together in fragments in order to survive then Rosa Menkman's influential projects remind us that we humans also have technologies that we have written and that these technologies survive as memories, remembering us through their fragmentary existences. Menkman gathers and disperses her own utterances across media that is broken, machines that are haunted, and in ruins of presently obsolete protocols.

Skew - “A bending of picture at top or bottom of television screen caused by the changing of the video track angles on the tape from the time of recording to the time of playback. This can occur as a result of poor tension regulation by the VCR or by ambient conditions which affect the tape.” from: Video Preservation: Glossary of Terms - Rebecca Bachman (1996)

Menkman's writings in addition to her artistic works, as shown in this exhibition, function as a beacon, tightly focusing and broadly illuminating the key critical issues of all of this beautiful digital garbage that we all love so much. Pushing us past idle aesthetics of error or decay, Menkman articulates through a combinations of writings in and on the technosocial fabric of our times, crafting the Art of Artifacts, A Vernacular of File Formats and pivoting across these points of articulation 'far away from perfection' and at The Tipping Point of Failure.

“When you try to describe a glitch, you can never really categorize it... the moment you try to make categories, there's always an inbetween. There's always the glitch that will be right were you didnt want it. So the category is broken again... you need to go from multiple angles, so that you have this spectrum of ways of approaching it."
- Rosa Menkman in the Group Chat w/ GLI.TC/H Organizers, an interview by Nicholas O'Brien for badatsports: http://www.vimeo.com/15370640

"...each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle, he remembered, but delta swept over him before he could ask himself what that might mean."
- Fragments of A Hologram Rose - William Gibson (1977)



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jonCates makes, organizes and teaches experimental New Media Art. His projects have been presented internationally at various events in locations such as Beijing, Madrid and Mexico City; nationally in Chicago, New York and Boston and are widely distributed online. Art Games, experimental Machinima, Computer Witchcraft, digitalPunk and Noise music are some of the unstable categories that his work playfully moves through.

jonCates teaches in the New Media path of study of the Film, Video & New Media Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His research and writings are on Media Art Histories and related subjects. In 2007, he initiated the Phil Morton Memorial Research Archive to archive and freely distribute the Media Art work of Phil Morton and associated research. He writes on these topics for Furtherfield.org as well as in other online and offline publications.

//The Tipping Point of Failure - Rosa Menkman

The Tipping Point of Failure - Rosa Menkman

Text from the exhibition catalogue.

Modern digital cultures are inseparable from keywords like functionality, smoothness, order and progress. Interaction designers, programmers and interface developers all work together to understand and execute these mantras. But to really understand these keywords, they have to be defined in relation to what they are not. A successful product designer does not design for the average customer, but instead for the marginal, extreme customer; because when taking the margins as the rule, the middle will take care of itself. This is why studying the qualities of disfunction, irregularities, breaks, disorder, damage or even demolition are as important in the development of a new technological product as the researching of its perfect flows and this is also one of the reasons why I think it is important to study failure. The concepts of perfection and failure are a tradeoff of each other. If we want to understand and pursue perfection - we can find this in the pursuit of failure.

Over the last months I have visited many different failure (and glitch in particular) related conferences (festivals and symposia) and I have learned a lot from the different voices and perspectives within this field that is, time and time again, referred to as ‘in a constant state of flux’, ‘new’, ‘other’ or even ‘indescribable’. The more people on the floor or in the conversation about glitch, the more diverse the perspectives on glitch become; the meaning of a glitch depends greatly on the background and the conceptual application that is chosen by the person experiencing it or talking about it.

But however mysterious the definition of glitch is, I have also noticed some very pronounced patterns that emerged between the different with failure induced glitch events. Some problems, subjects, frameworks or keywords keep floating to the surface and seem to be the focal points of glitch theory at this point: subjects like P/politics, memory or preservation, genre/effect, ethics, aesthetics and design, bio/virus, copyright and economics or history have their own panel in every other conference, while words like the Other, transgressive, progressive, order, affect, uncanny, void, materiality, gender or paradox seem to be part of the obligatory failure and glitch b/lingo.

Which makes me wonder – What is the difference between failure and glitch? And if the glitch (or failure) subject is really in such a state of flux, or indefinable, how is it possible to have a reasonable conversation about it? Can glitch or failure be overcome, and where or how can it be conquered until it no longer exists as its original pure and indescribable form? In other words, where is the tipping point of failure and where is the tipping point of glitch?

In wikipedia I read: “Failure refers to the state or condition of not meeting a desirable or intended objective, and may be viewed as the opposite of success”. When I read this I know that glossary-wise this might be true, but personally I keep my reservations about subscribing to this explanation; there also needs to be place for for instance successful failure - a contradiction in terms that I would rather live with then without...

I think that wether failure should be defined in contradiction to success or not, depends on the context in which the term ‘failure’ is used. It is a very complex problem - as complex maybe as the problem of glitch itself. This is why right now I am most interested in thinking about failure in relation to the definition of glitch.

When I posed the question of failure vs. glitch in the closing panel at GLI.TC/H (a festival that took place in Chicago  from 29 of September - 3th of October and that I co-organized), an interesting answer was given by Anton Marini, who declared that: “Overcoming failure is to accept it. Overcoming glitch is to incorporate it.” Which I think is was phrased excellently. Of course I also have a personal interpretation of these tipping points, which I will write up more elaborately now.

Technically, a glitch is a short lived fault or break from an expected flow within a computer system, typically experienced as an uncanny happening, a dangerous momentum of something other, unordered, unknown and unwanted; The glitch is where the digital flow fails to answer to our expectations.

The glitch fulfills the role of 'Other’ - it is the utterance of a computer that does not subordinate to the societal norms and rules or protocols its users and programmers have implemented upon it. It is the behavior that does not fit-in and is usually avoided or if possible, completely excluded from the system (by for instance debugging).

After the momentum of the failure, there are a couple of possible ways the glitch can ‘tip’. First of all, if the cause of the computers erratic behavior comes to the light, the glitch disappears and what is left after this is the effect of a bug that (often) has a certain debugging method. If the cause of the failure stays unknown, the momentum of glitch transforms into a phenomenon (or the memory thereof) that gains meaning from its context; the person who experiences the glitch, the technology that is malfunctioning and other perspectives that are at stake. In any case, the uncanny momentum of glitch is open to symbolical or metaphorical connotations - that take the interruption away from its strictly technological being. This openness of glitch is what glitch artists play with and is what makes glitch so hard to define.

In my opinion failure can thus be considered as the primary, under-developed state of glitch, which it will inevitably (and fast) tip away from. Failure is the static point of glitch, frozen in time, yet only nano seconds long, while its tipping point marks the active flow in which the glitch moves away from failure into and through its many new possible conceptions. The tipping point of failure thus marks the inclusion of glitch into or the conception of glitch as a paradigm, which can but does not need to demystify it. 

In the case of glitch-art, the roles of failure and glitch are inevitably more complex because the definitions of glitch and its tipping point(s) are more complex - depending of course on the perspective chosen - it moves away from a strictly technological definition to a more metaphorical one. My stand points on glitch-art are therefore multiple and never followed each other in a clean, clear-cut order. But for the sake of clarity I will try to describe it here as linear as possible.

My exhibition ‘The Tipping Point of Failure’ is about the role of failure in my different phases of glitch art. In my first practical glitch-art I passively framed accidental glitches; the monumental failures of the computer. I collected glitches that resulted from active tinkering and explored new ways in which I could exploit the computers failing draw-capabilities. I also moved along with re-programming and pre-programmed glitches.

These first stages are marked by my fascination with hunting down a formal aesthetics of failure that was (or was not) based on technical crudeness; an impetuous glitching that slowly commodified the dynamics, the norms and values of what once was digital punk - although I did not (always) realize this.

The work that symbolizes this development is The Vernacular of File Formats; A collection of 7 videos and 10 file format-images in which I actively demystify these most used glitch-effects. In this work I show that the tinkered-glitch has already been transformed into a filter and something that could even be called a commodity or paradigm - but the work also raises the question if this kind of glitching has actually always already been a ready-made commodity (instead of a new form..).

My Videoscapes, Glitch Studies Manifesto and the Collapse of PAL show the changing role (or tipping point) of failure in my work. In these works or ‘other’ phase of my glitch-art I am trying to make more conceptualized or narrative glitch-art. While failure sometimes still plays a role, the starting point of these works lies within the exploration of a concept, a call for studying glitch itself or even a narrative rather then failure itself.

The exhibitions “the Tipping Point of Failure” does not only refer to the inception of glitch, but should thus also be understood as a critique to the one dimensional “Aesthetics of Failure” that glitch-art is so often aligned with. It is an ode to everything that can happen after the tipping point of failure - within the realm of pure, not yet described glitch-art.

The Tipping Point of Failure opening!

The Tipping Point of Failure, my first solo exhibition, just opened in Łódź, Poland. The exhibition shows four of my works; the Vernacular of File Formats (consisting of 8 different films, 10 prints and a text based on my research in file formats), The Glitch Studies Manifesto (the text and center piece of the exhibition), The Collapse of PAL (a rememberance of the PAL signal) and my acousmatic videoscapes (8 musicvideos on LCDs, based on theories of Pierre Schaeffer).
The exhibition will run until the 4th of December. More + digital catalogue to come -- which will explain more about the title of the exhibition!
For reviews in Polish here and here

Pomyłka // The Tipping Point of Failure // Rosa Menkman Solo Show

29 Oct – 05 Dec 2010   
Galeria NT / Imaginarium  
ul. R. Traugutta 18, 90-113 Łódź    

    I am really really proud to have my first solo show "Pomyłka // The Tipping Point of Failure" at Galeria NT, opening on the 30th of October in Łódź, Poland. The main part of the exhibition will show an overview of my own research into glitch art in three parts; the Vernacular of File Formats, the Glitch Studies Manifesto and the Collapse of PAL. Besides these three parts, there I will also show 
some other, smaller works.

    Soon I will publish a self written text I about my show, but here is already a more general public press release written by Michał Brzeziński                          

"ROSA MENKMAN (1983, Arnhem, Netherlands) is a leading international theory-practitioner of glitch art. She has written extensively on digital artifacts and noise, including the Glitch Studies Manifesto (2010). Her videos and real-time performances have been included in festivals like Cimatics (Brussels ’08 + 09), Blip (Europe and US in 2009), Video Vortex (Amsterdam ’08 + Brussels ’09), ISEA (Dublin ’09) and File (Sao Paolo ’10). She was also one of the organizers/curators of the successful GLI.TC/H festival that took place in Chicago in 2010. She has collaborated on art projects and performed together with Alexander Galloway, little-scale, Govcom.org and the Internet art collective, Jodi.org. Menkman received her Master’s degree in 2009 and is currently pursuing a practical PhD at the KHM Cologne, writing on the subject of Artifacts.

Today many people enjoy their time watching super 8 tapes, while listening to poorly recorded vinyl records or endlessly copied cassette tapes. They enjoy the discolorations, cracks, and noises of these media. This retro-fetishism shows that we find ourselves at an aesthetic turning point; the good quality of the old image is no longer important. Instead, we are attracted to the traces of “old” media, that seem to be absent or at least imperceptible in the “new” media of today. Artists such as Rosa Menkman aim to show and evaluate the flaws that we haven’t yet learned to appreciate or even recognize in our new media – the imperfection.

Roman Jakobson identified various functions of communication in the primary axis between the addresser, the addressee and the message. When communication revolves only around the message itself, it has, according to Jakobson, a poetic function. Such a message does not communicate anything but its structure. Glitch is a radical implementation of this postulate on the grounds of visual arts.

The aesthetics of glitch, which continues traditions of structural film, comes from the interest in the medium itself, and thus, the process of image formation. The medium and its inherent specificities has become radically important for contemporary art, since many significant contemporary artworks use some form of exploitation of the material of (modern) media, or are known thanks to documentation done within these media.

The exhibition of “Pomyłka / Tipping point of failure” („Pomyłka” means „Mistake”) aims to pinpoint a quintessential phenomenon of aesthetics and contemporary art – the phenomenon of glitch. The aesthetics of glitch stems from an interest in the structure and research on conditions and characteristics of each medium.

Technically, this is can be accomplished by the exploration of the opportunities offered by for instance circuitbending and databending. These techniques that are often used by artists that are working within this field of art can be divided into several main types. Firstly, they focus on observation of the audiovisual effects caused by reconstruction of hardware, such as soldering wires, the changing of values (of resistors or data), introducing external components to the integrated circuit, etc. A second type is intentional damaging the media. A third type is damaging and redesigning data in digital files, when the artist gets to the content of the file and changes it manually by typing in a variety of values (computer graphic programs perform the same actions but in a mechanical way). A fourth type is the action associated with the transmission of the signal and its modulation. Artists repeatedly send the same files between devices up to the point when some of them commit certain errors. A fifth type of activities are actions related to the repeated compression of files or using errors of various compressed audio-visual materials.

To this collection we can also add many other related strategies such as the usage of TV interlacing or “freeze frame” in the VHS machines, the scrolling of the preview of DV devices, exposing differences in the frequency of images’ refreshing and scanning rates in the camera and TV systems, the usage of differences in the lighting of different parts of the old style kinescopes that are invisible to the naked eye or the large variety of feedback techniques, etc. It is an extremely interesting field of aesthetic exploration, which influences design, advertising industry and popular culture.

Often, the artists within this field treat each of these tactics as a research in the extensions of the human senses. Such orientation places them close to the position of for instance scientists. Artists, similarly to scientists, set up a research context and let the examined matter speaks for itself. But in glitch art, the word mistake has also become a synonym for the natural consequences of actions and gives right to a following and a following trial, which might cause different effects every time. From this perspective, glitch art could become a chapter in the history of art by just a simple exploration of the aesthetical relationships between a first and a subsequent mistake and its references to known canons of composition. Each of the redesigned devices can produce dozens of interesting abstract images per second and disrupt a yet to be constructed history by the inherent impossibility of capturing ephemeral artifacts – mistakes.

However, this kind of art can also, and maybe more interestingly, be understood in a metaphorical or even political or ethical way. Glitch is obviously related to the aesthetics of punk or DIY strategies. Striving for a poor quality image (Low Quality) or deliberately destroying or redesigning a final message, or to recapture the creativity of a medium can be described as the key features of an anti-corporate attitude.

Rosa Menkman aims to show and evaluate the flaws that we haven’t yet learned to appreciate or even recognize in our new media – the imperfection – and sets out to create an awareness of the many questions and different dichotomies inherent to these imperfections are brought to the front.

„Within a high-tech world, consumers are blinded by the sparkles of the latest protocol. They are on an elevator that seems to take them to a realm that functions cleaner, better and faster. However, during this trip in the elevator they never seem to arrive at a final destination – the holy grail of perfection. New media are not perfect and will never be perfect. Diverging and sometimes even opposing retro-fetishism, we need to be aware of the doctrine of our flawed, yet superficially perfect new media.„

The essence of Rosa Menkman’s art does not lie in achieving visual effects or within the development of just another glitch aesthetics. Instead she is conducting an advanced glitch studies, in which she strengthens practical research in aesthetics and design by scientific research, with focal points on politics, art-history and technological forms and discourses.

While artists are no longer interested in achieving results, but they want to explore the material and are open to the strangest sensory conclusions, it must be a meaningful sign that we live in a time in which totalitarian and fascist aesthetics of ideal projections, or the principle of so-called art without randomness, are fading into oblivion.

Instead, once again, art has become the domain of creative experiment. This is why, if the history of art wants to explore this strategy, it has to go very deeply not only into the artifact, the mistake, but into a process of creating these images and the unveiling of their hidden logic. The artists no longer create finished works of art or even exclusive artistic ideas, but instead they produce creative platforms, where the addressee has the power to become the creator of the final work of art. In this sense, glitch is a constantly mutating entity, that can move from a ephemeral form of randomness to a new paradigm. This is where we can find the tipping point of failure."