Rosa Menkman

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch researcher and artist. Her work focuses on noise artifacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch, encoding and feedback artifacts). These artifacts can facilitate an important insight into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardization via resolutions. This process of imposing efficiency, order and functionality does not just involve the creation of protocols and solutions, but also entails black-boxed, obfuscated compromises and alternative possibilities that are in danger of staying forever unseen or even forgotten. In her research, which is both artistic and theoretical, Menkman intends to uncover the interests of anti-utopic, lost and unseen or simply "too good to be implemented" resolutions.

DCT:SYPHONING. The 1000000th (64th) interval. Powerpoint, 3-tier video installation, VR: 2015-2017.

DCT:SYPHONING was first commissioned by the Photographers Gallery in London, for the show "Power Point Polemics" (Jan - Apr 2016). A 3-channel video installation was conceived for the 2016 Transfers’ travelling show "Transfer Download” while its final form is in VR, commissioned as part of DiMoDA’s Morphe Presence and after its closing, as stand alone VR application. DCT:SYPHONING won the new face award at the Japan Media arts festival, was nominated for the HeK Digital Art Award. The work that sits at the core of DCT:SYPHONING. 

About the work 

A modern translation of the 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott roman "Flatland", explains some of the algorithms at work in digital image compression. Inspired by Syphon, an open source software by Tom Butterworth and Anton Marini, in DCT:SYPHONING, an anthropomorphised DCT (Senior) narrates its first SYPHON (data transfer) together with DCT Junior, and their interactions as they translate data from one image compression to a next (aka the “realms of complexity”). As Senior introduces Junior to the different levels of image plane complexity, they move from blocks (the realm in which they normally resonate), to dither, lines and the more complex realms of wavelets and vectors. Junior does not only react to old compressions technologies, but also the newer, more complex ones which ‘scare' Junior, because of their 'illegibility'.