Resolution Dispute 0010 : Genealogy vs. /his/tory https://beyondresolution.info/0010-Resolution-Dispute-Genealogy Kunst Hochschule Kassel New Media Slides Summer Semester. Slides of the Kunst Hochschule Kassel New Media Slides Summer Semester by Rosa Menkman. From the course "Beyond Resolution". To establish a better understanding of our technologies, we need to acknowledge that the term »resolution« does not just refer to a numerical quantity or a measure of acutance. A resolution involves the result of a consolidation between interfaces, protocols, and materialities. Resolutions thus also entail a space of compromise between these different actors. Resolutions are the determination of what is run, read, and seen, and what is not. In a way, resolutions form a lens of (p)reprogrammed »truths.« But their actions and the qualities have moved beyond a fold of our perspectives; and we have gradually become blind to the politics of these congealed and hardened compromises. Technology and its inherent resolutions are never neutral; every time a new way of seeing is created, a new prehistory is being written.

1. From Artefact to effect.
Critical Glitch art used to exploit medium-reflexivity, to rhetorically
question technologies ‘perfect’ use, conventions and expectations.
However, over time glitch art has become a genre that also fulfils certain
expectations in itself (for instance, to rhetorically question the medium).
This reflexive approach has become inherent to the materiality of the glitch
and tends to, as Katherine Hayles would assert, re-conceptualize the
glitches’ materiality into an interplay between its ‘physical characteristics
and its signifying strategies’.
To really understand a work from the genre of glitch art completely, each
level of the notion of (glitch) materiality should be studied: the text as a
physical artefact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of
artists and audience.

2. The glitch art genre thus relies heavily on the literacy of the spectator (it
references media technology texts, aesthetics and machinic processes)
and their knowledge of more ‘conventional’ canons of media-reflexive,
modern art. Former disturbances have gained complex meaning beyond
their technological value; with the help of popular culture, their effects have
transformed into signifiers loaded with affect. For example, analogue noise
conjures up the sense of an eerie, invisible power entering the frame
(sometimes a ghost, or another paranormal activity), while block-artifacts
often refer to time travel while monochrome data often refers to a data
offence initiated by a hacker.
Today a glitch prompts the spectator to engage not only with themes, but
also with complex subcultural and meta-cultural narratives and gestures,
presenting new analytical challenges.

3. The render ghosts’ affect, or: A Vernacular of Glitch ‘Affect’

4. Referencing a Vernacular of File Formats, a Lexicon to the
Render Ghosts’s Affect offers insight into the ‘meaning’ of
particular glitch aesthetics applied in popular culture, by analysing
the use of distortion in the top 50 US Grossing Sci-Fi Titles
Released per year. A handbook to navigate glitch clichés as
employed in popular culture.

5. Watching the trailers of the top 20 Top-US—Grossing Sci-Fi Titles
Released between 1998 and 2018 (the last 20 years), as indexed by the
IMDB, to see if there is such a thing as a ‘Vernacular of Glitch Affect’
and if so, how this genre developed.

6. in Ringu (1998), the television signal features an analogue distortion
as the ghost of Sadako crawls out of a well.

7. In The Matrix (1999), a film that features a lot of monochrome / hacker
esthetics, Agent Smith specifically and directly informs Neo that Morpheus
is at the top of the wanted list for “terrorism”.

8. The Matrix (1999). Monochrome vertical data streams signify the
presence of hackers in the Matrix.

9. “The machines are starting to take over!” is uttered when T-X knocks
out the terminator. A combination of what seems like digital and
analogue, monochrome red distortions cover the ‘interface’ of the
Terminators point of view as he goes down.
Terminator: 3 Rise of the Machines (2003)

10. During a fighting scene between Electro, who has the ability to control
electricity, and Spiderman, the billboards of Times Square go all glitchy. ÷
The Amazing Spider-Man™ 2 (2014) was shot on KODAK VISION3 Color
Negative Film.

11. During the fight scene between Spider man and Electro, all the
bill boards glitch and finally explode, while Kodak is the of the
last billboards left standing.

12. From ‘Cool’ to ‘Hot’ Glitch artefacts
In the ‘Biggest Loser (2012)’, a reality television show about losing
weight, a margie cummins’ ‘snacking’ is framed via video noise artefacts
that have become a trope: they emulate an ‘unstable’ signal that signifies
that her snacking is ‘secret’ and ‘bad’.

13. The Verizon logo (an American telecommunications company)
glitches when it is featured as one of the sponsors during the
2015 MTV music awards.

14. Diesel Creates Glitch Invitations for 2015 Fashion Show

15. Wreck-It Ralph, (2o12) introduces a character Vanellope, also
known as ‘glitch’. Vanellope is a pixelating programming mistake
in the candy-coated kart-racing game Sugar Rush.

16. Blade Runner 2049 (2017) Title sequence takes place in an eerie, low
saturated environment featuring glitched out logos.
Vade’s software toolkit was used in the opening studio title sequence
created by Toros Kose. The sequence emulates the looks of GPU and
CPU memory errors.

17. In The Truman Show (1998), an insurance salesman/adjuster discovers his
entire life is actually a television show. We often see pieces of video
shot with interlacing, and a strong Vignetting, implying that it is shot by
a camera part of the television show.

18. Legacy Russel vs Beautifulwhites.com
The same glitch aesthetics, color shifts in the red and blue
channel and the dislocation of particular color blocks, are used
in Legacy Russel ’s glitch feminism manifesto and as part of
racist Memes on the Alt-Right website beautifulwhites.com

19. 5. The gospel of glitch art also tells about new standards
implemented by corruption. *Glitch Studies Manifesto 2010
Not all glitch art is progressive or something new. The popularization and
cultivation of the avant-garde of mishaps has become predestined and
unavoidable. Be aware of easily reproducible glitch effects automated by
softwares and plug-ins. What is now a glitch will become a fashion.

20. New Aesthetic
James Bridle: “the increasing appearance of the visual language of digital
technology and the Internet in the physical world, and the blending of
virtual and physical”

21. I first noticed the Render Ghosts on the hoardings surrounding a new
development near Finsbury Square. On the balconies of some vast,
virtual tower, two pixelated figures looked out over a darkened London, a
perfect red-pink gradient sunset behind them. He had short dark hair and
stubble, wore a black jacket and blue jeans. She had a cropped red
bob, white jacket, and a purple knee-length skirt. I didn’t know who they
were, but I started seeing them everywhere. - James Bridle, 2013.

24. A genealogy of the use of Macroblocks - specifically datamoshing -
in moving image.

25. “The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the
originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions
of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion,
fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and
appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.
In short: it is about reality.” - Hito Steyerl, 2009.

26. Colorado Impression 10a (after Dan Hays, Colorado)
2002, oil on canvas, 152 x 203cm

27. Dan Hays/Self-Portrait
2005, oil on canvas, 76 x 203cm

28. Thomas Ruff's JPEGs series (2004-2007) consists of
enlarged, low-resolution images from the web, creating
monumental ‘tableaus’ of highly pixilated and blurred views.
The images are author less, anonymous and generic
documents or appropriated readymades

29. Bertrand Planes, divxprime: 2004-2007.
Divxprime is a modified video codec, installed and used like any other
classic codec. It was programmed from sources Xvid (open source
version of Divx). The interface proposes several modifications, some of
the settings generated original graphic effects peculiar to the mpeg4
algorithm.

30. Sven Koenig, APpRoPiRaTe!: 2005.
APpRoPiRaTe! is an attempt to appropriate movies found in file-sharing
networks and turn them into art by revealing the real nature of such video
files.
This software's aim is to hack a found video file by just changing the
structure of the file to turn it into something visually completely different
without any video processing.
The technical aspect of the idea is inspired by a bug I've encountered in a
media player when testing downloaded movie files.

31. !mediengruppe bitnik and sven könig, .download finished: 2005.
download finished transforms and re-publishes films from p2p networks
and online archives. found footage becomes the rough material for the
transformation machine, which translates the underlying data structure of
the films onto the surface of the screen.
the original images dissolve into pixels, thus making the hidden data
structure visible. through download finished, file sharers become authors
by re-interpreting their most beloved films.

32. Nicolas Maigret, The Pirate Cinema: 2012-2014.

33. The Presets, Are You the One: 2005.

34. Venetian Snares, Szamar Madar (2005)

35. Takeshi Murata, pink dot: 2007.

36. Paper Rad, umbrella zombie mistake: 2007.

37. “On C is a short PDF that explains why JPEGs look the way
they do. These kinda documents are quite common around
the internet (it seems many CS departments require students
to make them) so it was really an exercise in understanding it
myself.” - Arcangel. On C.

38. Chairlift, Evident Utensil: 2009.

39. Kanye West, Welcome to Heartbreak: 2009.

40. Datamosher, How to Datamosh: 2009.

41. Paul B. Davis, Define your Terms: 2009.

42. Paul B. Davis, Codec: 2010.

43. Nick Briz: A New Ecology for the Citizen of a Digital Age, 2009.

44. Yung Jake, E.m-bed.de/d: 2012.
The screen becomes a display - an environment featuring interactive
windows.

45. Samuel H Goldstein, Goldmosh: 2012.

46. Enda o’Donoghue. Discrete (2012) Oil on Canvas, 30x30cm.
His “work presents a forensic interest into the construction, the
language and the mediated world of digital images together with
an ongoing dialogue with the medium and process of painting.”

47. Ted Davis, FFD8: 2012.
“Revealing both the surface and the structure of the very latest
Flickr uploaded image, it allows the used to find and replace all
instances of one particular HEX byte, therefore glitching the
stream as it comes in.”

48. David OReilly: A Glitch is A Glitch, 2013.

49. Karolina Sus. Die Hure N. 2013. 309 oil paintings, sound from
sonified paintings.

50. Donald Trump's Argument For America: 2016.

51. Donald Trump's Argument For America: 2016.

53. (ᴳ̐litch) Art Genealogies *19.03.2113 - 23.03.2113, curated in
collaboration with LEAP Berlin.
An effort to show just five of the many threaded glitch
discourses that play a role in the curators subjective
understanding of glitch art at this present. In these threads,
generations of different communities of (visual) glitch artists and
their working methods, conceptual themes and politics are
(inter)connected and/or juxtaposed.

54. Rosa Menkman, Glitch Timond, 2014.
In A Vernacular of Glitch ‘Affect’, I tried to illustrate my collection of
noise tropes from popular culture. Here dither is co-opted by the punks,
green and black binary code refers to hacker action, macroblocking
signifies AI and analogue noise implies the presence of ghosts etc.