Rosa Menkman

"Rosa Menkman: Lets write a hidden message in the dirty noise of a glitch!", was the title of the artist talk & first exhibition module of the "Platform Glitch Aesthetics" (2023, March 22nd): It was about the digital glitch as a "discrete transformer". Rosa Menkman (Amsterdam) explains the DCT, which hides secret messages in the “dirty noise” of the glitch artifact: which could be only be decrypted by "insiders". Rosa Menkman is presenting two artifacts from the series How Not To Be Read, 2015 and An Ecology of Compression Complexities, 2023 in the Digitalvilla.
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Glitch Moment/um (2011): Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist & researcher (based in Amsterdam). In her work she focuses on noise artifacts that result from analogue & digital media accidents. These artifacts offer precious insights into the obscure alchemy of standardisation and resolution setting. In 2011 she published the Glitch Art Manifesto.
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In 2011 Menkman co-facilitated the GLI.TC/H festivals in both Chicago and Amsterdam and curated the Incompatible Aesthetics symposium of Transmediale (2012). Menkman has also been part of the curatorial team of Sonic Acts (2016-2017).

Between 2012-2014, Menkman curated exhibitions that illuminated the different ecologies of glitch (art). In 2015 she initiated the institutions for Resolution Disputes [i.R.D.], a solo show at Transfer Gallery New York. The i.R.D. are institutions dedicated to researching the interests of anti-utopic, lost and unseen or simply "too good to be implemented" resolutions. As an undertone, the show featured a showcase of the different complexities in compression (dots, lines, wavelets, blocks and vectors). In follow up exhibitions, Behind White Shadows (2017) and Shadow Knowledge (2020) and Im/Possible Images (2021) Menkman developed and highlighted the politics of resolution setting further. In 2019 Rosa Menkman won the Collide, Arts at CERN Barcelona award, which inspired her research into Im/possible Images – where she aims find new ways to understand, use and perceive through and with „our“ technologies. From 2018 - 2020 Menkman was substitute Professor Neue Medien & Visuelle Kommunikation at the Kunsthochschule Kassel.

Since 2020 Rosa Menkman deals with the Politics of Resolution:
She developed and highlighted the politics of resolution setting in the book with the title Beyond Resolution. Here she describes how the standardization of resolutions is a process that generally promotes efficiency, order and functionality in our technologies. But how as a side effect, the setting of resolutions also compromises and obfuscates alternative possibilities.

"Rosa Menkman: Lets write a hidden message in the dirty noise of a glitch!", was the title of the artist talk & first exhibition module of the "Platform Glitch Aesthetics" (2023, March 22): It was about the digital glitch as a "discrete transformer". Rosa Menkman (Amsterdam) explains the DCT, which hides secret messages in the “dirty noise” of the glitch artifact: which could be only be decrypted by "insiders". Rosa Menkman is presenting two artifacts from the series How Not To Be Read, 2015 and An Ecology of Compression Complexities, 2023 in the Digitalvilla.

GLITCH ART MANIFESTO

1) The dominant, continuing search for a noiseless channel has been — and will always be — no more than a regrettable, ill-fated dogma. Acknowledge that although the constant search for complete transparency brings newer, ‘better’ media, every one of these improved techniques will always possess their own inherent fingerprints of imperfection.

2) Dispute the operating templates of creative practice; fight genres, interfaces and expectations! Refuse to stay locked into one medium or between contradictions like real vs. virtual, obsolete vs. up-to-date, open vs. proprietary or digital vs. analogue. Surf the vortex of technology, the in-between, the art of artifacts!

3) Get away from the established action scripts and join the avant-garde of the unknown. Become a nomad of noise artifacts! The static, linear notion of information-transmission can be interrupted on three occasions: during encoding-decoding (compression); feedback; or when a glitch (an unexpected break within the flow of technology) occurs. Noise artists must exploit these noise artifacts and explore the new opportunities they provide.

4) Employ bends and breaks as a metaphor for différance. Use the glitch as an exoskeleton for progress. Find catharsis in disintegration, ruptures and cracks; manipulate, bend and break any medium towards the point where it becomes something new; create glitch art.

5) Realize that the gospel of glitch art also reveals new standards implemented by corruption. 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.

6) Force the audience to voyage the acousmatic videoscape. Create conceptually synaesthetic artworks, that exploit both visual and aural glitch (or other noise) artifacts at the same time. Employ these noise artifacts as a nebula that shrouds the technology and its inner workings and that will compel an audience to listen and watch more exhaustively.

7) Rejoice in the critical trans-media aesthetics of glitch artifacts. Utilize glitches to bring any medium in a critical state of hypertrophy, to (subsequently) criticize its inherent politics.

8) Employ Glitchspeak (as opposed to Newspeak) and study what is outside of knowledge. Glitch theory is what you can just get away with! Flow cannot be understood without interruption or function without glitching. This is why glitch studies is necessary.