Rosa Menkman: Pique Nique Pour les Inconnues

A fundamental part of the history of image-processing, webdesign, and the standardization of settings within both analogue and digital media are test cards, placeholder images, bots and virtual assistants. Engineers used these female objects to evaluate the quality of image processing, the rendering and composition of architecture and to make these latent spaces more amicable. While these women seem to be able to prolong their existence for as long as the (digital) realms will copy and reuse them, most of them have lost their name and identity.

In Pique Nique pour les Inconnues, Menkman considers the ways in which the history of technology has been defined by standardization, in particular through the use of these color test cards for image processing. The work presents les Inconnues - unknown women whose images are linked to the history of image processing. In this work, test cards, bots, virtual assistants, stock photos and others find a voice, but fail to recover their personhood. In this work, the viewer is haunted by the familiarity of these digital ghosts, while at the same time, privy to an uncanny experience when the historically mute images speak for the first time. (RM)

 

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher. Her work focuses on noise artifacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media. These artifacts can offer precious insights into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardisation and resolution setting. As a compendium to this research, she published the Glitch Moment/um (inc, 2011), a little book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts.

Menkman developed and highlighted the politics of resolution setting further in a second book titled Beyond Resolution (i.R.D., 2020). In this book, 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. In 2019 Menkman won the Collide, Arts at CERN Barcelona award, which inspired her recent research into im/possible images. In this new research she aims to find new ways to understand, use and perceive through and with our technologies.

Check out this PDF or this webpage.

 

Image: Videostill, Rosa Menkman Pique Nique Pour les Inconnues (Rupert and the Frogs Chorus / Paul Mccartney / we all stand together version), 2020.