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I am a voyager of videoscapes: I create conceptually synesthetic artworks, that use both visual and aural glitch (or other noise) artifacts at the same time. These artifacts shroud the black box, as a nebula of technology and its inner workings.

The glitches I trigger turn the technology back into the obfuscated box that it already was. They shroud its inner workings and the source of the output as a sublime black veil. I perceive glitches without knowing where they originate from. This gives me an opportunity to concentrate better on its form - to interpret its structures and to learn more from what I can actually see. They create an acousmatic videoscape in which I can finally perceive an output outside of my goggles of speed, transparency and usability. The new structures that unfold themselves can be a portal to an utopia, a paradise like dimension, but also a black hole that threatens to destroy the technology as I knew it.
B288Y4S4TAV5






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∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵∵ ∵ ∵ ∵∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵

∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵

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∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵

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∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵ ∵

∵ ∵










█████████ ░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░


to watch my acousmatic Videoscapes click here ∆ 
How many efforts are required in order to watch 

Whenever I use a ‘normal’, transparent technology, I aim to see 'through' the actual machine. I have learned to unsee its interface and all structural components, to be able to understand its message and use the technology as fast as possible. In a way I have learned to become blind to (certain parts of) technology. 

Similar lines of development have taken place in my perception of sound. As Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer wrote: "We have no ear lids. We are condemned to listen. But this does not mean our ears are always open." Over the years I have learned to close my ear lids and even might have lost (or never developed) some of the sensitivities needed for 'deep listening' (or ‘deep watching’).

The quest to make the public re-hear certain sounds, to educate the listener and to 'open up ear lids', has been a subject pursued by many different sound artists. Acousmatics for instance, a strand of sound art developed by the French composer and pioneer of musique concrète Pierre Schaeffer, lets the audience listen to the sounds originating from behind a "black veil". The source or instrument of the sound remains unseen and unknown while the non-representational or formalist sound forces the audience to focus on active listening. 
Another example can be found in Murray Schafers work on soundscapes. In his book The Tuning of the World (1977), Schafer created a subdivision between the different sounds in the world. He uses this not only as a compositional structure, but also to educate his students about the many sounds they have grown accustomed to and as a result no longer hear. 

Both Schaeffer and Schafers work involve the studying and education of the perception of sound. And their work has made me wonder, has similar research and work been made in the visual arts? Does some form of acousmatic video or even acousmatic videoscapes exist? What would this look like and could glitches play a role in this form of art?


Glitch art (which is a derivative of technological glitch) is an art form that uses glitches not just on a technological level, but also conceptually and esthetically. 
While watching glitch art, the audience perceives glitches without (often) knowing how they came about, which gives them an opportunity to concentrate on their form - to interpret its structures and to learn more from what can actually be seen. In a sense many glitches follow the principle of acousmatics visually. 

A videoscape should be a place where artists can create a new, visual ecology that can give playful feedback on the technological conventions that control the spectator in their everyday life. In these conceptually fueled videoscapes we can open our eyes for the unreasonable and give form to what we so often have tried to obfuscate in both audio and visual media, namely artifacts.

The main subject of most glitch art is 'critical perception'. Critical in this sense is twofold; either criticizing the way technology is conventionally perceived, or showing the medium in a critical state. Glitches release a critical potential that forces the viewer to actively reflect on the technology. 
The acousmatic videoscape thus uses critical trans-media aesthetics to theorize the human thinking about technology; it creates an opportunity for self reflexivity, self critique and self expression.

The acousmatic videoscape is a space in which I can perceive output outside of my goggles of speed, transparency and usability. The new structures that unfold themselves can be interpreted as a portal to an utopia, a paradise like dimension, but also as a black hole that threatens to destroy the technology as I knew it. Here is a purgatory; an intermediate state between the death of the old technology and a judgement for a possible continuation into a new form of seeing and using, a new perspective…
















██ Demolish the eerie ▼oid (1:02')
(video: Rosa Menkman, Music: Extraboy, 2010)
Extraboy used a rain vst, PIPPO vst and C64 noise to compose a complimentary soundscape.

████ Infinitely pliable, yet holding shape
In "Demolish the eerie ▼oid" I exploit macroblocking, by opening a DV file in texteditor and playing around with the code.
What became clear to me is that multiple things can happen – and I am not sure (yet) what pieces of code trigger what results. In one of the first tries I encountered some quite mystifying, but nice new organizations of color (chrominance) structures. The matrix of macroblocks is still completely intact but the chrominance values are very off.

More background theory to this project here



Performative fail (4:26')

(video: Rosa Menkman, 2008)
This video is made with the help of a collection of failing hard drive sounds, while the
video is a collage of failed pdf screengrap videos.
This was the first time I made a (kind of) music-video / sound-video all on my own.


Performative fail was screened / featured / on exhibition
04-'10 – Screening. Critical Glitch Artware / Notacon / Blockparty, Cleveland, Ohio US.
09-10
-'09 – exhibited at The Persuit of Failure: the rejects (online)
00-03
-'09screening at the Glitch Night @ UCF Cinematheque. Florida, US.
20-11
-'09 – featured at Rhizome by Ceci Moss.
06-03-'10
– featured at Vagueterrain by Greg J. Smith



Radio Dada (3:47')

(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy, 2008)
The video-images are constructed out of nothing but the image created by feedback (I turned a high-end camera on a screen that was showing, in real time, what I was filming, creating a feedback loop). Then I glitched the video by changing its format and subsequently exporting it into animated gifs. I (minimalistically) edited the video in Quicktime. Then I sent the file to Extraboy, who composed music for the video. The composing process started with a hand held world radio. Extraboy scanned through frequencies and experimented with holding the radio in different parts of the room while touching different objects. Eventually he got the radio to oscillate noise in the tempo that he perceived in the video. The added synthesizer sounds were played live to further build on the non-digital sound and rhythm. This was later contrasted with drums which were digitally synthesized and processed through effects with a very digital sound to them. Just like with the video, the digital and analogue media and aesthetics of sound are mixed into one coherent whole.


Radio Dada has been screened / exhibited / featured
05-'10 – Screening and broadcasting of Radio Dada at Versi9n Chicago, Us
04-'10 – Screening. Critical Glitch Artware / Notacon / Blockparty, Cleveland, Ohio US.
04-'10 – exhibited at Videospace, Budapest, Hu.
06-'09 – screening at TERRITORIOS DIGITALES 2009, Sevilla, Sp. Photo
05-'09 – featured at Art of Artifacts, Intermerz (online)
05-'09 – featured at The Pixel Project
05-'09 – screening at Lev Festival, Gijon, Sp.
11-'08 – exhibited at Haip. photo



Eastern Fire Swim (4:30')
(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Goto80, 2008)
Constructive instability. Purposfully unfocused. Intended blur.

The tv is glitched, analogue-ous-ly, by colliding both the video and antenna input. The sound is made with the new tracker software Defmon that Goto80 uses. (un)fortunately this also glitched, digitally (the sounds got stuck). There is also a recording of this here



Egypt (2:50')
(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy)
Extraboy send me the music and when I listened it, I could only think of moving blobs that never evolved nor be seperated from eachother. Only when the more recognizable high pitched sounds and subdued thunder became part of the horizon, things seemed to go somewhere. But the horizon stayed a boundary in spacetime, an area smudged by black holes, through which events could never reach the outside observer.
Light emitted from inside the horizon seemed to never fully reach the observer, and anything that passed through the horizon from the observer's side disappeared.
I was never completely sure where the movements took me... Sideways? Upwards? Forwards? Or was it movement towards degrading?


The video is constructed from moving lines smudged by compression artifacts.



First Born / Still Born (5:04')

(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy 2008 / 2010)
First Born is made with the help of a pdf screengrap glitch.
Still born is the a never finished remake of First Born. RIP Oaktabarn.

A place for submissive degradation, idyllic tormenting and rhetoric voids. It passively terrorizes my being, I understand now that there is no nature without culture. No difference without repetition. No such thing as silence.Noise can only exist encapsulated within organized, meaningful structures. Viral ecologies in which the artifact can be an interface to the aura.



Sunshine in my Throat (0:27')
(video: Rosa Menkman, 2007)

While traveling through networks she discovered she existed. One day somebody committed burglary into her brain. Her shell was cracked and she became one of those people with hacked souls. She thought she had seen it all, but now she was a cyborg with a parallel memory.
She must be a decompression.


|||I|I|I|II|I||| Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum.
— Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” 1985.




Načechrané Obláčky and Flebb (3:47')
(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy, 2007)

Dromology. ‘Dromos’ from the Greek word to race (Virilio 1977:47). Meaning: the 'science (or logic) of speed'. He notes that the speed at which something happens may change its essential nature, and that that which moves with speed quickly comes to dominate that which is slower. 'Whoever controls the territory possesses it. Possession of territory is not primarily about laws and contracts, but first and foremost a matter of movement and circulation.'

Načechrané Obláčky and Flebb is a response to the Video Vortex conference in Brussels. In this conference Adrian Miles talked about YouTube and videodistribution on the web in general. Miles' main issue was the question where online video ends - at what point is it ‘complete’? What are the limits imposed by technology, or are these limits lingering clichés of narrative form (as opposed to Manovich’s ‘database’)? Can online video be imagined differently, outside the frames of cinema and TV?
Miles wants to rethink video. According to him, online video distributing sites will only have a future if they make their content granular; tagging scenes and shots, linking between them and in so doing making it easy to remix content at the level of the smallest possible unit. He wants to open up a space that he calls soft video.
Since blip (the video distribution site I use) or any other video distributing website doesn’t incorporate the options that make soft video possible (yet), I wanted to try if there are other ways to get closer to at least some sense of granularity- an experiment with time
Načechrané Obláčky and Flebb is a music video consisting of two separate screens. One, (the upper) screen is linear and synced with the music. The second, lower screen is a random video that can be remixed or scratched by the viewer, using the timeline as a tagging system.

Načechrané Obláčky and Flebb doesn’t realise Miles soft video. But it might be a start to think about options to get there.

Rosa Moln
(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy)
New video machines can show us new perspectives and new videoscapes where norms can be questioned and alien territories can be explored.
Together in my freezer AKA Washmountain
(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy)
Video made through my microscope, from melting ice - the machine showed me a new macro perspective, a videoscape.

corrupt tango

<<>> Dear mr compression
I write a 1000 poems to you
Is this what they call progress?
Warmly yours,
the noxious angel of history

Full description is now available at the Rhizome Artbase  Here are some articles on The Collapse of PAL:
Life and Death of an Image by Domenico Quaranta in Fabio Paris Art Gallery - Solo show catalogue, 2010
Media Archaeology of Signals (Transmediale 2011) by Jussi Parikka in Cartographies of Media Archaeology, 2011
What is Media Archeology? by Jussi Parikka in University of California Press, 2012
Going beyond the Collapse of PAL in The Collapse of PAL by Rosa Menkman in Sunshine in my Throat, 2011. 
Motion Pictures by Dom Philips in Time Out Sao Paolo, 2011. 
INTERVIEW WITH ROSA MENKMAN, DUTCH VISUALIST by Andrew Rosinski in Dinca, 2010.
Render of part one of the Collapse of PAL (Eulogy, Obsequies and Requiem for the blue plains of phosphor). As performed at TV-TV on the 25th of May 2010, Copenhagen, DK, Copenhagen, DK. The video work is based on analogue signal, compressions, glitches and feedback artifacts in sound and video. For this part of the 30 minutes video, I used a NES, some image bending and a broken photo camera (CCD chip is loose) && for the sound I used a cracklebox, feedback, Eurosignal and a couple of DV-compressed videobends. In "The Collapse of PAL" (Eulogy, Obsequies and Requiem for the planes of blue phosphor), the Angel of History (as described by Walter Benjamin) reflects on the PAL signal and its termination. This death sentence, although executed in silence, was a brutally violent act that left PAL disregarded and obsolete. While it might be argued that the PAL signal is dead, it still exists as a trace left upon the new, ‘better’ digital technologies. PAL can, even though the technology is terminated, be found here as a historical form that newer technologies build upon, in- herit or have appropriated from. Besides this, the Angel also realizes that the new DVB signal that has been chosen over PAL is different, but at the same time also inherently flawed as PAL. In memory of PAL. shout outs to Secam and NTSC!


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Video and sound by me. Created by editing dv compression in an hex editor.

Digital ate the cassette tape
Daniel Wilsons asked me to help him with the practical part of his master thesis graduation.
Sound mix by Daniel Wilson (he sampled the sound of a test tape/card, the eurosignal \\which I used to wake up with many mornings when I was young// and generation loss). Video is by me. 


Gravitational radiation

my appearance is your canvas
your quirks are your brush
imperfections caused through decay

all your wildness does not need to be tamed
no need for acceptance
the positive feedback
there are no norms anymore

all your wildness does not need to be tamed
there is no acceptance
there is nothing present
only incineration we must face

How to understand your devastation
How to make paths through something I still not recognize
…I can only follow your tides of madness

I travel along, no more defined by time
No more now or before
I am on the spot, transforming within the real

what were once possibilities is now faded
gravitational radiation
gravitational radiation
a new orbit has started

Washmountain 2 / Together in my freezer (2:36')
(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy, 2009)
Result of the use of Quicktime 7 pro. I exported Washmountain to .avi (Cinepak 256 grays, least quality). The result was this mad color surprise.


Screening
15-04'10 – Screening of Together in my Freezer @ Critical Glitch Artware / Notacon / Blockparty, Cleveland, Ohio US.
09-11'09 – Screening of Together in my Freezer @ Eye&Ear Clinic, Chicago, US.





Experiments with compression artefacts.(video: Rosa Menkman, sound/music: Extraboy, Rosa Menkman and Skype, 2009)

Experiments with compression artefacts. (video: Rosa Menkman, sound/music: Extraboy, Rosa Menkman and Skype, 2009) Two version of To Smell and Taste Black Matter showing different stages of ‘destroying’ the source footage through compression. The original footage is taken from a lofi webcam screenrecording, in which Extraboy is performing an unfinished song. The footage is then exported multiple times, to different compressions (such as least quality/animated/256 colors mov to least quality/256 colors/uncompressed avi, etc), resulting in artifacts such as black / dropped pixels and bleeding pixels (‘datamoshing'), noise and weird forms of interlacing.


Accidents in celluloid and pixel (2:36')
(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Goto80, 2009)
All footage was originally part of a selection of celluloid films the Filmmuseum Amsterdam offered for the Celluloid Remix project. The three videos I choose to remix all have particular accidents as subject; A petrol burning in Vlissingen (1917) and two train disasters (1917 and 1926).
The changes in terms of materiality (the grain) of the video are created by different compression accidents (or compression artifacts). Through remixing the celluloid I drew an analogy between the materiality of the celluloid and the digital pixel (I did not use any filters except for lumakey in the middle of the video to make a transition and adjusting the contrast).
Even though, the original footage changed so much it is sometimes hard to recognize. This is because some digital compressions changed the grain of the video into squares while others added particular (random) colors to the video.
This is actually another analogy between celluloid (only in celluloid this happens over a longer time span). In this video I think it becomes clear that compression glitches are a new materiality in the digital realm.

Soundtrack: Goto80 offered me his raw sound material (10 min) created on the ARP 2500, during his residency at WORM, Rotterdam. I edited a little bit to make it shorter.


Screening
25-09-'09 - Celluloid Remix / Nederlands Film Festival, Filmtheater 't Hoogt 1, Utrecht, Netherlands.



Compress Process (3:28')
(video: Rosa Menkman, music: Extraboy, 2009)

The whole video is created with one and the same skype video recording; its basically a selfportrait of me jumping around.
This video was successively compressed in three different (glitchy) ways. The first compression made the colors of the video unstable. In windows, the colors changed to black and white while on the mac, the video still had color. It also became pixelated (0'27-0'35).
The second compression made the video bleed. You can see what I mean with bleeding from 0'37 to 1'17. These are basically the more messed up parts of the video.
The third compression made the video very grainy, (for instance, from 2'50-3'06). Instead of playing frame by frame, the video seems to make collages of itself by putting layers triggered by the sound on top of eachother. A very weird compression mode that I also exploited in To Smell and Taste Black Matter (only seems to work when you add .wav sound to the video and compress with animation codec set on least quality).
The only filter I used was a contrast filter and a filter for keying some whites out. I also edited the video to the music.
Extraboy made the music for the video. The beginning of the song is consists of a speech synthesis fighting for room with a song composed of text and exe-data. All performed on the Amiga. Gradually this sound gets highly compressed, and at the same time the (g)rainy sounds of a malfunctioning VST enters. That is followed by a new version of the song that was recorded in the original skype video.


Screening
15-04'10 – Screening of Together in my Freezer @ Critical Glitch Artware / Notacon / Blockparty, Cleveland, Ohio US.

Washmountain

Lately I have been very much into Quicktime.. I like to say its one of my favorite softwares. Its has so many glitchy compressions. One of the glitches that I really enjoy is a very easy one I used for a remake of the old Washmountain (music by Extraboy) and also for the accidents in celluloid and pixel.
Use Quicktime 7 pro (don't know about the new one!) and export any video to .avi (Cinepak 256 grays, least quality). The result is a mad acid techno 090909 color surprise! yeahaa!
Even better: fastforward in the HD gets you a green youtube remix!