Panel Statement

Panel: (he)artbreaking to the core: zombie data and the arts of re/de/transcoding

The Col­lapse of PAL is a realtime na­tion­wide tele­vi­sion per­for­mance that I pre­sented at TVTV on the 25th of May 2010, in Copen­hagen, DK. In The Col­lapse of PAL, the Angel of His­tory (as de­scribed by Wal­ter Ben­jamin) re­flects on the PAL tele­vi­sion sig­nal and its ter­mi­na­tion. This death sen­tence, al­though ex­e­cuted in si­lence, was a bru­tally vi­o­lent act that left PAL dis­re­garded and ob­so­lete. How­ever, the Angel of His­tory has to con­clude that while the PAL sig­nal might be ar­gued to be dead, it still ex­ists as a trace left upon the new, ‘bet­ter’ dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies.

• Rosa Menkman is a Dutch vi­su­al­ist who fo­cuses on vi­sual ar­ti­facts cre­ated by ac­ci­dents in dig­i­tal media. The vi­su­als she makes are the re­sult of glitches, com­pres­sions, feed­back and other forms of noise. Al­though many peo­ple per­ceive these ac­ci­dents as neg­a­tive ex­pe­ri­ences, Rosa em­pha­sizes their pos­i­tive con­se­quences. By com­bin­ing both her prac­ti­cal as well as her aca­d­e­mic back­ground, she merges her ab­stract pieces within a grand the­ory ar­ti­facts (a glitch stud­ies). Be­sides the cre­ation of a for­mal “Ver­nac­u­lar of File For­mats”, within her sta­tic work, she also cre­ates (nar­ra­tive) work in her Acous­matic Videoscapes. In these Videoscapes she strives for new forms of con­cep­tual syn­the­sis (synes­the­sia) of sound and video ar­ti­facts.