Public keynote at RMeS Winter School & Graduate Symposium: Rosa Menkman
Over a decade of glitch moment/ums
Friday 27 January | 15.00-16.30
Tilburg University Dante Gebouw – DZ 008
Registration: Spaces are limited, please register here
Published by the Institute of Network Cultures, December, 2011, the Glitch Moment/um was a small booklet in which Menkman described the moment of encountering a glitch as twofold:
First there is the moment the glitch happens, which is often experienced as an uncanny break of an expected technological flow or threatening loss of control. In this moment, the user or spectator doesn’t know what to expect next. This loss of control soon becomes a catalyst with a certain power as the glitch passes a tipping point. After its tipping point, the glitch is either understood as a failure, or as a development that forces new knowledge onto the user about their presumptions of the technology, or the technologies actual functioning. In case of the latter, the glitch can force the user to reconsider their habitual use of the technology.
After this experience of rupture, the glitch thus moves beyond its sublime momentum and vanishes into a realm of new conditions; it becomes a new mode – either technologically or aesthetically -, while its previous uncanny encounter is now an ephemeral, personal experience of a machine.
During this talk, Menkman will reflect on what has changed within the ecologies of glitch and what has stayed the same.
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.
