︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎   
 
The journey of my protagonist, the Angel of History,
inspired by Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint, Angelus Novus, and conceptualized by Walter Benjamin in 1940,
functions as a foundational framework for my research into the role of resolution
in image processing technologies.

He writes:
Her eyes are staring, her mouth is open, her wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History.
Her face is turned toward the past, where she perceives a chain of events: catastrophes piling wreckage upon wreckage.
The Angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But as the pile of debris before her grows skyward, a storm is blowing from Paradise;
it has caught her wings with violence, propelling her into a future to which her back is turned.
This is the storm we call progress.*


A century after her first appearance, image processing technologies have evolved dramatically.
The Angel traverses a landscape littered with piles of obsolete technologies,
where trade-offs stifle progress and standard settings obscure clarity.

Caught in ripples of distortion and impaired by blind spots,
she finds it more and more impossible to render the world around her.
The Angel is now stuck,
desperately trying to navigate an endless spiral of digital 'advancements' in resolution
or: Hologram PenRose-Stairs of Progress.


*[transformed from:] Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History",
Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1969: 249.


*Destitute Vision: a research in Research into the ways compromise and loss define what remains visible
and what becomes or remains unseen. 
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  

When digital mediations replaced the typically continuous analog signal with discrete data, artifacts like clipping, truncation, and quantization were introduced, raising questions about authenticity and integrity.

This shift led to a crisis of fidelity, challenging the reliability of the signal.



////////////////////////////
Collapse of PAL
was produced for TV-TV
curated by
Kristoffer Gansing
and Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter
(2010)

This rendered version of the Collapse of PAL was produced during my residency at LabMIS São Paulo in 2011,
thanks to IMPAKT (NL).


 The Collapse of PAL (rendered version, 2010)
.
0000 — HOROLOGY: PROGRESS CAUSING OBSOLESCENCE

In a live television performance titled the Collapse of PAL, the Angel of History gloomily reflects on the transition from analog Phase Alternate Line signal (PAL, 625 lines, of which 576 visual) to Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB, 720 x 576 pixels).

She expresses a desire to make whole what has been broken, but remains a passive observer, rationalizing the end of the signal:
“PAL is just not good enough.”

Unbeknownst to her then, resolution will never be an endpoint, but rather an ongoing process of endless bends and breaks. While she mourns the violent ending of the signal, invisible traces of PAL persist, haunting the ‘better’ digital systems.