Radio Dada. Music by Extraboy.
Nov 23, 2008.
Nov 23, 2008.
To Smell and Taste Black Matter (1). Music by Extraboy. Feb 15, 2009
Washmountain. Music by Extraboy.
Sep 6, 2009.
Sep 6, 2009.
Rosa Moln. Music by Extraboy.
Dec 11, 2009.
Dec 11, 2009.
65 76 65 72 79 74 68 69 6e 67 20 69 73 20 (...) Apr 17, 2010
Decay of digital data, the obsolescence of hard- and software and other unexpected breaks from the expected flow of the render pipeline result in errors, bugs, glitches or complete loss of the image.
Some glitches may momentarily reveal the underlying, often invisible structures, exposing protocol, limitations and vulnerabilities.
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Vernacular of File Formats (2010)
was acquired by the
Stedelijk Museum
in 2016
PDF available here
Some glitches may momentarily reveal the underlying, often invisible structures, exposing protocol, limitations and vulnerabilities.
////////////////////////////
Vernacular of File Formats (2010)
was acquired by the
Stedelijk Museum
in 2016
PDF available here
Unwillingly pulled along the looping Hologram PenRose-Stairs to Nowhere, a paradox engineers call “progress,“ the Angel is forced to migrate into the realms of digital technology.
Upset by the loss of analog connection, her initial actions are disruptive. In Acousmatic Videoscapes she rebelliously manipulates various layers of digital technology, triggering artifacts caused by feedback, compression and glitches.
However gradually, the breaks seem to reveal something more than pure distortion. To her surprise, these ruptures expose what normally remains hidden within the black box of technology. Intrigued, the Angel examines the newly revealed qualities.
A key insight comes from Unresolved, an 84.48-meters-long data file that follows a linear Bitmap organization, encoded pixel by pixel, illustrating that digital resolution is no longer solely vertically encoded (as was the case for the analog signal PAL): the long, unwrapped line of data demonstrates that digital resolutions are also horizontally quantized (and possibly via other, meta-axes). Moreover, it shows that a final render depends on how hardware reads, displays and distorts data.
Resolution is therefore not just a fixed standard, but shaped by the entire technological apparatus, the imaging pipeline, involving production, dissemination, display and reception. Digital images are never truly static, as they depend on constant reinterpretation at every step of the image processing pipeline.
Armed with this new understanding of resolution, the Angel feels confident to conduct more experiments aimed at revealing the language of digital compression. In A Vernacular of File Formats, she playfully highlights the materiality that defines the digital image by transcoding a self-portrait into nine common compression formats (GIF, BMP, JPEG, etc.). When glitching these visually identical images, she reveals the unique structure of each compression algorithm, exposing the hidden logic inherent to each file format. She documents and describes these protocols, emphasizing how compression (codecs) shape visual representation.
Upset by the loss of analog connection, her initial actions are disruptive. In Acousmatic Videoscapes she rebelliously manipulates various layers of digital technology, triggering artifacts caused by feedback, compression and glitches.
However gradually, the breaks seem to reveal something more than pure distortion. To her surprise, these ruptures expose what normally remains hidden within the black box of technology. Intrigued, the Angel examines the newly revealed qualities.
A key insight comes from Unresolved, an 84.48-meters-long data file that follows a linear Bitmap organization, encoded pixel by pixel, illustrating that digital resolution is no longer solely vertically encoded (as was the case for the analog signal PAL): the long, unwrapped line of data demonstrates that digital resolutions are also horizontally quantized (and possibly via other, meta-axes). Moreover, it shows that a final render depends on how hardware reads, displays and distorts data.
Resolution is therefore not just a fixed standard, but shaped by the entire technological apparatus, the imaging pipeline, involving production, dissemination, display and reception. Digital images are never truly static, as they depend on constant reinterpretation at every step of the image processing pipeline.
Armed with this new understanding of resolution, the Angel feels confident to conduct more experiments aimed at revealing the language of digital compression. In A Vernacular of File Formats, she playfully highlights the materiality that defines the digital image by transcoding a self-portrait into nine common compression formats (GIF, BMP, JPEG, etc.). When glitching these visually identical images, she reveals the unique structure of each compression algorithm, exposing the hidden logic inherent to each file format. She documents and describes these protocols, emphasizing how compression (codecs) shape visual representation.
Unresolved (84.48-meters-long data file painted on canvas, partially wrapped, 2016)
UnResolved is inspired by
Beflix 29 PARALLEL STRIPES
UnResolved is inspired by
Beflix 29 PARALLEL STRIPES
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DCT:SYPHONING. The 64th interval (2015)
was conceived during my
Oregon Story Board residency
2016 - 2017
and finished during my time at
Schloss Solitude
DCT:SYPHONING. The 64th interval (2015)
was conceived during my
Oregon Story Board residency
2016 - 2017
and finished during my time at
Schloss Solitude
Feeling more familiar with the inner workings of various codecs by analyzing the aesthetics of their glitches, the Angel starts to enjoy recognizing the traces of their digital bends and breaks, as if she’s on a glitch safari.
On one such trip, she observes a senior Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT, a key algorithm of the JPEG compression, that converts 8x8 pixel blocks into 64 frequency components), instructing a Junior DCT how to transcode data from one compression language to another, or as they call it: how to ‘SYPHON.’
In a scene reminiscent of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s Flatland (1884), Junior and Senior DCT syphon from one Realm of Compression Complexity to the next. At first, they transcode simple artifacts such as dither, lines and blocks. However, as they navigate into more complex realms—such as wavelets and vectors—they push against the limits of their compatibility and ultimately trigger their own kernel panic.
From a Penrose-Stairs to Nowhere, just one complexity beyond them, the Angel wishes to intervene, proposing a forked solution. She commits: This is information! Unlike data, information spans multiple dimensions. It moves upward, not just northward!
But the DCTs have already syphoned back to simpler complexities.
Refusing to let her insight go to waste, the Angel develops a fork (modification) of DCT, mapping each of its 64 distinct blocks to the most frequently used characters of the Roman alphabet. A method that allows her to steganographically write in DCT error.
To the Angel, this DCT is more than a poetic, steganographic tool; the fork provides radical access to the inner workings of a JPEG, enabling precise manipulations within the Huffman table. A process that illustrates how compression fundamentally alters the essence of image data, transforming image resolution into material evidence of transcoding. These traces, or compression artifacts, left on the file and embedded in its metadata, form a record of compromise within resolution, indexing the algorithmic events along a file’s journey.
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DCT is a software that lets you write in error.
The first iteration was build by Ted Davis,
a second by Erik Axel Eggelink.