[ 0101 ]
0101: CRISIS
...Progress, once symbolized by the Hologram PenRose-Stairs to Nowhere, is now resolved in ruins, rendering a monumental cairn of nonsensical vectors. Which suggests that either the Angel’s dataset is flawed or her tools cannot resolve the information. At a loss, the Angel reflects on the Spomenik glitch, symbolizing the collapse of past and progress. She approaches it cautiously, tracing the dynamic edges of its vectors, composed of thick layers of poor-resolution sediments.
One of its shredded sides reveals a viewport, offering a glimpse onto its repository of render objects.
Like a media archaeologist from the future, she attempts to carefully reconstruct the Shredded Hologram PenRose to Nowhere. But its synthetic data follows machine-defined standards, producing nothing but a blue haze of noise. Realizing that the cairn is a collection of procedural images for which she is neither the intended user nor a possible interlocutor, she loses all confidence in resolving the data herself.
A momentary panic sets in.
...If her tools cannot render this data, perhaps another framework might de/calibrate the glitch.
In a last ditch effort, she scans frequencies she usually keeps on mute. Then, deep within a C-band frequency, she detects a faint echo: a CyCLOPS.cy corner reflector, part of a decentralized system that recalibrates data misaligned across time and space.
And just like that, she resolves its phase difference, and the image renders clearly.
..
REFRACTIONS (2022 - 2024)
While a myth is an algorithm that functions as a tool respective to a time and place, recursively, an algorithm too can become a myth, connected to, and lost with, its iterative updates and procedural contexts.
Refractions is a research project initiated during my residency at NeMe in Cyprus in 2022. It has since expanded iteratively.
A century after Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History’s 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.
When the Angel learns about Wodan, the Cyclops god who sacrificed an eye for the sense of future vision, her interest is piqued. Fascinated by the lore of future failure,a perspective diametrically opposed to her fixation on past collapse, the Angel enters “Wodan’s Grove,” hoping to learn more.
But as soon as she steps inside, she is caught in a recursive double blind between future collapse and past obsolescence. Everything around her turns to ruins.
With no sense of direction—up or down, forward or backward—the Angel is suspended, unaware that she has tumbled into the abyss of her own Myopia.
Realizing that her environment is synthesized by procedural algorithms for which she is neither the intended user nor a possible interlocutor, she loses all confidence in resolving the data herself.
Momentary panic sets in.
If her tools cannot render this data, perhaps another framework might recalibrate the glitch. In a effort, she scans frequencies she usually keeps muted. Deep within a C-band frequency, she detects a faint echo: a CyCLOPS.cy corner reflector, part of a decentralized AI system that recalibrates data misaligned across time and space.
Finally, she resolves her phase difference and her perspective becomes clear.
Iterations
The project’s development involved collaborations and iterations across multiple locations and formats:
2022: Refractions in Light and Time, 3D environment installation with custom wallpaper, shown at NeMe, RIXC, WRO (Cyprus, Latvia, Poland).
2023: Refractions in Light and Time lecture performance at RMIT, Melbourne.
2023: Cyclops Retina, in collaboration with Kimchi and Chips, London.
2024: Refractions video installation with soundtrack by Debit and custom sigils, exhibited in Schafhof, Munich, Germany, and iMAL, Brussels, Belgium.
The residency at NeMe made this exploration possible, allowing Menkman to work with Taietzel Ticalos, Marios Isaakidis, and Irini Mirena Papadimitriou. Soundtrack by Debit. In dialogue with NeMe
Refractions is a research project initiated during my residency at NeMe in Cyprus in 2022. It has since expanded iteratively.
A century after Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History’s 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.
When the Angel learns about Wodan, the Cyclops god who sacrificed an eye for the sense of future vision, her interest is piqued. Fascinated by the lore of future failure,a perspective diametrically opposed to her fixation on past collapse, the Angel enters “Wodan’s Grove,” hoping to learn more.
But as soon as she steps inside, she is caught in a recursive double blind between future collapse and past obsolescence. Everything around her turns to ruins.
With no sense of direction—up or down, forward or backward—the Angel is suspended, unaware that she has tumbled into the abyss of her own Myopia.
Realizing that her environment is synthesized by procedural algorithms for which she is neither the intended user nor a possible interlocutor, she loses all confidence in resolving the data herself.
Momentary panic sets in.
If her tools cannot render this data, perhaps another framework might recalibrate the glitch. In a effort, she scans frequencies she usually keeps muted. Deep within a C-band frequency, she detects a faint echo: a CyCLOPS.cy corner reflector, part of a decentralized AI system that recalibrates data misaligned across time and space.
Finally, she resolves her phase difference and her perspective becomes clear.
Iterations
The project’s development involved collaborations and iterations across multiple locations and formats:
2022: Refractions in Light and Time, 3D environment installation with custom wallpaper, shown at NeMe, RIXC, WRO (Cyprus, Latvia, Poland).
2023: Refractions in Light and Time lecture performance at RMIT, Melbourne.
2023: Cyclops Retina, in collaboration with Kimchi and Chips, London.
2024: Refractions video installation with soundtrack by Debit and custom sigils, exhibited in Schafhof, Munich, Germany, and iMAL, Brussels, Belgium.
The residency at NeMe made this exploration possible, allowing Menkman to work with Taietzel Ticalos, Marios Isaakidis, and Irini Mirena Papadimitriou. Soundtrack by Debit. In dialogue with NeMe
The Angel of History and her Mission to Learn from Cyclops Vision
Cyclops Retina
In collaboration with Kimchi and Chips.
Commissioned Install for Thin Air @The Beams, on till the 4th of June, London, UK.
In Cyclops Retina, Kimchi and Chips and Rosa Menkman combine their contrasting research into light as both a material and neurological phenomena to create an experimental video essay presented in an experimental format. The specially commissioned narrative written and narrated by Menkman takes us on her journey into the cave of a cyclops so that she might learn how to see into the future. This journey is illustrated by millions of beams of light which are merged in the haze to create floating graphics in the air. The installation and narrative delve into unconventional modes of vision, pushing boundaries and exploring new ways of experiencing light and perception.
Commissioned Install for Thin Air @The Beams, on till the 4th of June, London, UK.
In Cyclops Retina, Kimchi and Chips and Rosa Menkman combine their contrasting research into light as both a material and neurological phenomena to create an experimental video essay presented in an experimental format. The specially commissioned narrative written and narrated by Menkman takes us on her journey into the cave of a cyclops so that she might learn how to see into the future. This journey is illustrated by millions of beams of light which are merged in the haze to create floating graphics in the air. The installation and narrative delve into unconventional modes of vision, pushing boundaries and exploring new ways of experiencing light and perception.
Locations of different lineages and families of cyclopses I traced all over Europe
plaque of the CyCLOPS.cy Strategic Research Infrastructure Unit, an optical infrastructure network in Cyprus supporting the Sentinel satellite 
Documentation of my visit of CyCLOPS.cy in Limassol at the polytechnical University
Locations of the 12 CyCLOPS.cy corner reflector Network
ALEV01 + ALEV02
AKMS01 + AKMS02
SOUN01 + SOUN02
ASGA01 + ASGA02
MATS01 + MATS02
TROU01+ TROU02 - INACCESSIBLE BECAUSE MILITARY ZONE -
GOOGLE SATELLITE SCREENSHOTS
GOOGLE SATELLITE SCREENSHOTS
CyCLOPS.cy Corner Reflector network
optical infrastructure supporting the Sentinel satellite (2024)
12 CyCLOPS.cy Corner Reflectors (2024)
prints Installed at Schafhof, Freising (by Munich, 2024)
optical infrastructure supporting the Sentinel satellite (2024)
12 CyCLOPS.cy Corner Reflectors (2024)
prints Installed at Schafhof, Freising (by Munich, 2024)
Documentation of our first Cyclops research in Serifos, at the Cyclops throne and inside the cyclops cave.
Wodans grove near the village i was born.
CCBYNCSA Laura FiorioPerformance of the Shredded Hologram Rose during the Transmediale 2023.
The Shredded Hologram Rose
︎ Published in Angelaki: Shredded Hologram Rose PDF and ePuB
The Shredded Hologram Rose is inspired by "Fragments of a Hologram Rose," a 1977 science fiction short story by William Gibson.
In this short story, a Media Archeologist from the Future - a “100 cycles” in the future - comes home to her Hyper Yves Klein Blue-saturated cube. There, she reflects on her day, which started in misery: she fractured her dear Hologram Rose.
She contemplates the information she gathered during her visit of the DeCalibration Target, where she sourced the i.R.D. information on DCTs, an algorithm that lies at the basis of the now decommissioned JPEG compression, an encoding protocol she will have to understand in order to fix (de-glitch) her beloved Rose.
An earlier short video work was created for the group exhibition Fragments of a Hologram Rose curated by Rick Silva for Feral File. (29 June 2021). The work was extended for IMPAKT Festival: The Curse of Smooth operations and NAC Memory Card festival.
The Shredded Hologram Rose references the DeCalibration target and im/possible images.
Inspired and informed by Alan Warburtons RGBFAQ
T
︎ Published in Angelaki: Shredded Hologram Rose PDF and ePuB
The Shredded Hologram Rose is inspired by "Fragments of a Hologram Rose," a 1977 science fiction short story by William Gibson.
In this short story, a Media Archeologist from the Future - a “100 cycles” in the future - comes home to her Hyper Yves Klein Blue-saturated cube. There, she reflects on her day, which started in misery: she fractured her dear Hologram Rose.
“From the shredded side of a Hologram, one can peek into the 3D objects’ Delta Axis. From this perspective, one can see the Holograms render objects, which form a repository of layered information about the Holograms provenance, metadata, and other information that the unscathed Hologram would never prevail.”
She contemplates the information she gathered during her visit of the DeCalibration Target, where she sourced the i.R.D. information on DCTs, an algorithm that lies at the basis of the now decommissioned JPEG compression, an encoding protocol she will have to understand in order to fix (de-glitch) her beloved Rose.
An earlier short video work was created for the group exhibition Fragments of a Hologram Rose curated by Rick Silva for Feral File. (29 June 2021). The work was extended for IMPAKT Festival: The Curse of Smooth operations and NAC Memory Card festival.
The Shredded Hologram Rose references the DeCalibration target and im/possible images.
Inspired and informed by Alan Warburtons RGBFAQ
T
☗
non
quadrilateral
[monument]
non
quadrilateral
[monument]
Spomenik (2017)
Centrepiece of my Behind White Shadows solo show
(Transfer Gallery NYC, 2017)
The Spomenik is a 3x4 meters large format sculpture, made out of triplex wood, painted white featuring projection mapped videos. The scultpure also hides a little cave in the back where visitors can play VR in peace.
A monument for resolutions that will never be.
The Spomenik is inspired by the Spomeniks from the Balkan; brutalist monumental architecture, historically commemorating “many different things to many people”. The shape is inspired by Spomeniks such as Tjentiste and Ostra, but does not directly copy their shape but uses these structures as a reference.
This Spomenik is dedicated to resolutions that are impossible, such as ‘screen objects’ (shards) and the not (yet) implemented possibilities non quadrilateral screens have to offer.
This installed shard is three meter high, hiding a VR installation behind, running DCT:SYPHONING. The VR is accessible from the back of the Spomenik. The projection on the Spomenik is partially a mapped live stream from the VR.
The Spomenik also features textures of the Ecology of compression complexities, of which the map was layed out in front.
Centrepiece of my Behind White Shadows solo show
(Transfer Gallery NYC, 2017)
The Spomenik is a 3x4 meters large format sculpture, made out of triplex wood, painted white featuring projection mapped videos. The scultpure also hides a little cave in the back where visitors can play VR in peace.
A monument for resolutions that will never be.
The Spomenik is inspired by the Spomeniks from the Balkan; brutalist monumental architecture, historically commemorating “many different things to many people”. The shape is inspired by Spomeniks such as Tjentiste and Ostra, but does not directly copy their shape but uses these structures as a reference.
This Spomenik is dedicated to resolutions that are impossible, such as ‘screen objects’ (shards) and the not (yet) implemented possibilities non quadrilateral screens have to offer.
This installed shard is three meter high, hiding a VR installation behind, running DCT:SYPHONING. The VR is accessible from the back of the Spomenik. The projection on the Spomenik is partially a mapped live stream from the VR.
The Spomenik also features textures of the Ecology of compression complexities, of which the map was layed out in front.
