0101 CRISIS — ▋▅▉▝▊ || beyond resolution

Crisis of the Digital Image

0. OBSOLESCENCE OF ANALOGUE IMAGE PROCESSING

1. TRANSITION FROM ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL
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.

2. PLATFORMED IMAGE
With the emergence of internet platforms and apps, the networked image arrives.
The networked image is subjected to not just Terms of Service (ToS), that can lead to censorship and filtering, it is also transcoded when uploaded (and sometimes even when reposted).
A protocol that alters the image in minor and often opaque ways (in terms of meta data alteration, cropping, re-compressing and user edits and additions). However, through iterative interactions of up and download, the image gradually degrades into a 'poor image’, riddled with trace evidence of its moves through the network.
At stake are the image’s authenticity, authorship, control and finally its legibility.

3. CRISIS OF THE SYNTHETIC IMAGE
Transformations in the image render pipeline extend beyond artificial augmentations like “super-resolution” in devices such cellphones, which refers to the process of introducing additional patterns and details to the image that may not have a real-world origin.

The hyperimage may orginate from the real word, but is expanded by synthetic (computer generated) render layers that transform it into a dynamic, modular object. The hyperimage does away with the notion of a static image. Instead, the hyperimage is procedural construct, where some layers may even be rendered seperately; at clients end and remotely, fragmenting the image as a distributed, evolving, decentralized networked process consisting of assets that can be partially (re)rendered, on demand or progressively.
Moreover, synthetic images are increasingly rendered by machines for machines, particularly in the realm of computer vision.
Unlike traditional Visual Effects (VFX) and Computer-Generated Imagery (CGI), which enhance images for human perception, these synthetic images prioritize machine interpretation over human perception, blurring notions of fidelity, value, and legibility even further.
Computer vision and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) use synthesized datasets to train on. A process that redefines the traditional scope of capture (which used to be constrained by spectral, spatial, or temporal parameters) introducing synthetic datasets as a new parameter of scope.
This process of recursive synthesis ultimately leads to ‘limitless’ quantitative (but not qualitative) resolution:
synthetic resolution is optimized for efficiency and automation, but alienates the human viewer as it transforms visual information into constructs that no longer resemble a traditional image.

REFRACTIONS (2022 - 2024)

In DCT:SYPHONING, the Angel of History watches over 2 DCT Blocks, navigating the different ecologies of compression complexities.

When they enter higher complexities, the environment around them seems to collapse into a cairn of broken vectors, reminiscent of a Spomenik.

In Refractions
(in light and time),
the Spomenik, or cairn of broken vectors renders into a Pen/Rose Stairs to Nowhere when caibrated with the help of a CyCLOPS corner reflector network.

lightbox of a meeting between the Angel and cyclops

Refractions installed at iMAL for End and Beginning.

Refractions installed at Schafhof, Munich, 2024.

If 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 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 development of REFRACTIONS involved collaborations and iterations across multiple locations and formats:

REFRACTIONS VIDEO INSTALLATION WITH SOUNDTRACK BY DEBIT AND CUSTOM SIGILS OR WALLPAPER
18/01/2023 — 21/01/2023. Refractions in Light and Time, 3D environment installation with custom wallpaper, shown at NeMe.
20/09/2023 —11/11/2023. Refractions in Light and Time, 3D environment installation with custom wallpaper, shown at RIXC, Riga, Latvia.
10-14/5/23 —Refractions in Light and Time, 3D environment installation with custom wallpaper, shown WRO, Poland
08/08/2023 — Refractions in Light and Time lecture performance at RMIT, Melbourne. 27/09/2024—01/12/2024. Attention upon Arrival @ Schafhof, Munich, Germany.
07.11.2024 —16.02.2025. End and Beginning @ iMAL, Brussels, Belgium.
14-15/112024 — AI MADE ME DO IT, Exhibition @ studio3 Institute for Experimental Architecture, Innsbruck University, Austria.
17/112024— Artist talk about Refractions, Schafhof Munich, Germany.

WITH KIMCH AND CHIPS:
15/03/2023 —17/03/2023. Cyclops Retina, in collaboration with Kimchi and Chips, The Beams, London.
24/03/2023 —Artist talk. The Beams, London. Audience: 250

Documentation of our first Cyclops research in Serifos, at the Cyclops throne and inside the cyclops cave.

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

12 CyCLOPS.cy Corner Reflectors (2024) prints Installed at Schafhof, Freising (by Munich, 2024)
optical infrastructure network, that supports the Sentinel satellite data to be calibrated.

CRISIS: (plural, additive) of the image

Crisis of the Digital Image