She collects limits embedded in the render pipeline, hoping these axes will seed a catalogue of compromised, unsupported, unknown or forgotten image renders:
a scanline, a separator, a progress bar, a ruler, a mesh, a vector, a link, a loop, ...a generator, a discriminator?
From her collection of lines, the Angel assembles a BLOb or Binary Large Object: an uncommitted form that dissolves hierarchy into ambiguous dimension.
The BLOb is best thought of as a fluid stack of shifting moiré; a living archive of all im/possible image pipelines.
In front of the BLOb, the Angel considers how resolutions consolidate technologies, while dictating constraints on how she cannot - or chooses not to - use them. They shape what she can render while foreclosing alternatives.
Her next mission is clear: map every limit in the image-processing pipeline and compile an Atlas of Destitute Vision, documenting how each resolution defines what remains unrendered and unseen.
She collects limits embedded in the render pipeline, hoping these axes will seed a catalogue of compromised, unsupported, unknown or forgotten image renders:
a scanline, a separator, a progress bar, a ruler, a mesh, a vector, a link, a loop, ...a generator, a discriminator?
From her collection of lines, the Angel assembles a BLOb or Binary Large Object: an uncommitted form that dissolves hierarchy into ambiguous dimension.
The BLOb is best thought of as a fluid stack of shifting moiré; a living archive of all im/possible image pipelines.
In front of the BLOb, the Angel considers how resolutions consolidate technologies, while dictating constraints on how she cannot - or chooses not to - use them. They shape what she can render while foreclosing alternatives.
Her next mission is clear: map every limit in the image-processing pipeline and compile an Atlas of Destitute Vision, documenting how each resolution defines what remains unrendered and unseen.
a scanline, a separator, a progress bar, a ruler, a mesh, a vector, a link, a loop, ...a generator, a discriminator?
From her collection of lines, the Angel assembles a BLOb or Binary Large Object: an uncommitted form that dissolves hierarchy into ambiguous dimension.
The BLOb is best thought of as a fluid stack of shifting moiré; a living archive of all im/possible image pipelines.
In front of the BLOb, the Angel considers how resolutions consolidate technologies, while dictating constraints on how she cannot - or chooses not to - use them. They shape what she can render while foreclosing alternatives.
Her next mission is clear: map every limit in the image-processing pipeline and compile an Atlas of Destitute Vision, documenting how each resolution defines what remains unrendered and unseen.
is a research project in the framework of my Arts at CERN COLLIDE Barcelona award.
curated by Monica Bello
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If a myth is an algorithm that functions as a tool distinct to a time and place,then recursively, an algorithm can become a myth, written and transformed by iterative updates and within procedural contexts.
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THE PARADOXES OF RESOLUTION ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎
0000 HOROLOGY:
PROGRESS AS PENROSE-STAIRS TO NOWHERE
Every upgrade promises improvement, but also manufactures obsolescence and delays a final resolution. The gospel of progress is an endless loop.
0001 MATERIALITY:
MESSAGE AS NOISE-DEPENDENT (SHANNON)
Transmission is never noise-free; optimisation only displaces disturbance. Noise both disrupts and enables; it is what the system fights, and what it cannot do without. Each filter that excludes “noise,” also sets a threshold of resolution.
Transmission is never noise-free; optimisation only displaces disturbance. Noise both disrupts and enables; it is what the system fights, and what it cannot do without. Each filter that excludes “noise,” also sets a threshold of resolution.
COMPRESSION AS ADDITIVE TRACE (deletion as design)
Compression doesn’t just reduce; it recomposes. Artefacts (pixels, lines, blocks) are inscriptions of the event: detectable, classifiable, and historically specific.
* Vernacular of File Formats
* Ecology of Compression Complexities (BY A BLOb)
Compression doesn’t just reduce; it recomposes. Artefacts (pixels, lines, blocks) are inscriptions of the event: detectable, classifiable, and historically specific.
* Vernacular of File Formats
* Ecology of Compression Complexities (BY A BLOb)
OPTIMIZATION AS CONSTRAINT (upgrade-as-limit)
Legibility grows by narrowing variability. Each optimization pursues efficiency through exclusion: it installs filters and tightens tolerances. To optimise is to exclude.
0010 GENEALOGY:
STANDARDIZATION AS OBFUSCATION
(clarity by omission of alternatives)
OBFUSCATION AS TRANSPARENCY
The interface feels transparent, immediate, seamless because layers of mediation are hidden and made obfuscated.
Seamlessness is camouflage.
RESOLUTION AS INHERITED COMPROMISE
While interfaces evolve, these exclusions persist: sedimented into infrastructure, obfuscated by default settings. Resolution consolidates legacy exclusions into infrastructure (bias becomes inherited through the material legacy of infrastructure).
RESOLUTION AS SEMIOSIS (artefact as carrier of meaning)
Once embedded, legacy resolutions (visible as artefacts) collect meaning beyond their function: they become cues of authenticity, nostalgia, or proof. Defaults harden into signs; residues turn into reference or index.
0011 SCOPE:
SELECTIVE CAPTURE AS GROUND TRUTH
Standards, priors, and curation set thresholds of relevance: what counts as signal, what is dismissed as noise. This selective perception fabricates an epistemic “truth” mistaken for objectivity; it doesn’t just limit resolution, it defines what can be resolved—what is measurable, thinkable, and rendered real.
PROTOCOL AS REFUSAL (no protocol, no image)
Protocols don’t create or discover; they instantiate. Parsable inputs are rendered; inadmissible ones are deleted, clipped, or voided. Interoperability is conditional on conformity.
Incompatibility is by design.
0100 SCALE: PERCEPTION AS FAILURE
Standardised imaging systems don’t scale neutrally; they impose thresholds of legibility that decide what remains visible and what disappears. Scaling is a politics of admissibility and access.
Spectral: Narrow bands flatten distinctions; excessive bands swamp discrimination (whiteout).
Spatial/temporal scale: At micro-scale, detail fragments into “noise”; at macro-scale, meaning dissolves into abstraction. More data doesn’t mean more understanding.
* FF D8 De/Calibration Target Spectral: Narrow bands flatten distinctions; excessive bands swamp discrimination (whiteout).
Spatial/temporal scale: At micro-scale, detail fragments into “noise”; at macro-scale, meaning dissolves into abstraction. More data doesn’t mean more understanding.
0101 CRISIS:
INTEROPERABILITY THROUGH EXCLUSION
Interoperability is not typically achieved through openness, but through enforced uniformity; a logic of inclusion that operates via elimination, deprecation and obsolescence.
It is not failure, but design that renders systems incompatible and data unreadable.
RESOLUTION AS PROCESS (the image is non-static)
A resolution is data-in-process; a state resulting from a stack of limits, filters, bends, and breaks imposed by governing protocols, forever deferring perfection. Resolution never results into a final image. Instead, it is a momentary myth crystallized by procedural progress, an algorithm deployed in a specific time and place.
RESOLUTION DISPUTES
While the institutions of Resolution Disputes (i.R.D., 2015) formalized a foundational set of logics structuring inherited systems of image rendering, the entries in the Atlas of Destitute Vision trace newly encountered Resolution Disputes: paradoxes that arise from the Angel’s mapping of failure, oversaturation, illegibility, and compromise.
Paradigm shifts in the phases of the image,
or the additive crisis of the image
0. OBSOLESCENCE OF ANALOG IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNOLOGIES
1. TRANSITION FROM ANALOG TO DIGITAL IMAGE PROCESSING
2. PLATFORMED/NETWORKED IMAGE
3. CRISIS OF THE SYNTHETIC/HYPER IMAGE
* BLOb of im/possible Images
Resolution studies, classes and seminars
Resolution Studies is grounded in practical teaching and artistic research. It currently involves seven thematic “disputes,” each addressing a fundamental tension within the study of rendering, image culture, and media infrastructure:
Each dispute opens a terrain of theoretical and material exploration, inviting research, pedagogy, and speculative practice.
>>> For a deeper theoretical framing, see the long-form essay:
Refuse to let the syntaxes of (a) history direct our futures. [PDF]