Resolution Dispute 0001 : Habit “Habit isn’t the same as instinct; habit is a learned action that becomes automatic. Crucially, habit is always something you learn from others, or in response to the environment. […] I understand habit as the scar of others within the self.”
- Chun, Wendy. Characters in a Drama called Big Data, in: Sonic Acts. Noise of Being Reader, 2017. p 114.














Resolution Dispute 0010 : Habit 
“Habit isn’t the same as instinct; habit is a learned action that becomes automatic. Crucially, habit is always something you learn from others, or in response to the environment. […] I understand habit as the scar of others within the self.”
- Chun, Wendy. Characters in a Drama called Big Data, in: Sonic Acts. Noise of Being Reader, 2017. p 114.
 















Following the ideal logic of transparent immediacy, technology is designed in such a way that the user will forget about the presence of the medium. Generally, technology aims to offer an uninterrupted flow of functionality and information. This concept of flow is not just a trait of the machine, but also a feature of society as a whole, writes DeLanda.1 DeLanda distinguishes between chaotic disconnected flows and stable flows of matter, that move in continuous variations, conveying singularities. DeLanda also references Deleuze and Guattari, who describe flow in terms of the beliefs and desires that both stimulate and maintain society.2 Deleuze and Guattari write that a flow is something that comes into existence over long periods of time. Within these periods, conventions, customs and individual habits are established, while deviations tend to become rare occurrences and are often (mis)understood as accidents (or in computation: glitches). Although the meaningfulness of every day life might in fact be disclosed within these rare occurances, their impact or relevance is often ruled out, because of social tendencies to emphasize the norm.

To move beyond resolution also means to move beyond the habitual. One way to do this is by creating noise, for instance in the form of glitch: a short lived fault or break from an expected flow of operation within a (digital) system. The glitch is a puzzling, difficult to define and enchanting noise artifact; it reveals itself as accident, chaos or laceration and gives a glimpse into normally obfuscated machine language. Rather than creating the illusion of a transparent, well-working interface to information, the glitch can impose both technological and perceptual challenges to habitual and ideological conventions. It shows the machine revealing itself. Suddenly, the computer appears unconventionally deep, in contrast to the more banal, predictable, surface-level behaviors of ‘normal’ machines and systems.

To really understand the complexity of the user’s perceptual experience it is important to focus on these rare occurances - to create an awareness of the users habits by use of, for instance, the accident.
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1. Manuel DeLanda, War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, New York: Zone Books, 1991. p. 20.
2. Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. B. Massumi, Londen: The Athlone Press, 1988. p. 219.

The slides underneath are from the New Media class ‘Beyond Resolution’ which I thaught as substitute professor at the KHK (Kassel) in the Sommer Semester of 2018. During this week we unpacked the term ‘Habitual Use’ via a research into various layers of standardization. The slides are clickable; they either link to the work reference or zoom.















































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[ resolution theory ]
︎ Untie : Solve : Dissolve : Resolutions for the Transmediale Machine Research publication

full final text: Refuse to let the Syntaxes of (a) History Direct our Futures. In: Fragmentation of the Image (Routledge, 2019)) ed. Daniel Rubinstein. PDF HERE

Notes:

1. Gonring, Gabriel Menotti MP. Movie/Cinema: Rearrangements of the Apparatus in Contemporary Movie Circulation. Diss. Goldsmiths, University of London, 2011. p. 227.

2. Galloway, Alexander R. The interface effect. Polity, 2012.
Untie : Solve : Dissolve : Resolutions
Resolutions involve < determinations > /* –and lost alternatives– */

Within the technological realm, the term ‘resolution’ is often simplified, to mean a standard numerical quantity or a measure of acutance, such as samples per inch. In reality, the term refers to settings that function in conjunction and thus entails a space of compromise between different actors (objects, materialities and protocols) in dispute over norms (frame rate, number of pixels, etc.). Generally, settings within these conjunctions either ossify as requirements and de facto standards, or are notated as standardized norms by organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

A resolution - or rather the resolving - of an image thus means more than just a superficial setting of width x height, or frames per second. Besides a width and height, a screen also has a ‘thickness’ and ‘depth’.1 This thickness of the screen acts as a membrane, that shrouds the technology from its audience, while its depth can be understood as the space where protocols behind (or beyond) the screen organize settings, that in their turn inform the image politically, technically and aesthetically. Resolutions should be understood as a trade off between these standard settings; actors (languages, objects, materials) that dispute their stakes (frame rate, number of pixels and colours, etc.), following set rules (protocols).

The more complex an image processing technology is, the more actors it entails, each following their own ‘protocols’ to resolve an image, all influencing its final resolution (think: liquid crystal, CPU, compression, etc.). However, these actors and their inherent complexities are positioned more and more beyond the fold of everyday settings, outside the afforded options of the interface. This is how resolutions do not just function as an Interface Effect but as hyperopic lens, obfuscating some of the most immediate stakes and possible alternative resolutions of media. When was the last time you saw or thought about a video with 8 or 3 corners?

Unknowingly, the user and audience suffers from technological hyperopia. It has lost track of the most fundamental compromises that are at stake within resolutions. The question now is, have we become unable to construct our own settings, or have we become blind to them?
Determinations such as standard resolutions are as dangerous as any other presumption; they preclude alternatives, and sustain harmful or merely kippled ways of running things. This is why any radical digital materialist believes in informed materiality: while every string of data is ambiguously fluid and promiscuous, it has the potential to be manipulated into anything. This is how a rheology of data can take form, facilitating a fluidity in data transactions where actors themselves are at stake.
Resolution theory is a theory of literacy: literacy of the machines, the people, the people creating the machines, and the people being created by the machines. But resolution studies is not only about the effects of technological progress or the aesthetization of the scales of resolution; which has already been done under the titles such as Interface Effect or Protocol.2 Resolution studies is research about the standards that could have been in place, but are not - and which as a result are now left outside of the discourse.
Through challenging the actors that are involved in the setting of resolutions, the user can scale actively between increments of hyperopia and myopia. This is why we need to shift our understanding of resolution, and see them as disputable norms or habitual compromises.

A protocol shapes data in order for it to be stored, shown, or move and connect between technologies. Protocols, together with objects and their materialities, form the resolutions that make technology run smoothly.3 But these resolutions form not only a solution, but also a compromise between multiple underlying media properties. A resolution is not a neutral facility but carries historical, economical and political ideologies. The cost of all of these media protocols is that we have gradually become unaware of the choices and compromises they represent. We are collectively suffering from technological hyperopia where these qualities have moved beyond a fold of perspective.

Have we become bad at constructing our own resolutions, or are we just oblivious to resolutions and their inherent compromises?

The Night of the Unexpected
Deep Screen Resolution
During the autumn of 2013, I was invited to play a concert with the Dutch band Knalpot, during The Night of the Unexpected in Moscow. The invitation came from the Russian government, to celebrate 100 years of trade between the Netherlands and Russia. Coincidentally, it was timed just after the implementation of a federal law passed on June 29, 2013, banning the distribution of propaganda to minors to promote non-traditional sexual relationships. A timing that put a strange context of control over the event.

A mediator working for the Dutch embassy in Moscow helped us through the process of obtaining our visa. Besides the normal requests, he demanded a map of my setup, a rider (the list of technological needs – I requested an RCA (analog) connection and a list of gear. He also spoke about permitted AV behavior, referencing the new ban on propaganda. I had to explain my intentions, describing the generation of synced live video, by using the sound of Knalpot.

The Night of the Unexpected arrived. The venue was big and we set up in the middle on an island built of scaffolding. A big projector graced the prow of our island, pointing at a professionally suspended black screen. A technician handed me HDMI (digital, not the requested analogue RCA), and an analog-to-digital converter. Surprised at what seemed like problems stacking up rapidly, I turned to the event’s producer:
< Where will I project?
> This is the screen (she pointed at the black screen)
< A black screen will not reflect the light; it will absorb light, which means the projection will not show. I need to project on a white screen. 
> In your rider it did not specify a white screen. I ordered the best technology in Moscow. It is the most expensive.
(silence) 
< Can I show you what I mean? We can test it
… Can I have the RCA I requested in my rider? 
> (producer points at HDMI cable and analog-to-digital converter)  
We have this for you. It’s better, it’s digital.
< I requested analogue out. I need to send my output unconverted, from my synthesizer to the projector, to keep it untransformed and synced with the band.
>  This is not possible. HDMI is better.

None of my primary issues resolved. But it was only when the rehearsal started that I realized that I had a much bigger problem (and found the cause of some of the smaller complications): in the corner of the island, next to a video server, a Russian video engineer (or what I like to call the ‘Russian video police’) screened my live video for offensive content, taking the liberty to overlay or even cut my stream at any time. The digital video server of the Russian video police digitized my analog, synced video stream, not only corrupting its intrinsic analogue qualities by replacing analogue scanning (line) artifacts with digital macroblocks, introducing an aspect ratio conflict (the image got stretched), but also its timing, by adding a two-second delay. In the end, my performance became a barely visible, indiscernible disaster.

However that night, The Night of the Unexpected, something also became very clear to me: the shortcomings in the use and understanding of the term resolution. During the performance, the differences between the resolved image on the black screen and the image resolved on my check monitor differed not just in terms of brightness or aspect ratio, but also in terms of aesthetics, timing, and most importantly, in terms of power. I realized then, that even though a screen often illuminates a situation, what happens beyond the screen is actually often obscured by the screen. The screen acts as a veil or cover, concealing (most of) the technological processes involved in resolving the image.

In order to understand technology better, the term resolution needs to be expanded to mean more than just the dimensions of the screen or display; a final resolution is not just a matter of width and height. A critical reflection of a screens’ resolution considers the technological procedures and trade-offs a programmer or artist has to deal with beyond (or behind) the screen: the processes of power and standardization, involved in creating or resolving a final image on the screen.

 
A drawing of my setup during the Night of the Unexpected, Moscow, 2013. 


The Russian black screen, in the process of cleaning before the performance. 
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Untie&&Dis/Solve Screen / resolution / desktop


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KhK winter semester 2018: Screenology block
A three week seminar on the screen as display, introducing a short history of the GUI and the interface effect.
The Sci-Fi screen in Hollywood movies and contemporary methods of decollage. The third week focuses on screenshots and the Desktop Documentary genre._















































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Desktop Documentary


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KhK winter semester 2018: Screenology block
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