I

B eyond Resolution: An Introduction.

I opened the institutions of Resolution Disputes [i.R.D.] on March 28, 2015, as a solo show
hosted by Transfer Gallery in New York City. On September 9, 2017, its follow-up Behind
White Shadows also opened in Transfer. At the heart of both shows lies research on
compressions, with one central research object: the Discrete Cosine Transform algorithm,
the core of the JPEG (and other) compressions. Together, the two exhibitions form a
diptych that is this publication, titled Beyond Resolution (2018).
The solo exhibitions both came with their own custom patch – the i.R.D. patch
(black on black) provided a key to five encrypted ‘institutions’; encrypted, polemical
statements, while the patch for Behind White Shadows featured Lenna Sjööblom aka
Lena Söderberg (glow in the dark on white) – as a symbol for the ongoing, yet too often
ignored racism embedded within the development of image processing technologies.

The journey that Beyond Resolution also represents, started on a not so fine Saturday
morning in early January 2015, when I signed the contract for a research position, to write a book on Resolution Studies. For this
opportunity I moved back from London to Amsterdam. Unfortunately, and out of the blue, three days before my contract was due to
start, my job was put on hold indefinitely. Bureaucratic management dropped me into a financial black hole.
I finally re-organised my finances and moved to the Mojave desert, to take some time. There, from the porch of my little cabin
looking out over a dust road, I could feel the infrasound produced by bombs dropped on Little Baghdad, a Twentynine Palms military
training ground just miles away on the slope of a hill. I became fascinated with this obscure military space – where things happened
beyond my understanding, yet in my direct field of perception. It reminded me of Trevor Paglen’s book I Could Tell You But Then You
Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me (2007). Paglen’s main field of research is mass surveillance and data collection. His work often deals
with photography as a mode of non-resolved vision and the production of invisible images. This memory inspired me to re-start my
research on resolutions, this time independently, resulting in Beyond Resolution.
Right after I came back to Europe, I started my residency at Schloss Solitude and obtained a teaching position at Merz
Akademie, where I developed a full colloquium around Resolution Studies as an Artistic Practice. Here I shared, reworked and
extended Beyond Resolution with my students. In Beyond Resolution, the i.R.D. (institutions of Resolution Disputes) conducts research
into the consequences of setting resolutions, following a pentagon of critical contexts: the tactical (anti-)institution, the (violent) effects
of scaling and the habitual, material(ity) and genealogical conditions of the settings that make up our resolutions.

In 2017, while teaching in another art school, within a – very traditional – department focused on painting and sculpture, two students
separately asked me how art can exist in the digital, when there is an inherent lack of emotion within the material. One student even
added that digital material is cold. I responded with a counter question: Why do you think classic materials, such as paint or clay, are
inherently warm or emotional? In doing so, I hoped to start a dialogue about how their work exists as a combination of physical
characteristics and signifying strategies. I tried to make the students think not just in terms of material, but in terms of materiality,
which is not fixed. I am borrowing here from the postmodern literary critic Katherine Hayles, who describes materiality as ‘the
interplay between a text’s physical characteristics and its signifying strategies’.1 Rather than suggesting a mediums materiality as fixed in
physicality, Hayles’ re-definition is useful because it opens the possibility of considering texts as embodied entities while still
maintaining a central focus on interpretation. In this view of materiality, the object is not merely an inert collection of physical
properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the
interpretive activities of readers and writers. Materiality thus emanates from the norms and expectations, traditions, rules and finally
the meaning the artist and writer add themselves. I tried to explain that we – as artists – can play with this constellation and
consequently, even morph and transform the materiality of for instance, paint and digital materials.

1 Hayles, Katherine, ‘Print is flat, code is deep: The importance of media-specific analysis’, Poetics Today 25, no. 1 (2004): p. 67-90.
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But the students lacked an
BEYOND RESOLUTION
understanding of digital material in
general – let alone of its materiality. They had no analytical training to
understand how materials work, or how digital media and platforms
influence and program us, by speaking to our habits and using a particularly
reflexive vernacular or dialect.
I was shocked; digital literacy is not trivial; it is a prerequisite for agency
in our contemporary society. To be able to ignore or unsee the
infrastructures that govern our digital technologies, and thus our daily realities,
or to presume these infrastructures are ‘hidden’ or ‘magic,’ is an act reserved
only for the digital deprived or the highly privileged. I am convinced that
this digital illiteracy is the result of lacking education in primary and high
school. Even if these students have not studied the digital previously, I would
expects some grasp of analytical and hopefully experimental tools as part of
their creative thinking strategies. This makes me wonder if todays teachers are
not sufficiently literate themselves, or alternatively, if we are not teaching our
students the tools and ways of thinking
necessary to understand and engage present forms of ubiquitous information processing.
As a personal reference, I recall that decades ago, when I was ten years old, I dreamed
of listening to sound in space. In fact, this is what I wrote on the first page of my diary
(1993). I also remember clearly when my teacher stole this dream from me, the moment
she told me that because of a lack of matter, there is no sound in space. She concluded
that the research I dreamed of was impossible, and my dream shattered.
Only years later, when I was introduced to micro waves and NASA’s use of
sonification – the process of displaying any type of data or measurement as sound – I
understood that with the right listening device, anything can be heard. From then on I
started teaching my students not just about the electromagnetic spectrum, but also how
they, through sonification and other transcoding techniques, could listen to rainbows and
the weather. The technical challenges associated with this I call a rheology of data. Here,
rheology is a term borrowed from the branch of physics that deals with the deformation
and flow of matter (or in in this case, data)
When I started considering a rheology of data, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis
Borges’s 1941 short storey The Library of Babel was of amazing help to me. In the short
story, the author describes a universe in the form of a vast library, containing all possible
books following these simple rules: every book consists of 410 pages, each page displays
40 lines, has approximately 80 letters, features any combinations of 25 orthographic
symbols; 22 letters, a period, a comma, and a space. While the exact number of books of
the Library of Babel can be calculated, Borges describes the library as endless. I think
Borges was aware of the morphing quality of the materiality of books and that, as a
consequence, the library is full of books that read like nonsense.
The fascinating part of this story starts when Borges describes the behavior of visitors
of the library. In particular, the Purifiers, who arbitrarily destroy books that do not follow
their rules of language or decoding. The word arbitrarily is important here, because it
references the fluidity of the library; the openness to different languages and other
systems of interpretation. What I read here is a very clear, asynchronous metaphor for our
contemporary approach to data: most people are only interested in information and
dismiss (the value of) RAW, non formatted or unprocessed data (RAW data is of course
an oxymoron, as data is never RAW but always a cultural object in itself). As a result the
purifiers do not accept or realise that when something is illegible, it does not mean that it

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is just garbage. It can simply mean there is no key, or that the string of data - the book - is
not run through the right program or read in the right language, that decodes its data into
human legible information.
Besides a rheology of data, I worked with my students to imagine what syphoning
could mean to our computational experience. Syphoning, a term borrowed from the open
source Mac OS X plugin technology Syphon (developed by Tom Butterworth and Anton
Marini) refers to certain applications sharing information, such as frames – full frame rate
video or stills – with one another in real time. For instance, Syphon allows me to project
my slides or video as textures on top of 3D objects (from Modul8 into Unity). This
allowed me to, at least partially, escape otherwise flat, quadrilateral interfaces of (digital)
images and video, and leak my content through the walls of applications.
In the field of computation – especially in image processing – all renders are
quadrilateral, ecology dependent, standard solutions following the tradeoffs
(compromises) between the settings managing the speed and functionality (bandwidth,
control, power, efficiency, and fidelity) and their claims in the realms of storage,
processing and transmission. However,
what I am interested in is the creation of circles, pentagons, and other more
organic manifolds! If this was possible, our computational machines would
work entirely different; we could create syphoning or even modular
relationships between text files, and as demonstrated in Chicago glitch artist
Jon Satroms’ 2011 QTzrk installation, videos could have uneven corners,
multiple timelines, and changing soundtracks.
Inspired by these ideas, I build Compress Process (2012), an application
that makes it possible to navigate video inside 3D environments, where sound
is triggered and spatially pans when you navigate. Unfortunately, upon release,
Wi r e d m a g a z i n e r e v i e w e d t h e experiment Compress Process as a
flopped video game. Ironically, they could not imagine that in this work
video exists outside the confines of the traditional two-dimensional and flat
interface; this other resolution – 3D – me ant t he v ide o-work was re-
categorized as a gaming application. In The Interface Effect (2012), NYU new
media professor Alexander Galloway writes that “an interface is not a thing,
an interface is always an effect. It is always a process or a translation.”2 The
interface is thus part of the process of These images were made by syphoning modul8 content into Unity
understanding, reading and translating
our mediated experiences. Which begs the question: is it at all possible to
escape the normative or habitual interpretation of our interfaces?
In a time when image processing technologies function as black boxes, we desperately need research, reflection and re-
evaluation of these machines of obfuscation. However, institutions – schools and publications alike – appear to consider the same old
settings over and over, without critically analyzing or deconstructing the programs, and the problems and possibilities that come with
our newer media. As a result, there are no studies of alternative resolutions. Instead we only teach and learn to copy; simulate the
behavior of the interface, replicate the information, paste the data.
Today, the speed of the upgrade is incommensurable; new upgrades arrive too fast. Because of this speed, remaining the same,
or using technology in a continuous manner, has become next to impossible. It seems that new technologies exploit the speed of the
upgrade as a way to obscure the new options, interfaces and (im)possibilities of the ever so rigid technologies. As Wendy Chun writes:
“New media – we are told – exist at the bleeding edge of obsolescence. We thus forever try to catch up, updating to remain the same.” 3

2 Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Polity, 2012: p. 33.

3 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to remain the same: Habitual new media. MIT press, 2016: p.1.
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A condition that reminds me of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick’s dystopian novel Pay for the Printer (1956), in which printers print
printers, a process that finally results in printers printing useless mush. If we do not approach our resolutions analytically, a next
generation will likely be discombobulated by generation loss - the loss of quality between subsequent copies or trans-copies. As a result,
they will turn into a partition of institutionalized programs producing monotonous junk.
Do we completely depend on our conditioning every time we deal with data? Can we escape the interface? Or, if every
decontextualized materiality is immediately re-contextualized inside another, already existing, paradigm or interface, is it at all possible
to create new resolutions? Together these questions set up a pressing research agenda.

To establish a better understanding of our technologies, we need to acknowledge that the term resolution does not just refer to a
numerical quantity or a measure of acutance. Resolutions are made, and they involve a procedural trade-off. Consider for instance how
different objects (lens, film, image sensor, and compression algorithm) dispute settings (frame rate, aperture, ISO, number of pixels or
weight) while having to evaluate the technologies’ possible affordances; the possible settings the mediating technological architecture
offers when connecting or composing these objects and settings - or as Gibson writes: the “properties of the environment upon which
one can act”4.
Generally, settings either ossify as requirements or de facto norms, or are notated as de jure - legally binding - standards by
organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Which
makes the process of resolving an image less complex, since it systematizes parts of the
process, but ultimately also less transparent and more black-boxed. But it is not only
institutions such as ISO that program, encode, and regulate (standardize) the flows of
data in and between our technologies, or that arrange the data in our machines following
systems that underline efficiency or functionality. In fact, data is organised following
either protocol, or proprietary standards developed by technological oligarchs to include
all kinds of inefficiencies that the user is not conditioned or even supposed to see, think,
or question. 5 These proprietary standards function as a type of controlling logic that re-
capsulate information inside various wrappers in which our data is (re-)encoded, edited
and even deformed by nepotist, (sometimes) covertly operating cartels for reasons like
insidious data collection or locking the user into their proprietary software.
So while in the digital realm, the term resolution is often simplified to just mean a
number signifying width and height of for instance a screen, the critical use I propose
also considers the depth beyond the screen, where protocols and other (proprietary)
standards, together with the technological interfaces and the objects’ materialities, form
the resolutions that the technology produces.
Resolutions entail a space of compromise between these different actors. And it’s
within the depths beyond the screen
that reflections on the technological procedures and tradeoffs made by the
programmer (or artist) take place. There, beyond (behind) the screen, is
where standard settings, interfaces and other forms of power (i.e. habits and
norms), technically resolve the image and make it visible on the screen. A
resolution is thus the result of a consolidation (or a merging) between
materialities of objects, and its standards and interfaces, the rules that
shape data in order for it to be stored, shown, moved and connected to and
between technologies.

4Gibson, James J. ”The theory of affordances." in: Gieseking, Jen Jack, et al.,
eds. The People, Place, and Space Reader. Routledge, 2014: p. 60.

5Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How control exists after decentralization.

MIT press, 2004: p. 172.
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The cost of all of these media resolutions - standards encapsulated inside standard encapsulations - is that we have gradually become
unaware of the choices and compromises they represent. We need to realise that a resolution is never a neutral settlement, but an
outcome that carries historical, economical, and political ideologies which once were implement per choice. Documentary film maker
and writer Hito Steyerl’s video essay How Not to be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), filmed at a standard 1951
USAF resolution test chart located just west of Cuddeback Lake, presents viewers with an educational manual which via a critical
consideration of the resolutions and surveillance embedded in digital and analogue technologies, argues that whatever is not captured
by resolution is invisible and thus carries political importance. 6
Even though I am aware that Steyerl’s work by no means claims to be a comprehensive description of the term resolution, or the
ways in which these resolutions perform in the age of mass-surveillance, I believe the essay misses a crucial perspective: resolutions do
not simply present things as visible, while rendering Others obscured or invisible. Rather, a resolution should also be understood as the
choice between certain technological processes and materials that involve their own specific standards and affordances, which in their
turn inform the settings that govern a final capture. However, these settings and their inherent affordances - or the possibilities to
choose other settings - have become more and more complex and obscure themselves as they exist inside black-boxed interfaces.
Moreover, while resolutions compromise, obfuscate, or obscure particular visual outcomes, the processes of standardization and
upgrade culture as a whole also compromise particular technological affordances – creating new ways of seeing or perceiving –
altogether. And it is these alternative technologies of seeing, or obscured and deleted settings that also need to be considered as part of
resolution studies.

The i.R.D.
The i.R.D. is dedicated to researching anti-utopic, obfuscated, lost and unseen, or too good to be implemented resolutions. The i.R.D.
functions as a stage for non-standard, radical digital materialisms and is a place for the otherwise or dysfunctional to be empowered, or
at least to be recognized. From inside the i.R.D., technical literacy is considered to be both a strength and a limitation: The i.R.D. shows
resolutions beyond our usual field of view, and points to settings and interfaces we have learned to refuse to recognize.
While the i.R.D. call attention to media resolutions, it does not just aestheticize their formal qualities or denounce them as evil,
as new media professors Andrew Goffey and Matthew Fuller did in Evil Media (2012). The i.R.D. could easily have become a
Wunderkammer for artifacts that already exist within our current resolutions, exposing standards as Readymades in technological
boîte-en-valises. Curiosity cabinets are special spaces, but in a way they are also just dead; they celebrate objects behind glass, or safely
stowed away inside an acrylic cube. I can imagine the man responsible for such a collection of technological artifacts. There he sits, in
the corner, smoking a pipe, looking over his conquests.
This type of format would have turned the i.R.D. into a static capture of hopelessness; an accumulation that will not activate or
change anything; a private, boutique collection of evil. An institute that intends to host disputes cannot get away with simply displaying
objects of contention. Disputes involve discussions and debate. In other words: the objects need to be unmuted – or be given – a voice.
A dilemma that informs some of my key questions: how can objects be displayed in an active way? How do you exhibit the (normally)
invisible?
A realization that genealogy (in
terms of for instance upgrade culture)
and ecology (the environment and the
affordances the environment offers for
the dynamic inter-relational processes
of objects) play a big role in the
construction of resolutions. This is why
the i.R.D. hosts classic resolutions and
their inherent (often invisible) artifacts

6 In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States

Air Force installed various versions of
these test charts to
calibrate aerial photography and video.
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BEYOND RESOLUTION
BEYOND RESOLUTION such as dots, lines, blocks, and wavelets,
inside an Ecology of Compression
Complexities (2015-2017), a study of
compression artifacts and their qualities
and ways of diversion, dispersion, and
(alternative) functioning by employing
‘creative problem creation’, a type of
tactic coined by Jon Satrom, during
G L I . T C / H 2 1 1 1 , w h i c h s h i ft s
authorship back to the actors involved
in the setting of a resolution.
For instance, in the video
Tacit:Blue (Menkman, 2015) small
interruptions in an otherwise smooth
blue video document a conversation
between two cryptography
technologies; a Masonic Pigpen or Freemasons cipher (a basic, archaic, and geometric simple substitution cipher) and the Discrete
Cosine Transform encryption DCT (Menkman, 2015). The sound and light that make up the blue surface are generated by transcoding
the same electric signals using different components; what you see is what you hear.
The technology responsible for the audiovisual piece is the NovaDrone (Pete Edwards/Casper Electronics, 2012), a small AV
synthesizer designed by Casper Electronics. In essence, the NovaDrone is a noise machine with a flickering military RGB LED on top.
The synthesizer is easy to play with; it offers three channels of sound and light (RGB) and the board has twelve potentiometers and ten
switches to control the six oscillators routed through a 1/4-inch sound output, with which you can create densely textured drones, or in
the case of Tacit:Blue, a rather monotonous, single AV color / frequency distortion.
The video images have been created using the more exciting functions of the NovaDrone. Placing the active camera of an iPhone
against the LED on top of the NovaDrone, which turns the screen of the phone into a wildly moving suprematist collage of color bars,
revealing the NovaDrone’s hidden second practical usage as a light synthesizer. In this process the NovaDrone exploits the iPhone's
CMOS (Complimentary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor) image sensor, a technology that is part of most commercial cameras, and is
responsible for the transcoding of captured light into image data. When the camera function on the phone is activated, the CMOS
moves down the sensor capturing pixel values one row at a time. However because the flicker frequency of the military RGB LED is
changed by the user and higher than the writing speed of the phone's CMOS, the iPhone camera is unable to synch up with the LED.
What appears on the screen of the iPhone is an interpretation of its input, riddled with aliasing known as rolling shutter artifact; a
resolution dispute between the CMOS and the RGB LED. Technology and its inherent resolutions are never neutral; every time a new
way of seeing is created, a new prehistory is being written.
A second work in the i.R.D., titled Myopia (Menkman, 2015) – consisted of a giant vinyl wall installation of 12 x 4 meters, plus
extruding vectors – presenting a zoomed-in perspective of JPEG2000 wavelet compression artifacts. These artifacts were the aesthetic
result of a glitch, made when I added a line of another language into the data of a high res JPEG2000 image – a compression standard
used and developed for medical imaging, supporting zoom without block distortion. An action that revealed both the surface and
structure of the image.
The title Myopia hinted at a proposed solution for our collective suffering from technological hyperopia – the condition of
farsightedness: being able to see things sharp only over a distance. With Myopia I build a place that disintegrated the architecture of
zooming, and endowed the public with the qualities of being short-sighted. Myopia offered an abnormal view; a non-flat wall that
presented the viewer a look into the compression – a new perspective. This was echoed in the conclusion of the installation, the day
before the i.R.D. closed, when visitors were invited to bring an Exacto knife and to cut their own resolution of Myopia to mount them
on any institution of choice (a book, computer or other rigid surface).
Resolutions are the determination of what is run, read, and seen, and what is not. In a way, resolutions form a lens of
(p)reprogrammed truths. But their actions and the qualities have moved beyond a fold of our perspectives; and we have gradually
become blind to the politics of these congealed and hardened compromises. We are collectively suffering from technological hyperopia,

VII
where these qualities have moved beyond a fold of perspective.
A third and main work in the i.R.D. (institutions of Resolution Disputes) consists of three parts. The first part, titled DCT
(Menkman, 2015 - after Discrete Cosine Transform, the algorithm at the core of the JPEG compression) uses the 64 macroblocks that
form the visual alphabet for any JPEG compressed image. The premise of DCT is that the legibility of an encrypted message does not
only depend on the complexity of the encryption algorithm, but equally on the placement of the message. DCT, a font that can be used
on any .TTF (TrueType Font) supporting device, applies both methods of cryptography and steganography; hidden in secret, the
message is transcoded and embedded on the surface of the image where it looks like an artifact. A second part of the third work was
inspired by one of the by Trevor Paglen’s uncovered Symbology (2007) patches. It consists of a logo for the i.R.D., embroidered in a
black on black patch, providing a key to decipher anything written in DCT: 010 0000 – 101 1111. These binary values also decipher the
third and final work institutions (Menkman, 2015): consisting of five statements written in manifesto style, printed in DCT, on acrylic.
When MOTI, the Museum Of The Image (in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures, that had previously
contracted me to write my book on Resolution Studies, but then floundered), wrote out their first Crypto Design Challenge later that
year (August 2015) I entered the competition with DCT. Delivered as an encrypted message against institutions and their backwards
bureaucracy, DCT finally won the shared first prize in the Crypto Design Challenge.

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Behind White Shadows
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A next institutional success came in the winter of 2016. When, six years after the creation of A Vernacular of File Formats (Menkman,
2010), I was invited to submit the work as part of a large-scale joint acquisition of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and MOTI. A file
format is an encoding system that organizes data according to a particular syntax. These organizations are commonly referred to as
compression algorithms. A Vernacular of File Formats consists of one source image, a self-portrait showing my face, and an
arrangement of recompressed and disturbed or de-calibrated iterations. By compressing the source image using different compression
languages and subsequently implementing a same (or similar) error into each file, the normally invisible compression language
presents itself on the surface of the image, resulting in a compilation of de-calibrated and unresolved self-portraits showcasing the
aesthetic complexities of all the different file format languages.
After thorough conversation, both institutions agreed that the most interesting and best format for acquisition was the full
digital archive, consisting of more than 16GB of data: 661 files of which many glitched – broken – and unstable image files but also the
original files, the Monglot software (Menkman and Larsby, 2011), videos, and original PDFs. A copy of the whole compilation is now
part of the archive of the Stedelijk Museum. The PDF of A Vernacular of File Formats remains freely downloadable and following the
spirit of COPY < IT > RIGHT !, soon the research archive will be freely available online, inviting artists, students, and designers to use
the files as source footage for their own work and research into compression artifacts.
By keeping my work available for
re-use or to copy and by describing my
process of creation, I intend to share the
creative process and knowledge I have
obtained throughout its productions. I
adopt video artist and activist Phil
Mortons statement: “First, it’s okay to
copy! believe in the process of copying
as much as you can” (Phil Morton,
Distribution Religion, 1973). Generally,
copying can be great practice; it can
open up alternative possibilities, be a
tactic to learn, and create access.
Unfortunately copying can also be done
in ways that are damaging or just not
right, as has happened repeatedly with
A Vernacular of File Formats. For
instance when extracted images were
used as application icons for the apps
Glitch! for Android and Glitch Camera for iPhone, or the many times my work was featured on commercially sold clothing and
functioned as cover image on two different record sleeves, without permission, compensation or proper accreditation.
For Elevate Festival 2017 I was invited to talk about my experiences with losing authorship over images of my face. During the
preparations for this talk I realised that it is not that uncommon to lose (a sense of) authorship over an image (even ones own face). An
example of this is the long standing tradition within the professional field of image processing of co-opting (stealing) the image of a
Caucasian female face for the production of color test cards. A practice that is responsible for the introduction of a racial bias into the
standard settings for image processing. This revelation prompted me to start the research at the basis of the second part of the Diptych
Beyond Resolution, titled Behind White Shadows (2017).
In digital photography the effort of taking an image of the face, such as a selfie or a portrait, has been reduced to the
straightforward act of clicking. However these photos, stored and created inside (digital) imaging technologies do not just take and
save an image of the face. In reality they release a large set of biased – gendered and sometimes even racist – standards to intervene in
the processes of saving the face to memory. What gets resolved, and what gets lost during the compromise that is part of this process.
While a one size fits all or as a technician once wrote: physics is physics approach has become the standard, in reality, the various skin
type complexions reflect light differently. This requires a composite interplay between the different settings involved when subject are

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captured. Despite the obvious need to factor in these different requirements for hues and
complexions, certain technologies only implement the support for one – the Caucasian
complexion – and in doing so, compromise the resolution of Other complexions.
A much discussed example is the image of Lena Söderberg (in short Lena),
featured as the Miss November 1972 Playboy centerfold and subsequently co-opted as test
image during the implementation of DCT in the JPEG compression. The rights of use of
the Lena image were never properly cleared or checked with Playboy. But the image, up
until today, is the only image used to test and build the JPEG compression on. Scott
Acton, editor of IEEE Transactions, writes in a critical piece: “We could be fine-tuning our
algorithms, our approaches to this one image. […] They will do great on that one image,
but will they do well on anything else? […] In 2016, demonstrating that something works
on Lena isn’t really demonstrating that the technology works.”
To uncover and gain a better insight into the processes behind the biased rules
that make up standard settings, in Behind White Shadows, I set out to ask some
fundamental questions: Who gets to decide the hegemonic conventions that resolve the
JPEG image? Through what processes is
this power legitimized and how does it
elevated to a normative status?
Moreover, who decides the principal
point of view, and whose perspective is
used in the operation of scanning or
imaging technologies? Finally, who are
responsible for casting these
(Caucasian) shadows?
One way to make instances such
as the habitual whiteness of color test
cards more apparent is by insisting that
these standard images, trapped in the
histories of our technologies, become
part of the public domain. These images
need to lose their copyright along with
their elusive power. The stories of
standardization belong in high-school
textbooks, and the possible violence
associated with this process should be
studied as part of any suitable
curriculum. In order to illuminate the
white shadows that govern the
outcomes of our image processing
technologies, it is required to first write
these genealogies of standardization.
This type of research can easily
become densely theoretical, something
which is not bad in itself, but will result
in the loss of audience. Which has let
me to rethink and re-frame the output
of my practice, and to show it as a series
of compression ethnographies; videos,

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3D environments, poems, and other experimental forms in which I anthropomorphize compressions and let them speak in their own
languages. In doing so, I give these otherwise muted technologies a voice: I enable compressions to tell their own stories, about their
conception and development, in the language of their own data organization.
An example is the Behind White Shadows centerpiece: DCT:SYPHONING. The 1000000th (64th) interval (Menkman,
2016-2017) created and performed in VR. A fictional journey, told as a modern version of the 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott novel
Flatland. But in this case, told as a odyssey through image compression complexities. In DCT:SYPHONING two DCT blocks, Senior
and Junior lead us through a universe of abstract, simulated environments made from the materials of compression - evolving from
early raster graphics to our contemporary state of CGI realism. At each level, this virtual world interferes with the formal properties of
VR to create stunning and disorienting environments, throwing into question our preconceived notions of virtual reality.
As a third and final work, the exhibition Behind White Shadows also exhibits a four by three-meter Spomenik (Menkman, 2017),
a monument for resolutions that will never exist; a non-quadrilateral, extruding and video-mapped sculpture, that presents videos shot
from within DCT:SYPHONING. Historically, a Spomenik is a piece of abstract, Brutalist, and monumental anti-fascist architecture
from former Yugoslavia, commemorating or meaning ‘many different things to many people’. The Spomenik in Behind White Shadows
is dedicated to resolutions that will never exist and screen objects (shards) that were never implemented, such as the non-quadrilateral
screen. Technically, the Spomenik, functions as an oddly shaped screen with mapped video, consisting of 3D vectors extruding in space.
The Spomenik commemorates
the biased (white) genealogies of image
and video compression. The installed
shard is three meters high and
obscuring a compartment in the back
of the Spomenik: a small room hiding a
VR installation that runs
D CT:SYPHONING, while the
projection on the Spomenik features
video footage from within the VR. In
doing so, the Spomenik reflects literal
light on the issues surrounding image
processing technologies and addresses
some of the hegemonic conventions
that obscure our view continuously.
- Proceedings of my presentation
for #34C3, Leipzig, Germany, 2017.

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