Rosa Menkman: Behind White Shadows

Artist Talk within the scope of the exhibition: »Open Codes. Living in Digital Worlds«

Artist Talk within the scope of the exhibition: »Open Codes. Living in Digital Worlds«
Artist Talk within the scope of the exhibition: »Open Codes. Living in Digital Worlds«
Duration
1:03:13
Category
Lecture/Talk
Date
16.11.2017
Description

While digital photography seems to reduce the effort of taking an image of the face, such as a selfie or a portrait, to a straightforward act of clicking, these photos, stored and created inside (digital) imaging technologies do not just take and save an image of the face. In reality, a large set of biased – gendered and even racist – protocols intervene in the processes of saving the face to memory. What gets resolved, and what gets lost during the process of resolving the image is often unclear. 

To uncover and get a better insight into the processes behind the biased protocols that make up these standard settings, we need to come back to asking certain basic questions: who gets decide the hegemonic conventions that resolve the image? And why and how do these standards come into being? Through an examination of the history of the color test card, I aim to provide some answers to these issues.

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch art theorist, curator, glitch artist and visual artist specializing in glitch art and resolution theory. Menkman has curated several international exhibitions of other artists' work. In 2015 she started the iRD, the institutions for Resolution Disputes, in order to build more awareness about the compromises set by the resolutions inherent to our media. 

Video documentary:

ZKM | Videostudio

Camera: Benedict Meyer, Frenz Jordt
Editing: Bastian Buchgraber

Participants