Tag: performance

Research Critique: Rosa Menkman – “The Collapse of PAL”

September 17, 2015 / / 1 Comment

“His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of history.” – Walter Benjamin, Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History

Rosa Menkman in her work “The Collapse of PAL” shows us the Angel of History (as described by Walter Benjamin) reflecting on the PAL signal and its termination. This audio-visual performance presents to us a cold, jagged visualization of the silent termination of the PAL signal in favor of the DVB signal.
[vimeo 12199201 w=500 h=375]

The Collapse of PAL from Rosa Menkman on Vimeo.

The above video is the  “Render of part one of the Collapse of PAL (Eulogy, Obsequies and Requiem for the blue plains of phosphor).” The title is rather abstract to me, but I guess that this is just an excerpt and the original video is 30 minutes long. I did, however, find a performance version on Youtube:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuDwaQDzOZc]

The performance (and the video) plays out a narrative, using Walter Benjamin’s description of the Angel of History to verbalize the thoughts of the Angel about the PAL signal. The nature of the Angel is such that it wants to save the PAL signal, to preserve it, but progress in the form of a storm is too strong for the Angel to fight against. Hence the PAL signal is simply rendered obsolete, left behind in the landscape of the past.

Menkman continues describing the narrative on her blog, saying

“However, the Angel of History has to conclude that while the PAL signal might be argued death, it still exists as a trace left upon the new, “better” digital technologies. PAL can, even though the technology is terminated, be found here, as a historical form that newer technologies build upon, inherit or have appropriated from. Besides this, the Angel also realizes that the new DVB signal that has been chosen over PAL, is different but at the same time also inherently flawed.”

I enjoy how the narrative is continuously moving together with the landscapes on the screen. It’s as if we were being taken on some kind of time-travelling journey, moving through the years with the Angel as we contemplate the history of PAL.

I think that the entire performance comes together very cohesively to create a chilling and rather nostalgic piece of work. Something I particularly liked (even though Menkman admitted to making some mistakes) were the typos made during the performance. I’m not sure whether they were deliberate – I initially thought they were – until I read her description below the Youtube video. However, these mistakes just seemed to echo the “inherent flaws” of the PAL and DVB signals. They also served to create more suspense during the piece.

Another aspect is the sounds used during the video; the build-up in the beginning sets the cold tone of the video, and it is pierced with sharp screeches and deep, mysterious booms. Throughout the performance there is also always some buzzy fuzzy background noise which I feel adds more to the suspenseful aspect of the work.

I also liked how Menkman used two screens in her performance to compare PAL and DVB. The glitching was really similar for much of the performance, but eventually the PAL screen was almost unreadable.

Overall, there were many aspects of the work which captivated me. I particularly enjoyed the narrative and the sounds. I think that the work serves to show us the relentless advancement of technologies, each building upon the ruins of the previous ones. It made me think of the number of times I myself have witnessed the destruction of older technology, yet completely disregarded it because I was so focused on the new-ness and novelty of the new technology,

Research Critique: The Pirate Cinema, Nicolas Maigret

September 2, 2015 / / 7 Comments

“In the context of omnipresent telecommunications surveillance, “The Pirate Cinema” makes the hidden activity and geography of Peer-to-Peer file sharing visible.” – The Pirate Cinema

This quote, taken from the abstract written on the website of the artwork, sums up pretty much exactly what we see in the work. It is truly an amazing piece of art, one which uncovers and presents to viewers the invisible network connections happening every second all around the world. As someone who has used torrents before, this work really fascinated me and got me thinking about two different perspectives of torrenting; one from the perspective of the user, and the other from the perspective of the producer of the original work.

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There are 3 main segments in the website, each presenting a different form of the work. The first is the installation of the work. The setup consists of 3 projectors, projecting live-streamed, intercepted data of torrents. Also included is the information of the users – their countries and their IP addresses are shown at the top of each screen. After watching the entire video on the website, I was still hungry for more. The torrents are ever-changing, each scene not more than a second long. This makes it feel as if I were watching snippets of a film – just teasers, without the complete picture. It was also fascinating because I could recognize some scenes as being part of a TV series or movie that I had watched. The quality of the scenes also evoke a sense of a poor quality or lagging stream which gave me a minor headache actually, adding to the sense of claustrophobia of data.

Screen Shot 2015-09-01 at 3.30.40 PMThe next segment of the website is an online version of the work. Anyone is now able to view the work, live, on their computers. My first thought was something like, “Wow, now I’m seeing what other people are sharing REAL TIME”, and I was really amazed. I realized that I could actually be involved in the work if I wanted to, all I had to do was download a torrent. This ability to visualize the data being transferred is more than just showing who is downloaded what; it is showing us how the media itself works.

“With Netartizens.tv, we intend to engage a full social and artistic agenda that stretches across disciplinary, geographical, and cultural boundaries, exploring real-time interaction and dialogue between artists, performers, viewers and audience-participants.” – The NetArtizens Project

At this point, I already feel that this work parallels the ideas of NetArtizens.tv. Using data, the artist has managed to achieve a work which spans the entire globe, creating a dialogue between everyone involved, and anyone who wants to be involved.

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This series of screenshots are taken from the third segment of the website; this one details the performance version of the work. In it, the artist covers a total of 7 acts. These acts provide a context to the torrent data presented in the work. He talks about the different media (TV shows, movies, music, porn, etc.) being torrented around the world, the different ways in which users label the torrents, and the copyright infringement case between Metallica and Napster, among other things. It revealed alot more about this hidden world of torrents and gave interesting bits of information to think about while viewing the work.

After viewing the installation and the online version, I felt that the video of the performance version was a really neat way to round things off. It provided interesting insights into how the world of torrents work and the way people differentiate between torrents. More than that, it showed me the astounding amount of artistic work available to everyone that without torrents, would probably remain undiscovered and unseen by most of us. To me, this means that the torrent world gives us much more than we can imagine, but at the same time takes away alot from the artists who create the work. I personally would like to see a kind of compromise between the two, but it’s hard to imagine how that would happen.