Artist Talk with Rosa Menkman

Within the scope of the »Open Codes« exhibition, an artist talk with artist Rosa Menkman will take place on November 16, 2017 at the ZKM. 

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. 

Please note: The Artist Talk will be held in English.