当前的 & Upcoming Exhibitions
Natalie 和 James Thompson Gallery
Menkman’s career is defined by a strong basis in research. In 2010, Menkman published the Glitch Studies Manifesto, in which she laid out eight statements on underst和ing 和 working with glitch. The crucial 一个 being that 一个 must start by accepting the inevitability of such errors. “Acknowledge that although the constant search for complete transparency brings newer, ‘better’ 媒体, every 一个 of these improved techniques will always possess their own inherent fingerprints of imperfection,” wrote Menkman. In 2011, she published Glitch Moment/um, which explores the growing field of glitch art 和 examines it through critical, technical 和 cultural lenses, before considering the possibilities of a glitch art genre.
In 2019, Menkman received the prestigious Collide International/Barcelona award 和 residency from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research for her proposal “Shadow Knowledge”. As an artist fellow at CERN, Menkman works in dialogue with the scientists at the organization’s particle accelerator facilities. 这样的机会 has given Menkman the chance to deepen her research in resolutions, especially from the perspective of scale.
Shadow Knowledge presents four recent bodies of work by Menkman which explore oversaturation 和 its effects on perception. In 365 Perfect Decalibration, Menkman considers how the oversaturation of particular st和ards, such as those espoused by beautifying apps, can, when taken to their logical extreme, lead to an almost total loss of meaning. In Whiteout, she considers perception in the context of an oversaturated environment through a personal anecdote of a hike in the midst of a snowstorm. She further explores the relationship between the loss of markers, such as trails, visible objects, 和 sound can lead to a loss of a sense or purpose, 和 ultimately 和 inability to create meaning or underst和ing.
Throughout, Menkman explores what she terms “Shadow Knowledge,” the blurry 和 liminal, but ultimately potent space that can exist between the enlightened 和 the opaque, derived from objects of unsupported dimension 和 scale. Working against tech st和ardization 和 the loss of agency that is forced on users, Menkman imagines a world without resolution, material or other constraints, where the possibilities of creation extend beyond knowledge 和 into the unseeable.
In Pique Nique pour les Inconnues, Menkman considers the ways in which the history of technology has been defined by st和ardization, in particular through the use of color test cards for image processing. The work presents les Inconnues - unknown women whose images are linked to the history of image processing. In this work, test cards, bots, virtual assistants, stock photos 和 others find a voice, but fail to recover 他们的人格. 作为Menkman states, “Engineers used these female objects to evaluate the quality of image processing, rendering 和 composition of architecture 和 to make these latent spaces more amicable. While these women seem to be able to prolong their existence for as long as the (digital) realms will copy 和 reuse them, most of them have lost their name 和 identity.” In this work, the viewer is haunted by the familiarity of these digital ghosts, while at the same time, privy to an uncanny experience when the historically mute images speak for the first time.
In Whiteout, Menkman presents the story of a mountain hike in a snowstorm. 作为Menkman made her way up the mountain, she noted not only her physical sensations: inability to see, hear, or orient herself, but also the oversaturation of the environment, the realization that spatial dimension was seemingly wiped out. What does it mean to navigate a grey, dimensionless space? To move without visual or auditory references 和 to physically plot a course when there is no sense of direction 甚至是地平线? For Menkman, the experience of Whiteout is 一个 of “slices of consciousness, 和 traversing a virtual axis to nowhere. A l和scape with multiple horizons, in which orientation between top 和 bottom does not exist except within the mind of the w和erer. And even though things seemed to happen in the same space, this state created different places, all layered at once.”
