Late to the party (as I often can be), I recently discovered Rosa Menkman’s work while at NXT Museum for the “Still Processing” exhibition.

Turns out, Rosa Menkman has quite the background in Glitch Art, having worked on theorizing it and having produced artworks bought in the Stedelijk Museum collection. Usually not a big fan of video essays, I ended up being very interested in two of her productions. The first one about racial and sexist biases in analog and digital image processing. The second one about the changing nature of rainbows due to atmospheric conditions (pollution) or changes in our analog wetware (eyes).

Glitch Art isn’t something I have ever been passionate about. Rosa Menkman’s work managed to ring a bell with me though.

Her work on DE/CALIBRATION ARMY (2017) exposes how test cards were used in photography or cinematography to provide standardized colors. She also reveals how the same standards were applied in digital image processing,  exposing the elephant in the room: sexist and racial bias in image processing. I found it very interesting. 

Commoditized as it is, we tend to forget about how much we live in a world of computational imagery. We are aware of the algorithm in our social networks, but do we really often think about the algorithms in our image capture and processing stack? Not so sure.

Capturing an image with a smartphone involves a deeply integrated technological stack of hardware components (lens, sensors, chips) and software (processing algorithms, analysis, correction), each maintained by teams with their own requirements and constraints (time, engineering, financial, etc.). 

Anyone who has ever worked in engineering or product teams knows this fundamental truth: requirements necessitate choices.

To choose is to renounce. Biases love choices because they thrive on renouncement. Choices compound through the whole technological stack. Choices are then amplified by the default settings which are mostly defined by anticipated market expectations. Biases are now ready for their reinforcement loops until they get disrupted by other forces. A new externality has been created and needs to be addressed. 

Rosa Menkman demonstrated this through her glitch art. She created an app you can use to apply biases to your portrait. The result’s fun and glitchy-looking sure, but in no way different than beauty filters used by social media platforms such as TikTok (search for Bold Glamour Body Dysmorphia on your favorite search engine). These beauty filters are created to sustain and improve engagement within these apps. In that case, our relationship to biases is weaponized for maximizing profits. 

Choices... Choices...  

Through the small lens with which I see her art, Menkman exposes the challenges coming with the embedded power structures of our everyday technologies. 

Are you old enough that you spent your time on IRC back in the days? Do you like your chat infrastructure free of billionaire influence? Do you have free time? Are you experiencing nostalgia? If you answered yes to one or more of the questions above, here’s what it takes to connect to the IRC network in 2025.

The IRCv3 protocol update aims to fix the (let’s be honest) awful user experience of IRC. They even have a draft for server-side chat history! Meanwhile, the Open-Source community congregates on libera.chat, and if you're looking for channels on different networks, Netsplit.de is a great resource. 

Bouncers act as a middleman between your client and the IRC server. Installed on a server, they help with keeping chat history and hiding your home IP address.

ZNC works well and is acceptably complicated to set up. The good folks at LinuxServer.io even provide a docker image. There's also Soju, an alternative written in Go but I felt lazy and didn’t try it. 

Did you know that mIRC is regularly updated (and can you imagine that a IRC software has a 4 letter .com domain)? Their licensing model hasn’t changed. It makes me happy that not all software has turned to a subscription model. If you're looking for a multi-platform client, Halloy is written in Rust. It’s a nice piece of software. I like the UI, and the icon is gorgeous.

I don't know why anyone would be on IRC in 2025, to be honest. It’s clear that IRC has a worse user experience than proprietary solutions such as Discord, Slack, or Telegram. That said, IRC is open and has a following strong enough that 30 year-old software keeps being updated and developers are building new open-source clients in memory-safe languages.

Using IRC isn’t easy, and might never be. And it’s a quiet place. But it’s free of corporate interests and sometimes I think that’s the best feature of all. And quiet is nice. 

P.S: I’m marc_in_space on libera.chat.

Totally forgot this track. What a synth-dub beauty. 

Discovery of the day: This cool J-Pop music video. The lyrics are made of all the Japanese tongue twisters (or so the comments say). I really like the vibe. Check the original song by Mono No Aware also! 

Nor nationalist nor military music are my kind of stuff, and discovering Turbofolk through pure randomness, I didn't expect learning about this particular aspect of the Yugoslav War.

I was converting "Harmonique" to Katakana and googled the result (ハルモニク). I was surprised to see a Japanese wikipedia page of a band. My Japanese isn't that good yet so I switched to English and felt curious about what I just discovered. 

Atomik Harmonik is a turbo-folk music group from Kamnik, Slovenia. Their debut single "Brizgalna Brizga" stayed at #1 in the Slovenian pop charts for several months. Their other hits include "Hop Marinka", "Na seniku", "Od hr'ma do hr'ma", and their European hit "Turbo Polka", which hit the charts in Germany and Austria, bringing the group fame across Europe.

I never heard about them before. I searched for their hit song on YouTube and was pretty amused by it. It sounds like a country-side party song. Harmless in a way. 

I dug a bit more and read the opening paragraph of the Wikipedia page on Turbofolk:

Turbo-folk is a subgenre of contemporary South Slavic pop music that initially developed in Serbia during the 1990s as a fusion of techno and folk. The term was an invention of the Montenegrin singer Rambo Amadeus, who jokingly described the aggressive, satirical style of music as "turbo folk". While primarily associated with Serbia, this style is also popular in other former Yugoslav republics.

Again, sounds pretty harmless, right? I searched a bit more and found some modern music videos who made me think of Rosalia. Not my stuff again, but searching a bit more, I actually ended up watched a 23 minutes explanation on the origins of Turbofolk and how the Yugoslav war shaped the style as well. During wartime, this style of music was also used by artist promoting nationalist ideas, joked (or boasted) about war crimes. Absolutely terrible and disturbing.

In the comments, YouTube user @n.d.1926 says:

Dude, I'm so glad I discovered your channel! This was a great video. As a Serbian, I gotta recommend the rock 'n' roll response to the bloody Yugoslav wars! A bunch of rock bands got together and created a rock anti-war propaganda album. It's called "rimtutituki". You gotta realize, there were A LOT of people opposing the wars, protesting every day. This was their anthem.

Of course, I searched for it. Ah, the vibe is more my thing. I have no clue what the lyrics say though. Looking at the comments, again:

Unfortunately, folk music won. That's why they brought us to this state. (Nažalost pobjedila je narodna muzika. Zato su nas i dovali u ovo stanje.)

"There's no brain under the helmet." The end. ("Ispod šlema mozga nema". Kraj.)

Translation (made by Google) of Rimtutituki's lyrics:

Peace is the most beautiful girl that not everyone can have
If I can't fly, I won't crawl
Because when I crawl, I can't fuck
Peace! Peace, brother, peace!

We won't let folk music win
I love you young more than they give me a gun
Peace! Peace, brother, peace!

Dirty fights in love bags
Shoot less, fuck more
Peace! Peace, brother, peace!

You're too young to drink 'lad
There's no brain under the helmet
Peace! Peace, brother, peace!

Where don't you all go, too
Because whoever betrays will be a damn cunt
Peace! Peace, brother, peace!

You can't escape something that's there
Omnipresent...
Peace! Peace, brother, peace!

Rimtutituki...

How many of you are there?
How many of you are there?
Count them in pairs!
First! Second! First! Second!..
Peace! Peace, brother, peace!

Closure.