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.