Rosa Menkman

DCT:SYPHONING, 2015-2016

DCT (discrete cosine transform) is a core component of JPEG image compression technology. Yet few people have in-depth knowledge of how the algorithm functions or are aware of the race and gender issues underlying its development. Menkman uses the satirical novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin Abbott Abbott to highlight some of these issues. The novella, published in 1884, is a comment on the hierarchies in Victorian culture and an examination of dimensions. Menkman sketches a two-dimensional world of geometric figures, in which the narrator DCT Senior describes how DCT Junior first ran an open source Syphon framework on its 64th interval, unveiling the young algorithm’s transcoding trip through various ecologies of complex image fields. Introducing different levels of compression; moving from macroblocks to dither, to lines, to the ‘future’ realms of wavelets and vectors, the user travels through the geometric world of ever evolving complexity in which newer and more complex dimensions are more and more ‘illegible’. Menkman made each image plane in 3D, and per level, artefacts from another realm of compression form the textural basis of the chapter.

Artwork: https://vimeo.com/176773197
Artist: http://rosa-menkman.blogspot.ch