Pomylka / The Tipping Point of Failure
29 October - 05 December 2010
Galeria NT / Imaginarium
ul. R. Traugutta 18, 90-113 Lódz, Poland

Today many people enjoy their time watching super 8 tapes, while listening to poorly recorded vinyl records or endlessly copied cassette tapes. They enjoy the discolorations, cracks, and noises of these media. This retro-fetishism shows that we find ourselves at an aesthetic turning point; the good quality of the old image is no longer important. Instead, we are attracted to the traces of "old" media, that seem to be absent or at least imperceptible in the "new" media of today. Artists such as Rosa Menkman aim to show and evaluate the flaws that we haven't yet learned to appreciate or even recognize in our new media - the imperfection.

Rosa Menkman (1983, Arnhem, Netherlands) is a leading international theory-practitioner of glitch art. She has written extensively on digital artifacts and noise, including the Glitch Studies Manifesto (2010). Her videos and real-time performances have been included in festivals like Cimatics (Brussels '08 + 09), Blip (Europe and US in 2009), Video Vortex (Amsterdam '08 + Brussels '09), ISEA (Dublin '09) and File (Sao Paolo '10). She was also one of the organizers/curators of the successful GLI.TC/H festival that took place in Chicago in 2010. She has collaborated on art projects and performed together with Alexander Galloway, little-scale, Govcom.org and the Internet art collective, Jodi.org. Menkman received her Master's degree in 2009 and is currently pursuing a practical PhD at the KHM Cologne, writing on the subject of Artifacts.

Roman Jakobson identified various functions of communication in the primary axis between the addresser, the addressee and the message. When communication revolves only around the message itself, it has, according to Jakobson, a poetic function. Such a message does not communicate anything but its structure. Glitch is a radical implementation of this postulate on the grounds of visual arts.