Rosa Menkman
Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from accidents in both analog and digital media.
The journey of her protagonist, the Angel of History—inspired by Paul Klee’s 1920 monoprint, Angelus Novus, and conceptualized by Walter Benjamin in 1940—functions as a foundational framework for her explorations of image processing technologies. As the machines upgrade, the Angel finds herself caught in the ripple of their distortions, unable to render the world around her.
What follows is Destitute Vision, a journey through the realms of digital image processing, traversing spaces that are not fully rendered. At the end of her travels, the Angel embraces her role as Media Archaeologist from the future, compiling her insights on image processing as Resolution Studies.
Complementing her practice, Rosa published Glitch Moment/um (INC, 2011), a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts. She further explored the politics of image processing in Beyond Resolution (i.R.D., 2020). In this book, Rosa describes how the standardization of resolutions promotes efficiency, order, and functionality, but also involves compromises, resulting in the obfuscation of alternative ways of rendering.
From 2010-2012 the GLI.TC/H Bots facilitated a festival/gathering in Chicago, Amsterdam and Birmingham, shoutouts to Nick Briz, Jon Satrom and William Robertson and Antonio Roberts!
In 2019, Rosa won the Collide Arts at CERN Barcelona award, which inspired her recent research into im/possible images, consolidated in the im/possible images reader (published by the i.R.D. & Lothringer, with support from V2, 2022).
From 2018 to 2020, Rosa worked as Substitute Professor of Neue Medien & Visuelle Kommunikation at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. Since 2023, she has been running the Im/Possible Lab at HEAD Geneve. (2025)
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