0110 — ATLAS FOR  DESTITUTE VISION

Adopting her newfound role as Media Archaeologist from the future, the Angel finds purpose in compiling her journey through the ecology of resolutions into an Atlas for Destitute Vision, a collection of maps illustrating the hidden frameworks that govern past and future render protocols.

Through the Atlas, the Angel conveys that resolution is not simply about quantity, clarity or fidelity; to resolve means to filter, to deploy lenses, and to accept blind spots.

Just as  blur - or lack of resolution - can indicate censorship or governance, a glitch may reveal not just a break, but a complexity in formatting. While the world around her has shifted to synthetic resolutions optimized by machines for machines, favoring dynamic abstraction, efficiency, and automation. The Atlas maps an ecology of resolutions, capturing their dynamic, constantly evolving procedural materiality, genealogies, scale, scope, dissemination, and qualitative receptions.



Maps in the Atlas for  Destitute Vision:

- Vernacular of File Formats
- Ecology of Compression Complexities
- Lexicon of Glitch Affect
- im/possible Images
- De/Calibration Army
- Spectrum of Lost and Un/Named colours
- FF D8 De/Calibration Target

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De/Calibration Target (2023) was curated by Nora O’ Murchú produced by Transmediale with financial support of Stimuleringsfonds


︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  


Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from accidents in both analogue 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.

Complementing her practice, she 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.

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. Class materials can be found here; please copy <it> right!.

Recent work can be found in this pdf portfolio.
This website was made possible with the financial support of the Stimuleringsfonds.nl (2018)
I am grateful to have received a basis stipend from the Mondriaan Fund (2018-2021) and just recently: 2023 - 2027!
︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎  ︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ ︎