Rosa Menkman

Born 1983 in Arnhem/Netherlands.

Rosa Menkman is an artist and researcher who focusses on visual noise artifacts, resulting from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch, encoding and feedback artifacts). She believes these artifacts can facilitate an important insight into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardization via resolutions, which entail not just the creation of solutions or protocols, but also black-boxed, unseen, forgotten or obfuscated compromises and alternative possibilities. 

A »resolution« generally simply refers to a determination of functional settings in the technological domain. A resolution is indeed an overall agreed upon settlement (solution), however, a resolution also involves a space of compromise between different actors (objects, materialities, and protocols) in dispute over norms (frame rate, number of pixels etc.).

Through her work, Rosa Menkman intends to uncover the ways in which resolutions constantly inform both machine vision and human ways of perception. Moreover, where possible, she creates constructs beyond resolution; frameworks outside of the general rules of capital, to make space for new opportunities, magic and imagination.

Works that illustrate this practice are Vernacular of File Formats (2010), Acousmatic Videoscapes (2007), Collapse of PAL (2010), Xilitla (2012-2013) and the iRD (2015—).