Rosa Menkman (Dutch, b. 1983) is an artist and researcher whose work examines noise artifacts that result from accidents in analog and digital media, and the compromises built into technical standards of resolution.,Her practice follows the Angel of History, a protagonist inspired by Paul Klee's 1920 monoprint Angelus Novus as conceptualized by Walter Benjamin, through a landscape of obsolete technology and image-processing standards.
In 2011, Menkman published Glitch Moment/um, a book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts,and was among the organizers and presenters of the Gli.tc/h festival, alongside artists including Jon Satrom, Evan Meaney, Jon Cates, and Nick Briz.In the essay The Glitch Art Genre, she described glitch art as “a collection of forms and events that oscillate between extremes: the fragile, technologically based moment(um) of a material break, the conceptual or techno-cultural investigation of breakages, and the accepted and standardised commodity that a glitch can become”.
She extended this research into image-processing politics in the book Beyond Resolution (2020), which examines how standardized resolutions promote efficiency at the cost of obscuring alternative ways of rendering. After winning the 2019 Collide Arts at CERN Barcelona award, Menkman researched what she calls im/possible images, consolidated in the im/possible images reader, published with i.R.D. and Lothringer in 2022.One resulting work, The BLOB of Im/Possible Images (2021), invited physicists and others to posit images that cannot actually exist, which she then rendered as abstractions within an immersive black-and-white online space. It was shown as an installation in the exhibition “Electric Op” at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.From 2018 to 2020, Menkman was Substitute Professor of Neue Medien und Visuelle Kommunikation at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, and since 2023 she has run the Im/Possible Lab at HEAD Geneve.
Menkman's video work The Collapse of PAL (2010) follows the Angel of History as she reflects on the termination of PAL, an analog broadcast signal.The piece was subsequently performed at Transmediale in Germany and the Nova festival in Brazil,and is held in Rhizome's archive.Her installation Spomenik was shown at TRANSFER gallery in New York in 2017.In 2025, her solo exhibition “Image Remains” at Drugo More's Filodrammatica Gallery in Rijeka, Croatia, followed the Angel of History mapping her attempts to reclaim agency within image-processing systems, probing the compromises and glitches that occur when reality is captured, compressed, and computed.
