Rosa Menkman

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist, curator and researcher whose work focuses on noise artefacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media (such as glitch, encoding and feedback artefacts). These artefacts can facilitate an important insight into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardization via resolutions.
The standardization of resolutions is a process that generally imposes efficiency, order and functionality on our technologies. It does not just involve the creation of protocols and solutions, but also entails the obfuscation of compromises and the black-boxing of alternative possibilities, which are as a result in the danger of staying forever unseen or even forgotten. Through her research, which is both artistic and theoretical, Menkman wishes to uncover these anti-utopic, lost and unseen or simply "too good to be implemented" resolutions -- to produce new ways to use and perceive through our technologies. 

In 2011 Menkman wrote the Glitch Moment/um, a little book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artefacts, published by the Institute of Network Cultures. In 2015 Menkman started the institutions for Resolution Disputes [iRD]. The iRD are institutions dedicated to researching the interests of anti-utopic, lost and unseen or simply "too good to be implemented" resolutions. Menkman has curated independently and for Sonic Acts (2016-2017).

Rosa Menkman is the recipient of the first Collide International Residency Award, a new edition of our international award. Menkman spent two months at CERN and one month at Fabra i Coats Art Factory, Barcelona (Spain). Menkam conducted field research in continuous dialogue with physicists and engineers on her on-going research of Beyond Resolutions, where Menkman insists on an extended formulation of resolution. “A resolution always involves the inherent compromise of other ways of rendering. And it is through these other ways - not (yet) implemented or supported resolutions - that we need to train to see, run and formulate our alternatives”. Her work Whiteout (2020), is a video essay inspired by her time during the CERN Collide, a climb of the Brocken and a voyage on board of a ship of the Chilean army to Antartica. This work was premiered in her exhibition Shadow Knowledge at SJSU art galleries (US) in March 2020.

Collide is part of the collaborative framework between CERN, the Institute of Culture and Barcelona City Council (2019-2021).