Arts at CERN

‘Imagine you could obtain an ‘impossible’ image of any object or phenomenon that you think is important, with no limits on spatial, temporal, energy, signal/noise or cost resolutions. What image would you create?’

Artist Rosa Menkman posed this question to scientists during her Collide residency between CERN and Barcelona. The BLOB (Binary Large OBject) presents the outcomes of these dialogues on a webXR platform. Menkman created a low poly rendition of a blob that gives home to possible and impossible images that are very hard or simply impossible to resolve due to limitations in the affordances of our image processing technologies.

Within the BLOB, the collection collectively illustrates Menkman’s concept of the im/possible image. As intersecting axes of affordance define the mechanics of what can be resolved and, consequently, what will not be rendered, we are prompted to question how imaging technologies frame our capacity to negotiate the possible and impossible. Some may have reached our eyes; some may remain unreachable, existing only in the hypothetical nooks of the BLOB, which functions as an archive of Im/Possible images.

The space of all im/possible images is fragmented, organised by affordances, stacked by the history of imaging technology, and consolidated in resolutions. The BLOB offers a space where imaginary propositions are possible. Visitors can think through images as fluid, released from otherwise rigid settings and compromises.