Rosa MenkmanNL
Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from accidents in both analog 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.
“As an artist, I see it as my responsibility not only to engage critically with the materialities of the digital but to develop a fluid literacy of these constantly mutating infrastructures. Through my practice-based and theoretical research, I aim to uncover speculative, anti-utopic, lost and unseen or simply “too good to be implemented” resolutions; to shed a light on the shadow side of resolutions. Whatever is not captured by our resolutions remains unseen, but it is not necessarily absent.”
beyondresolution.info/12940483 ↗
The Collapse of PAL2010
In The Collapse of PAL, the Angel of History (as conceived by Walter Benjamin in 1940) reflects on the termination of the analog signal PAL (Phase Alternate Line). This death sentence, although executed in silence, is a brutally violent act that leaves many technologies disregarded and ready to fall into obsolescence.
While PAL may now be declared dead — or a zombie signal — the technology still exists as a trace left upon newer and so-called ‘better’ digital technologies that have built upon, appropriated and inherited from it. The Angel realizes that the new DVB signal, chosen over PAL, may be different, yet at the same time also inherently flawed.
