Spanning from all possible images to invisible images, the im/possible images workshop brings together strategies and methods of thinking in how we make things visible. During the im/possible images workshop, we will explore the conditions of image making today, through a consideration of this main question: 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?

In order for an object or thing – light or other type of data – to enter the visible domain and to become an image, it needs to be resolved. It needs to pass through a process involving standards, rules and compromises. As a result, under the fold of our image processing technologies, there is a complex system that constitutes our images and the optical regime we abide by.

The workshop will be partially theoretical, and partially practical, exploring processes of sonifaction and 3D story telling. Please bring your own computer if possible.

Participants must attend the workshop with their laptop.

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher. Her work focuses on noise artifacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media. These artifacts can offer precious insights into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardisation and resolution setting. As a compendium to this research, she published the Glitch Moment/um (inc, 2011), a little book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts.

Menkman developed and highlighted the politics of resolution setting further in a second book titled Beyond Resolution (i.R.D., 2020). In this book, she describes how the standardization of resolutions is a process that generally promotes efficiency, order and functionality in our technologies. But how as a side effect, the setting of resolutions also compromises and obfuscates alternative possibilities. In 2019 Menkman won the Collide, Arts at CERN Barcelona award, which inspired her recent research into im/possible images. In this new research she aims to find new ways to understand, use and perceive through and with our technologies.

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