Rosa Menkman shows CERN's impossible images at V2_'s 45th
A low-poly 3D space holds the pictures scientists said they would take with no limits on resolution.
- When
- Sept. 24 to Oct. 18, 2026, Thursday to Sunday
- Where
- V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, Eendrachtsstraat 10, Rotterdam
"Imagine you could obtain an 'impossible' image of any object or phenomenon that you think is important." That is the question Rosa Menkman put to scientists throughout an Arts at CERN residency in 2019 and 2020. No limits on resolution, energy, noise or cost. What would you make? The answers ended up somewhere you can walk around: The BLOB of Im/Possible Images, a 3D space built on New Art City and commissioned by HEK in Basel in 2021.
A pass over The BLOB of Im/Possible Images on New Art City, clipped from Rosa Menkman's video im/possible Images and the Latent Image space. The full version has sound.
It is on view again through Oct. 18 in Still Unstable, the exhibition V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media has mounted in Rotterdam for its 45th anniversary. V2_'s documentation photos show the piece as a freestanding wall, a black-and-white print crossed by red, green, blue and yellow lines, with a screen mounted on it. It is something of a homecoming: V2_ backed the research with a residency in 2021.
Menkman calls the lines Axes of Affordance. Each one represents a decision in how a picture gets made, and each decision cuts the blob in two: images that can still be rendered and images that never will be. Menkman describes the model as "a low poly rendition of the unquantifiable BLOB," which I love, because the compromise is sitting right there in the mesh.
If Rotterdam is out of reach, the BLOB is still open in a browser.
From left: the wall at V2_, head on; the BLOB cut by its axes on New Art City; the controls guide that greets visitors inside. Images: V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, Rosa Menkman
Walkable arguments about how pictures get made are a Killscreen beat, and almost nobody else's. The free newsletter is where the next one turns up.
