Starting from Mark Twain’s The Canvasser’s Tale (1876), this lecture uses the story as an analogy for the
obsessive collecting practices behind contemporary AI. Drawing from my time at Google Arts & Culture and my interviews with its partners, I examine how data is collected, stored, reused, and changed across large technical systems. As data circulates through these systems, it does not simply return intact, but comes back intentionally or unintentionally degraded, mutated, and reconfigured by algorithmic processes.
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 Angelus Novus (1920) and conceptualized by Walter Benjamin in 1940—forms a 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.
- Website: https://beyondresolution.info/
- Instagram Handle: @_menkman
