The Tipping Point of Failure: a solo exhibition by Rosa Menkman — Exhibition Catalog text by jonCates (2010)

Rosa Menkman is the consummate theory-practitioner of the ever moving/flowing media art known contentiously enough as Glitch or Glitch Art or Noise or Noise Art or Error or Disruption or Corruption or Loss or Failure or Obsolescence or Disappearance or a not so subtle dance between all these possible poles of existence in, of and between unstable categories…

Glitch — “A form of low frequency interference, appearing as a narrow horizontal bar moving vertically through the picture.”
Video Preservation: Glossary of Terms — Rebecca Bachman (1996)

As Menkman has written, this flow follows a movement over time through media from celluloid to CRTs to phosphor burn-ins to LCD cracks to file formats. Perhaps this flow is not so linear in chronologies but rather is distributed across multitudes of moments. And perhaps these are moments that cannot be recognized immediately as they occur but rather only from the perspectives of Last Angels of Histories.

This flow forward in reverse results in the Glitch or as ‘the spirit of that time of what the glitch was’ or had occurred. At that moment in time and of time-based media… of traces of tracings of what has past… we are left with all hat has been left…