Currently reading: Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl, 2012, eflux Journal, Sternberg Press. Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle.
Part 1/5
The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
http://www.e-flux.com/books/the-wretched-of-the-screen/
pdf: http://thecomposingrooms.com/research/…/e-flux_Hito%20Steyerl_15.pdf
In studying (image) representation of rubbish and the exchange and discarding of images, the politics of image and representation are quite fundamental. Two of her essays in this book are particularly relevant: In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective because of her references to montage and more centrally In Defense of the Poor Image. A couple of notes also come from A Thing Like You and Meand Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation.
Preface: “The digital image is not as ephemeral as one might think, because just as a photograph is lodged in paper, the digital image is lodged in a circulatory system of desire and exchange, which itself relies on a very specific economic regime.” (p.5)
Franco “Bifo” Berardi in the Introduction (p.9) marks 1977 as the “watershed point of de-evolution or de-civilization”. He also talks about the “material legacy of industrialization, sacrificed to religious dogma or god called ‘the markets’”. He pinpoints the second decade of twenty-first century as when “post-bourgeios dilapidation took the final form of a financial black hole.”
“The seductive force of simulation transformed physical forms into vanishing images, submitted visual art to viral spreading, and subjected language to the fake regime of advertising. […] History has been replaced by the endless flowing recombinations of fragmentary images” (p.10).
“It was the 1990s, decade of crazy acceleration when the black hole began to form, that Net culture and recombinant imagination emerged from the ashes of visual art reduced to imaginary spam, and intermingled with media activism. […] Hito Steyerl’s essays in this book are a sort of reconnaissance mission, a cartography in the making of the wasteland of the frozen imagination, but also a cartography of the emerging new sensibility.” (p.11)
continued…
