Week 2 at Can Serrat, and I’m sitting alone in the studio, huddled close to the radiator, although the view outside is of partly cloudy, partly sunny skies. The sound of the trees rustling and the heaters making occasions clicks is the only noise. I’m mainly sat at my table, reading things and attempting to write things, but keep finding myself starting one text and then abandoning it halfway through and picking up where I left off on another. Either that or wandering off into the woods.
One thing I wanted to mull over a little is a topic I’ve been thinking about alot- the rise of a new breed of images, which are necessarily encoded within language: the images and videos of the internet. These images, in order to be searchable, and therefore to be findable, within the digital drift of the internet, have to have textual elements embedded within them- the first layer being titles and subtitles, the second being metadata, i.e., tags and keywords, allowing them to be read as relative to other images of similar content. I first became aware of this when collecting the titles off stock videos sites; they have whole sections on the art of titling and key-wording which point out that if a customer can’t find your video after inserting their keywords, its game over- the video is worthless and might as well not exist.
In the wider arena of the internet, a similar process occurs, since without this textual information, the visual material is lost in space, adrift with nothing to anchor it to the warmth of human interaction, without a specific address to connect it to. The unfathomable depths of the Internet are probably littered with these images, along with those that were once uploaded somewhere and then lost after your Flickr/ Facebook/ whatever account closed; images of relatively little use or value.
Hito Stereyl, in her essay ‘Poor Images’ talks about the hierarchy of resolution, which casts lo-res images “a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution”. She goes on to discuss the disappearance of “resistant or non-conformist visual matter” from the surface of culture and into an underground of personal archives, in which barter and exchange in and off-line allows the circulation of works otherwise prohibitively expensive for cinema screening and unsuited to TV broadcast. These works have now resurfaced as poor images- copied, compressed, ripped- due as she puts it, to the neo-liberal re-structuring of media production and digital technology, a process which designated certain material ‘low-value’. This is especially relevant now as the UK turns ever more towards a neo-liberal model whereby the arts and humanities are devalued relative to ‘important’ (read money-making) activities such as science, technology and business- what else is going to disappear into the ether?
Although this is a different order of disappearance than the one I started talking about, it also touches on the way images move through the internet and the conditions that affect their smooth movement. The economics of this movement then comes to the fore, and this is something I’ve been thinking about recently- inspired by a passage in Mark Fisher’s book Capitalist Realism.
He quotes Deleuze saying that capitalism is profoundly illiterate, in a passage on the ‘depressive hedonia’ of teenagers in education; “they process capital’s image-dense data very effectively without any need to read- slogan-recognition is sufficient to navigate the net-mobile-magazine informational plane.”
Smooth traversal of this informational plane is, however, dependant on the textual elements that structure, name and organise this image-dense data. Its integral to the linking of one video/ image to the next which constitutes the movement known as surfing.
One of the most interesting aspects about uploading videos into YouTube is seeing what are deemed to be ‘related videos’; related of course by user-defined tags and definitions of content proclaimed through the video. The weary internet traveler is all too familiar with the state of digital drift into the maze of similar images and related videos which this textuality facilitates: the ‘how did I get here?” feeling after an hour of aimless clicking. You never really get where you were trying to go.
