Rubbish

Currently reading: Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl, 2012, eflux Journal, Sternberg Press. Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle.

Part 3/5

In Defense of the Poor Image

Steyerl makes a kind of manifesto or definition for the poor image:

“The poor image is a copy in motion. […] The poor image is a rag or rip; an avi or a jep. […] The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. […] The poor image is an illicit fifth generation bastard of the original image. […] Only digital technology could produce such a dilapidated image in the first place. […] Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up the digital economies’ shores.” (p.32)

So, poor images are rubbish, at the bottom of the value hierarchy.

“Contemporary hierarchy of images is not only based on sharpness but also and primarily on resolution.” (p.33)

“Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within society of images – their status as illicit or degraded grants them exception from this criteria.” (p.38)

The drawings I made for my Rubbish Newspaper are the poor image versions of the originals. The ‘originals’ are the physical sculptures and installation, photographed they are ‘degraded’ once, hand drawn by me they are ‘degraded’ twice – information lost and their pictorial essence reduced to a very basic line drawing. Then they are scanned and computer-manipulated; the pen lines made solid pixel lines and greyscale fills added. A representation of a representation of a representation. An impression. They are computerised icons or symbols for the real thing. If you know the real thing and are familiar with what that looks like, the drawings function as signifiers. If not, they are just poor images.

In defining the value of the (poor) image, Steyerl looks to resolution and exchange value, also “velocity, intensity and spread (dematerialization) – as a legacy of conceptual art and contemporary modes of semiotic production.” She positions this in the general information turn, “within economies of knowledge that for images and their caption out of context into the swirl of permanent capitalist deterritorialization.” (p.41)

Her conclusion: “After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a digital no-man’s land, constantly shifting their resolution and format. Speed and media, sometimes even losing name sand credits along the way. […] The poor image is no longer about the real thing – the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality.”

Currently reading: Wretched of the Screen by Hito Steyerl, 2012, eflux Journal, Sternberg Press. Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle.

Part 2/5

In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective (p.12)

Steyerl discusses that with the abundance ofaerial views, overviews, Google map views and satellite views, “we also notice the decreasing importance of a paradigm of visuality that long dominated our vision: linear perspective.” She notes that our modern sense of time and space are based upon the stable horizon line. (p.14)

She goes on to say that in the twentieth century, “Cinema supplements photography with the articulation of different temporal perspectives. Montage becomes a perfect device for destabilizing the observer’s perspective and breaking down linear time.”

This is the cinematic device I choose to use in Rubbish (2011), for these reasons. There is no linear narrative – only images or rubbish flashing up on the screen in quick succession you hardly focus on one before the next appears.

Steyerl argues that there is a new vertical perspective, “the former distinction between subject and object exacerbated and turned into the oneway gaze of superiors to inferiors, from high to low. (p.24) This leads her to discuss the Politics of Verticality that she sees as a “metonymy for the more general verticalization of class relations in context of intensified class warfare from above. […] We no longer know whether we are objects or subjects as we spiral down in imperceptible freefall (assuming there is no ground, even those on the bottom of hierarchies keep falling). (p.26)

Back to the notion of montage (p.27), Stetyerl argues “Montage was the first step in liberalisation from cinematic linear perspective […] Similar things can be said about multiscreen projections, which create dynamic viewing space, dispersing perspective and possible points of views. […] The viewer is no longer unified by such a gaze, but is rather dissociated and overwhelmed, drafted into the production of content. None of these projection spaces suppose a unified horizon. Rather, many call for a multiple spectator who must be created and recreated by ever-new articulations of the crowd.

The viewer of Rubbish is (in multiplicity) the content generator as many Collections of the rubbish featured were of other people’s rubbish – what they chose to “donate to the museum”. If I were to make a video anew for every new Collection, and especially if this process was automated, then this would fit even more perfectly with Stereyl’s concept of liberalised cinema.

Steyerl concludes by turning to a positive (p.27): “What seemed like a helpless tumble into an abyss actually turns out to be a new representational freedom.” […] Falling means ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe. Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condition that turns people into things and vice versa. […] Perspective of free fall teaches us to consider a social and political dreamscape of radicalized class war from above, one that throws jaw-dropping social inequalities into sharp focus. […] But falling does not mean falling apart, it can also mean a new certainty falling into place.

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…

Currently watching: Garbage Warrior (2007), 86 mins, dir Oliver Hodge.

“What do beer cans, car tires and water bottles have in common? Not much unless you’re renegade architect Michael Reynolds, in which case they are tools of choice for producing thermal mass and energy-independent housing. For 30 years New Mexico-based Reynolds and his green disciples have devoted their time to advancing the art of “Earthship Biotecture” by building self-sufficient, off-the-grid communities where design and function converge in eco-harmony.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNYFlcV9R1w

Simon Woolham at Paper Gallery put me onto this documentary after our rubbish conversation in Stockholm. With the current ‘eco chic’ ‘upcycling’ trends doing the rounds on social media, my timelines are often filled with designs from the old student classics-suddenly-cool-again pallets made into tables and old tyres made into planters to more crafty and aestheticised designs such as coat hooks made from old cutlery. Whilst the former is very function orientated, in that it’s using cheap/free and abundant materials to hand that have ideal properties for their reuse, the latter take on a more superficial upcycling design aesthetic. These things look cool in spotlit studios against a white backdrop but place them in an ordinary home full of average consumer items they might look a bit silly with a few bent forks sticking out of the wall.

But the reduce, reuse and recycle ethos has to start somewhere, and a few bent forks might lead to completely reconsidering the consumer tat next to it and the whole nature of the identical chocolate box house it all resides in.

The documentary subject Mike Reynolds didn’t exactly take this path of eco-living enlightenment as he started from the architecture itself. He comments that the traditional practice of architecture barely takes into account the environment or the people that inhabit it. Looking for self-sustainable means of living, he has devised a couple of techniques to build housing termed biotecture (n. 1. the profession of designing buildings and environments with consideration for their sustainability. 2. A combination of biology and architecture.):

Can bricks: beer cans wired together like a brick six-pack and compacted with dirt.

Tyre bricks: bigger versions of the can bricks with compacted dirt in each tyre.

These 2 units can be used to build walls or even domes and can be covered over or left to reveal the recycled materials. Reynolds talks about his revelation of how walls using these materials are excellent at retaining heat (thermal mass) so that even in winter additionally heating sources are not required.

Glass and plastic bottle windows: a la Stig of the Dump, bottle are placed on their sides so the light filters through the base of the bottle. Reynolds comments the coloured bottles look like gems.

Being aware of natural light has enabled Reynolds to build houses with South facing pane windows harnessing the maximum amount of light and enough to see by in daylight hours throughout the house as well as grow food all year round.

Other key elements to his designs include roof design and guttering to collect enough water to self-water the greenhouse and be purified for consumption, solar panels for sustainable power.

The decades of work and refining his designs with teams of enthusiastic people around him to help has resulted in ideal self-sustaining homes, cheap to make, and completely off-grid. The documentary shows him try and navigate the US legal system to enable this kind house building for everyone who wants it. It fails due to massive bureaucracy of the system.

The film follows him and a team to India’s Andaman Islands after a devastating tsunami. The local infrastructure and housing is destroyed and the local population has been reduced to a fraction. Reynolds and his team build self-sustaining buildings with the local community, showing them how to do it themselves after they have gone back home. Reynolds is obviously delighted to have been able to make a difference here, and comments on the contrast between how easy it is to implement new designs on a community scale here, whereas in a supposedly first world country it has proved an arduous and unfruitful journey.

http://www.garbagewarrior.com/

Museum of Contemporary Rubbish at Venn Projects, Blackpool, 14 March – 7 April 2014

Museum of Contemporary Rubbish has been invited to show at Venn Projects in Blackpool. The MoCR has made a Blackpool Collection for this exhibition, available as postcards, which feature alongside the Rubbish video documenting over 500 items in Collections from all over the UK, Germany, Italy, the US and Cuba.

The newly published Rubbish Newspaper (pdf download, 32.4MB) will also available at the exhibition.

Preview: Friday 14 March 6-8pm

Exhibition continues until 7 April 2014.

Gallery opening times: 9:30am-4:30pm Mon/Weds/Fri