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.”
