In 2009, Hito Steyerl, a media philosopher, artist, and professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, wrote a landmark essay In Defense of the Poor Image, highlighting several important characteristics inherent in digital images circulating on the Internet. These are low-quality, edited, processed images distributed mainly through social networks, forums, and pirate sites. These are homemade video clips, reports captured on a mobile phone, gif animations used to express emotions, memes, humorous collages. In the chaos of images, the limits of high and low, private and political, are mixed. It is impossible to establish when and by whom this or that image was first used, what context it originated, what it reported. And it ceases to make any difference. Any image leaked to the global network does not belong to anyone, and everyone can use it simultaneously. With the video How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File, Hito Steyerl attempts to explain and rehabilitate this layer of visual culture. She sees cultural significance and political potential behind the poor quality and disorderly distribution of poor images.
For a long time, video production was an occupation for the elite, requiring expensive equipment. The changes came with a new technological breakthrough: a smartphone with a high-resolution camera has ceased to be a means of luxury. The second stage of the turn is associated with social networks’ emergence because the liveliest communication occurs through images. A new round of capitalism dictated the impetus for this breakthrough. The rise of poor pictures was led by the fetishization of images and active Internet marketing, which stimulated consumption. Resolution and high definition are the standards that any commercial image strives for. Through the mass media, these high-quality images openly influence the construction of everyday reality while remaining agents of the consumer system.
“Bad” pictures rejected by the market are banished to the underground and resurrected as poor images. Steyerl writes: “A poor image is a lumpen proletarian in a class society of images” (Steyerl par. 32). Douglas writes about one of the pillars of the visual culture of the Internet – memes: “Internet memes are based on the ideals of non-market network solidarity and free the work from the need to be a glamorous marketed object” (Douglas 324). In the video Hito Steyerl illustrates her point: she shows no images that remain untouchable; there is no picture of reality that cannot be challenged, supplemented, or, if desired, ridiculed. The concepts of “original” and “copy” lose their meaning; nothing is copied but endlessly reproduced, supplemented, edited, and imitated. The initial state does not matter, and the final form does not exist. That is why her video does not assume the final frame. If in traditional cinema the signal for the end of the film would be the command ” cut!”, then where poor images flourish, there is simply no one to say it.
The escape of images from hierarchies and economic control has led to the rebirth of the Internet, an environment free from all forms of officialdom. It is anonymous, based on universal equality, accumulating its own unique laughing culture, that is, deeply carnival in nature. Poor image, denying any rules and prohibitions, strengthens the position of the all-pervading carnival. Like the carnival, it is hostile to any perpetuation, completion, and end. As Steyerl writes: “Losing its visual density, it regains its political power and forms a new aura around it.” (Steyerl par. 42). And at the same time, in the poor image, there is always a void that has potency, waiting for it to be filled with new content so that the image can be reborn. In a bad image, constant inconsistencies and metamorphoses can also be observed: sadness turns into joy, aggression-into irony, intolerance-into longing for freedom.
The poor image always wears a mask and is itself at the same time a thousand masks. Perhaps the invisibility from the video can also be considered a kind of mask. It can clarify something about the poor image since it is itself to some extent such. This is an illustrative example that expresses the ideology of hacktivism, Internet piracy, and cyber-anarchy, which can symbolize an anonymous protest against a totalitarian government. If any attempt to assert itself is a form of a mask, then the number of shows is potentially infinite. In a sense, the invisibility mask’s story is the story of the poor image. The disputed copyright object gives a common identity to people who feel the need not only for anonymity but also for representation. The poor image becomes a universal way to talk about yourself and to talk in general. This is a visual idea in its formation, innumerable forms of presenting yourself to the world.
Video clips of movies on YouTube were initially a synopsis of the most striking episodes. They were one of the types of Internet communication that allows you to exchange impressions. But at a certain point, anonymous authors began to express the need to express themselves on top of the original image. So, there is one of the most intriguing forms of life of the poor image. Alternate history is created from remounted frames with redrawn and re-superimposed replicas. The poor image involves broader groups of people in the communication process because they get the opportunity to consume and produce images independently. Rich images, speaking in the name of the prevailing truth, often inculcate identity. The poor images represent a window of opportunity through which identity can be built independently based on at least a little more freedom. Through freely distributed images, collective ideals are expressed that are not distorted by the demands of political, economic, or ideological expediency.
The inner need for the creation of life and the appearance of its new faces determines an essential feature of media reality – the lack of desire for incrimination. Before our eyes, the drama turns into a comedy, the outcast – into the protagonist. Douglas writes: “It is precise because of the development of media literally in the last 5-10 years that it is essential to recognize the human imagination as a social force that can reconstruct reality” (Douglas 340). The bad image is assembled from the swift, mocking images, sly masks stolen from reality, and re-educated heroes. In the video, the invisibility mask became a manifestation for those who lost the opportunity to influence their lives. Anonymity in her revealed itself as universality, as an opportunity to be seen at last. In a society where unique identity is suppressed, the absence of a face has become a way to speak out: behind the mask is not emptiness, but anything.
Steyerl gives new characteristics of image value – speed, intensity, and breadth of propagation. Tension refers to the brevity in one small fragment of an intense emotion, thought, or experience. Also, poor images represent countless people who care so much about these fragments that they spend their time-modifying, editing, adding subtitles, uploading, and distributing them (Steyerl). Poor images are ambivalent and dangerous because they help to build the fragile world of a freer human community and manifest themselves as agents of capitalism. On the one hand there is an accessibility, on the other-intrusiveness; on the one hand – a confidential conversation; on the other – hate speech. Exposing injustice is the spread of paranoia, protesting against corrupt government is false propaganda. That leads to the emancipation of the body, and as a result, to the dominance of pornography, free information is interconnected with aggressive commercial spam. “An impression, not an immersion. Brightness, not contemplation ” (Steyerl par. 94). The poor image is equally about all this, and therefore, says Steyerl, it is about reality.
Above, the word “resurrection” was used about the poor image. Resurrection is life after death, and this reveals another property of the poor image: its indestructibility. In the video the author states: “Invisibility hides something more than space. Under it is an idea. And ideas don’t die. ” Is the poor image capable of dying in the age of social media, drones distributing Wi-Fi directly from the sky, tablets, smartphones, blogs, and microblogs? In the age when even the most insignificant images, like a picture of a breakfast or a beautifully crumpled cigarette butt, cause genuine interest and a series of imitations. It still remains to be seen what ideas a bad image can provide.
Works Cited
Douglas, Nick. “It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic.” Journal of Visual Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, 2014, pp. 314-339.
“How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File.” YouTube, uploaded by Lekelly99, 2017, Web.
Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” e-flux, vol. 10, no. 1, 2009, Web.