In Defense Of The Poor Image Summary

Co-workers: Network as Artists ran in 2016 at the Musee D’Art Monderne. Like Crimp’s ‘Pictures’, this show collects artists that work with images appropriated from visual culture. The show contextualized itself as responding to the contemporary “mode of communication hinged on an uninterrupted flow of information.” This information surplus is due to the constant network of digital presence we experience on account of internet and mobile technologies. Co-workers adheres to the notion of ‘Ambient-Intelligence.’ This contains a suggestion that intelligence and consciousness are not unique to the human experience. Not that the art-objects included are capable of active thought, but rather that a complexity that outstrips our definition of agency

Tracing how their usage develops and is perpetuated through internet culture, she constructs an alternative reading of the post-aura image as enabling worldwide distribution of the means of production. Steyerl describes the poor image as “a copy in motion. It’s quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of

Developments in image making technologies also enable internet users to create new content without engaging in elite structures of education. People pirating, re-coding and ‘misusing’ editing technology has enabled the participation of more producers than ever before in the making of visual cultural. The internet channels that support this content embody a new public sphere. Political discourse is less concrete without the support of the national but “floats on the surface or temporary and dubious data pools.” Users are not all active in re-negotiating media towards progressive ends. Capitalizing on the social freedom of anonymity, users engage in practices of remixing and appropriation to disseminate spam, hate speech and trolling. The ideas that inform internet abstraction originate as much in the parts of the web where pornography and criminal activity are curated as they do anywhere