Hito Steyerl

In Defense ofthe Poor Image

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality isbad, its resolution substandard. As itaccelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of animage, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, anitinerant image distributed for free, squeezedthrough slow digital connections, compressed,reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copiedand pasted into other channels of distribution.          The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or aJPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class societyof appearances, ranked and valued according toits resolution. The poor image has beenuploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, andreedited. It transforms quality into accessibility,exhibition value into cult value, films into clips,contemplation into distraction. The image isliberated from the vaults of cinemas andarchives and thrust into digital uncertainty, atthe expense of its own substance. The poorimage tends towards abstraction: it is a visualidea in its very becoming.           The poor image is an illicit fifth-generationbastard of an original image. Its genealogy isdubious. Its filenames are deliberatelymisspelled. It often defies patrimony, nationalculture, or indeed copyright. It is passed on as alure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of itsformer visual self. It mocks the promises ofdigital technology. Not only is it often degradedto the point of being just a hurried blur, one evendoubts whether it could be called an image at all.Only digital technology could produce such adilapidated image in the first place.           Poor images are the contemporaryWretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisualproduction, the trash that washes up on thedigital economies’ shores. They testify to theviolent dislocation, transferrals, anddisplacement of images – their acceleration andcirculation within the vicious cycles ofaudiovisual capitalism. Poor images are draggedaround the globe as commodities or theireffigies, as gifts or as bounty. They spreadpleasure or death threats, conspiracy theories orbootlegs, resistance or stultification. Poorimages show the rare, the obvious, and theunbelievable – that is, if we can still manage todecipher it.

1. Low ResolutionsIn one of Woody Allen’s films the main characteris out of focus.1 It’s not a technical problem butsome sort of disease that has befallen him: hisimage is consistently blurred. Since Allen’scharacter is an actor, this becomes a majorproblem: he is unable to find work. His lack ofdefinition turns into a material problem. Focus isidentified as a class position, a position of easeand privilege, while being out of focus lowersone’s value as an image.

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Shoveling pirated DVDs in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, China, April 20, 2008.

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Nine 35mm film frames from Stan Brakhage’s Existence is Song, 1987.

          The contemporary hierarchy of images,however, is not only based on sharpness, butalso and primarily on resolution. Just look at anyelectronics store and this system, described byHarun Farocki in a notable 2007 interview,becomes immediately apparent.2 In the classsociety of images, cinema takes on the role of aflagship store. In flagship stores high-endproducts are marketed in an upscaleenvironment. More affordable derivatives of thesame images circulate as DVDs, on broadcasttelevision or online, as poor images.           Obviously, a high-resolution image looksmore brilliant and impressive, more mimetic andmagic, more scary and seductive than a poorone. It is more rich, so to speak. Now, evenconsumer formats are increasingly adapting tothe tastes of cineastes and esthetes, whoinsisted on 35 mm film as a guarantee of pristinevisuality. The insistence upon analog film as thesole medium of visual importance resoundedthroughout discourses on cinema, almostregardless of their ideological inflection. It nevermattered that these high-end economies of filmproduction were (and still are) firmly anchored insystems of national culture, capitalist studioproduction, the cult of mostly male genius, andthe original version, and thus are often

conservative in their very structure. Resolutionwas fetishized as if its lack amounted tocastration of the author. The cult of film gaugedominated even independent film production.The rich image established its own set ofhierarchies, with new technologies offering moreand more possibilities to creatively degrade it.

2. Resurrection (as Poor Images)But insisting on rich images also had moreserious consequences. A speaker at a recentconference on the film essay refused to showclips from a piece by Humphrey Jenningsbecause no proper film projection was available.Although there was at the speaker’s disposal aperfectly standard DVD player and videoprojector, the audience was left to imagine whatthose images might have looked like.           In this case the invisibility of the image wasmore or less voluntary and based on aestheticpremises. But it has a much more generalequivalent based on the consequences ofneoliberal policies. Twenty or even thirty yearsago, the neoliberal restructuring of mediaproduction began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point whereexperimental and essayistic cinema becamealmost invisible. As it became prohibitively

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expensive to keep these works circulating incinemas, so were they also deemed too marginalto be broadcast on television. Thus they slowlydisappeared not just from cinemas, but from thepublic sphere as well. Video essays andexperimental films remained for the most partunseen save for some rare screenings inmetropolitan film museums or film clubs,projected in their original resolution beforedisappearing again into the darkness of thearchive.           This development was of course connectedto the neoliberal radicalization of the concept ofculture as commodity, to the commercializationof cinema, its dispersion into multiplexes, andthe marginalization of independent filmmaking.It was also connected to the restructuring ofglobal media industries and the establishment ofmonopolies over the audiovisual in certaincountries or territories. In this way, resistant ornon-conformist visual matter disappeared fromthe surface into an underground of alternativearchives and collections, kept alive only by anetwork of committed organizations andindividuals, who would circulate bootlegged VHScopies amongst themselves. Sources for thesewere extremely rare – tapes moved from hand tohand, depending on word of mouth, within circles

of friends and colleagues. With the possibility tostream video online, this condition started todramatically change. An increasing number ofrare materials reappeared on publicly accessibleplatforms, some of them carefully curated(Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff (YouTube).           At present, there are at least twentytorrents of Chris Marker’s film essays availableonline. If you want a retrospective, you can haveit. But the economy of poor images is about morethan just downloads: you can keep the files,watch them again, even reedit or improve them ifyou think it necessary. And the results circulate.Blurred AVI files of half-forgotten masterpiecesare exchanged on semi-secret P2P platforms.Clandestine cell-phone videos smuggled out ofmuseums are broadcast on YouTube. DVDs ofartists’ viewing copies are bartered.3 Many worksof avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercialcinema have been resurrected as poor images.Whether they like it or not.

3. Privatization and PiracyThat rare prints of militant, experimental, andclassical works of cinema as well as video artreappear as poor images is significant onanother level. Their situation reveals much morethan the content or appearance of the images

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Chris Marker’s virtual home on Second Life, May 29, 2009.

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themselves: it also reveals the conditions of theirmarginalization, the constellation of socialforces leading to their online circulation as poorimages.4 Poor images are poor because they arenot assigned any value within the class society ofimages – their status as illicit or degraded grantsthem exemption from its criteria. Their lack ofresolution attests to their appropriation anddisplacement.5           Obviously, this condition is not onlyconnected to the neoliberal restructuring ofmedia production and digital technology; it alsohas to do with the post-socialist andpostcolonial restructuring of nation states, theircultures, and their archives. While some nationstates are dismantled or fall apart, new culturesand traditions are invented and new historiescreated. This obviously also affects film archives– in many cases, a whole heritage of film printsis left without its supporting framework ofnational culture. As I once observed in the caseof a film museum in Sarajevo, the nationalarchive can find its next life in the form of avideo-rental store.6 Pirate copies seep out ofsuch archives through disorganized privatization.On the other hand, even the British Library sellsoff its contents online at astronomical prices.           As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor imagescirculate partly in the void left by state-cinemaorganizations who find it too difficult to operateas a 16/35-mm archive or to maintain any kind ofdistribution infrastructure in the contemporaryera.7 From this perspective, the poor imagereveals the decline and degradation of the filmessay, or indeed any experimental and non-commercial cinema, which in many places wasmade possible because the production of culturewas considered a task of the state. Privatizationof media production gradually grew moreimportant than state controlled/sponsoredmedia production. But, on the other hand, therampant privatization of intellectual content,along with online marketing andcommodification, also enable piracy andappropriation; it gives rise to the circulation ofpoor images.

4. Imperfect CinemaThe emergence of poor images reminds one of aclassic Third Cinema manifesto, For an ImperfectCinema, by Juan García Espinosa, written inCuba in the late 1960s.8 Espinosa argues for animperfect cinema because, in his words, “perfectcinema – technically and artistically masterful –is almost always reactionary cinema.” Theimperfect cinema is one that strives to overcomethe divisions of labor within class society. Itmerges art with life and science, blurring thedistinction between consumer and producer,audience and author. It insists upon its own

imperfection, is popular but not consumerist,committed without becoming bureaucratic.           In his manifesto, Espinosa also reflects onthe promises of new media. He clearly predictsthat the development of video technology willjeopardize the elitist position of traditionalfilmmakers and enable some sort of mass filmproduction: an art of the people. Like theeconomy of poor images, imperfect cinemadiminishes the distinctions between author andaudience and merges life and art. Most of all, itsvisuality is resolutely compromised: blurred,amateurish, and full of artifacts.          In some way, the economy of poor imagescorresponds to the description of imperfectcinema, while the description of perfect cinemarepresents rather the concept of cinema as aflagship store. But the real and contemporaryimperfect cinema is also much more ambivalentand affective than Espinosa had anticipated. Onthe one hand, the economy of poor images, withits immediate possibility of worldwidedistribution and its ethics of remix andappropriation, enables the participation of amuch larger group of producers than ever before.But this does not mean that these opportunitiesare only used for progressive ends. Hate speech,spam, and other rubbish make their way throughdigital connections as well. Digitalcommunication has also become one of the mostcontested markets – a zone that has long beensubjected to an ongoing original accumulationand to massive (and, to a certain extent,successful) attempts at privatization.           The networks in which poor imagescirculate thus constitute both a platform for afragile new common interest and a battlegroundfor commercial and national agendas. Theycontain experimental and artistic material, butalso incredible amounts of porn and paranoia.While the territory of poor images allows accessto excluded imagery, it is also permeated by themost advanced commodification techniques.While it enables the users’ active participation inthe creation and distribution of content, it alsodrafts them into production. Users become theeditors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors ofpoor images.           Poor images are thus popular images –images that can be made and seen by the many.They express all the contradictions of thecontemporary crowd: its opportunism,narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, itsinability to focus or make up its mind, itsconstant readiness for transgression andsimultaneous submission.9 Altogether, poorimages present a snapshot of the affectivecondition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia,and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun,and distraction. The condition of the images

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Thomas Ruff, jpeg rl104, 2007.

speaks not only of countless transfers andreformattings, but also of the countless peoplewho cared enough about them to convert themover and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, orupload them.           In this light, perhaps one has to redefine thevalue of the image, or, more precisely, to create anew perspective for it. Apart from resolution andexchange value, one might imagine another formof value defined by velocity, intensity, andspread. Poor images are poor because they areheavily compressed and travel quickly. They losematter and gain speed. But they also express acondition of dematerialization, shared not onlywith the legacy of conceptual art but above allwith contemporary modes of semioticproduction.10 Capital’s semiotic turn, asdescribed by Felix Guattari,11 plays in favor of thecreation and dissemination of compressed andflexible data packages that can be integratedinto ever-newer combinations and sequences.12

          This flattening-out of visual content – theconcept-in-becoming of the images – positionsthem within a general informational turn, withineconomies of knowledge that tear images andtheir captions out of context into the swirl ofpermanent capitalist deterritorialization.13 Thehistory of conceptual art describes this

dematerialization of the art object first as aresistant move against the fetish value ofvisibility. Then, however, the dematerialized artobject turns out to be perfectly adapted to thesemioticization of capital, and thus to theconceptual turn of capitalism.14 In a way, thepoor image is subject to a similar tension. On theone hand, it operates against the fetish value ofhigh resolution. On the other hand, this isprecisely why it also ends up being perfectlyintegrated into an information capitalism thrivingon compressed attention spans, on impressionrather than immersion, on intensity rather thancontemplation, on previews rather thanscreenings.

5. Comrade, what is your visual bondtoday?

But, simultaneously, a paradoxical reversalhappens. The circulation of poor images createsa circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions ofmilitant and (some) essayistic and experimentalcinema – to create an alternative economy ofimages, an imperfect cinema existing inside aswell as beyond and under commercial mediastreams. In the age of file-sharing, evenmarginalized content circulates again andreconnects dispersed worldwide audiences.

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          The poor image thus constructs anonymousglobal networks just as it creates a sharedhistory. It builds alliances as it travels, provokestranslation or mistranslation, and creates newpublics and debates. By losing its visualsubstance it recovers some of its political punchand creates a new aura around it. This aura is nolonger based on the permanence of the“original,” but on the transience of the copy. It isno longer anchored within a classical publicsphere mediated and supported by the frame ofthe nation state or corporation, but floats on thesurface of temporary and dubious data pools.15

By drifting away from the vaults of cinema, it ispropelled onto new and ephemeral screensstitched together by the desires of dispersedspectators.          The circulation of poor images thus creates“visual bonds,” as Dziga Vertov once calledthem.16 This “visual bond” was, according toVertov, supposed to link the workers of the worldwith each other.17 He imagined a sort ofcommunist, visual, Adamic language that couldnot only inform or entertain, but also organize itsviewers. In a sense, his dream has come true, ifmostly under the rule of a global informationcapitalism whose audiences are linked almost ina physical sense by mutual excitement, affectiveattunement, and anxiety.           But there is also the circulation andproduction of poor images based on cell phonecameras, home computers, and unconventionalforms of distribution. Its optical connections –collective editing, file sharing, or grassrootsdistribution circuits – reveal erratic andcoincidental links between producerseverywhere, which simultaneously constitutedispersed audiences.           The circulation of poor images feeds intoboth capitalist media assembly lines andalternative audiovisual economies. In addition toa lot of confusion and stupefaction, it alsopossibly creates disruptive movements ofthought and affect. The circulation of poorimages thus initiates another chapter in thehistorical genealogy of nonconformistinformation circuits: Vertov’s “visual bonds,” theinternationalist workers pedagogies that PeterWeiss described in The Aesthetics of Resistance,the circuits of Third Cinema andTricontinentalism, of non-aligned filmmakingand thinking. The poor image – ambivalent as itsstatus may be – thus takes its place in thegenealogy of carbon-copied pamphlets, cine-train agit-prop films, underground videomagazines and other nonconformist materials,which aesthetically often used poor materials.Moreover, it reactualizes many of the historicalideas associated with these circuits, amongothers Vertov’s idea of the visual bond.

          Imagine somebody from the past with aberet asking you, “Comrade, what is your visualbond today?”          You might answer: it is this link to thepresent.

6. Now!The poor image embodies the afterlife of manyformer masterpieces of cinema and video art. Ithas been expelled from the sheltered paradisethat cinema seems to have once been.18 Afterbeing kicked out of the protected and oftenprotectionist arena of national culture, discardedfrom commercial circulation, these works havebecome travelers in a digital no-man’s land,constantly shifting their resolution and format,speed and media, sometimes even losing namesand credits along the way.           Now many of these works are back – aspoor images, I admit. One could of course arguethat this is not the real thing, but then – please,anybody – show me this real thing.          The poor image is no longer about the realthing – the originary original. Instead, it is aboutits own real conditions of existence: aboutswarm circulation, digital dispersion, fracturedand flexible temporalities. It is about defianceand appropriation just as it is about conformismand exploitation.           In short: it is about reality.          !An earlier version of this text was improvised in a response atthe “Essayfilm – Ästhetik und Aktualität” conference inLüneburg, Germany, organized by Thomas Tode and SvenKramer in 2007. The text benefitted tremendously from theremarks and comments of Third Text guest editor KodwoEshun, who commissioned a longer version for an issue ofThird Text on Chris Marker and Third Cinema to appear in2010 (co-edited by Ros Grey). Another substantial inspirationfor this text was the exhibition “Dispersion” at the ICA inLondon (curated by Polly Staple in 2008), which included abrilliant reader edited by Staple and Richard Birkett. The textalso benefitted greatly from Brian Kuan Wood’s editorialwork.

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Hito Steyerl is a filmmaker and writer. She teachesNew Media Art at University of Arts Berlin and hasrecently participated in Documenta 12, ShanghaiBiennial, and Rotterdam Film Festival.

      1Deconstructing Harry, directedby Woody Allen (1997).

      2“Wer Gemälde wirklich sehenwill, geht ja schließlich auch insMuseum,” FrankfurterAllgemeine Zeitung, June 14,2007. Conversation betweenHarun Farocki and AlexanderHorwath.

      3Sven Lütticken’s excellent text“Viewing Copies: On the Mobilityof Moving Images,” in e-fluxjournal, no. 8 (May 2009), drewmy attention to this aspect ofpoor images. See http://e-flux.com/journal/vi ew/75.

      4Thanks to Kodwo Eshun forpointing this out.

      5Of course in some cases imageswith low resolution also appearin mainstream mediaenvironments (mainly news),where they are associated withurgency, immediacy, andcatastrophe – and are extremelyvaluable. See Hito Steyerl,“Documentary Uncertainty,” APrior 15 (2007),http://magazines.documenta.de/frontend/article.php?IdLanguage=1&NrArticle=584.

      6Hito Steyerl, “Politics of theArchive: Translations in Film,”Transversal (March 2008),http://eipcp.net/transversal/0608/steyerl/en.

      7From correspondence with theauthor via e-mail.

      8Julio García Espinosa, “For anImperfect Cinema,” trans.Julianne Burton, Jump Cut, no.20 (1979): 24–26.

      9See Paolo Virno, A Grammar ofthe Multitude: For an Analysis ofContemporary Forms of Life(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,2004).

      10See Alex Alberro, Conceptual Artand the Politics ofPublicity(Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2003).

      11See Félix Guattari, “Capital asthe Integral of PowerFormations,” in Soft Subversions(New York: Semiotext(e), 1996),202.

      12All these developments arediscussed in detail in anexcellent text by Simon Sheikh,“Objects of Study orCommodification of Knowledge?Remarks on Artistic Research,”Art & Research 2, no. 2 (Spring2009),http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/sheikh.html.

      13

See also Alan Sekula, “Readingan Archive: Photographybetween Labour and Capital,” inVisual Culture: The Reader, ed.Stuart Hall and Jessica Evans(London/New York: Routledge1999), 181–192.

      14See Alberro, Conceptual Art andthe Politics of Publicity.

      15The Pirate Bay even seems tohave tried acquiring theextraterritorial oil platform ofSealand in order to install itsservers there. See Jan Libbenga,“The Pirate Bay plans to buySealand,” The Register, January12, 2007,http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/01/12/pirate_bay_buys_island.

      16Dziga Vertov, “Kinopravda andRadiopravda,” in Kino-Eye: TheWritings of Dziga Vertov, ed.Annette Michelson (Berkeley:University of California Press,1995), 52.

      17Vertov, “Kinopravda andRadiopravda,” 52.

      18At least from the perspective ofnostalgic delusion.

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