Summary of "In defense of the poor image"

A short summary of Steyerl's concept of the poor image

Hito Steyerl defines the poor image as a copy of an image that continuously changes and deteriorates in quality and resolution. This kind of images in fact are most of the time barely a ghost since they have been formatted and essentially remixed an uncountable number of times. Poor images have exchanged their quality for their accessibility, for this reason they tend towards abstraction.They challenge and resist to all forms of property and testify the continuous movement of images that happens in audiovisual capitalism. An image with a bad resolution is considered less valuable in a hierarchy that is governed by strong and stable studio productions mainly concerned with the commercialization of the image and profits. This type of hierarchies, brought to their extreme by neoliberal policies and the ongoing privatization and monopolization of audiovisual production, made experimental cinema basically invisible and segregated from the mainstream. With the advent of video online this situation drastically changed, rare materials that were before impossible to find now reappear as video art.

Juan Garcia Espinosa defines perfect cinema as intrinsically reactionary and therefore suggests the research for an imperfect cinema, that is popular and eradicates the elitist position that filmmakers hold. Poor images fit perfectly the definition that Espinosa gave but even though they achieve a democratization of image production this doesn’t mean that this is always towards emancipatory ends.Poor images in fact are a great expression of the crowd of today and all of its contradictions. Images in the digital world and their dematerialization are both a tool in the resistance to capitalism and at the same time they play into capital's conceptual turn with its new tools of control and of value extraction. Poor images generate visual bonds between people but are as much about fighting conformism as they are about promoting a conformist narrative.

Will you conform? How will these visual bonds gain a consistency through time? These questions are still left open in the Sea of the Simulation.