Steyerl 2012

Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. (Sternberg Press, 2012)

In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective

disorientation, loss of horizons

history of linear perspective, breaking up of linear perspective with Turner's painting, The Slave Ship (1840)

now, birds-eye perspective reigns

"A fall toward objects without reservation, embrac- ing a world of forces and matter, which lacks any original stability and sparks the sudden shock of the open: a freedom that is terrifying, utterly deter- ritorializing, and always already unknown. Falling means ruin and demise as well as love and abandon, passion and surrender, decline and catastrophe. Falling is corruption as well as liberation, a condi- tion that turns people into things and vice versa.17 It takes place in an opening we could endure or enjoy, embrace or suffer, or simply accept as reality." (28)

In Defense of the Poor Image

"The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletariat in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and reedited. It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. The image is liberated from the vaults of cinemas and archives and thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends toward abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming." (32)

"Poor images are the contemporary Wretched of the Screen, the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores." (32)

"rich image" of blockbuster cinema; "poor image" of the avant-garde, circulated in copied VHS tapes etc.

"the poor image reveals the decline and degradation of the film essay, or indeed any experimental and noncommercial cinema, which in many places was made possible because the production of culture was considered a task of the state. Privatization of media production gradu- ally grew more important than state-controlled/ sponsored media production. But, on the other hand, the rampant privatization of intellectual con- tent, along with online marketing and commodifica- tion, also enables piracy and appropriation; it gives rise to the circulation of poor images." (39)