Methods of translating
Invisible Images translates Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image through the poetic and fragmentary structure of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Steyerl’s arguments about the degradation, circulation, and democratization of images are translated into a series of imaginary “cities,” each representing a different phase in the life of a digital image.
Kublai asks: “What is left of the image once it has been copied a thousand times?”
Marco replies: “Only it’s pixes.”
I travelled through cities out of our empire of poor images.
Some cities there shimmer in low resolution, others exist only as fragments of compressed files. Their colors flattened, their borders pixelated.
In one city, the people exchange JPEGs as if they were coins; in another, videos circulate hand to hand like letters. Each city’s images are broken, but in these cities, many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and noncommercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images circulating. Whether they like it or not.
Cities & Copy
The first city I saw was “Copy”. This city was built on ruins. Everywhere, the debris of audiovisual production drifted like dust. When I passed by the shores, the amount of trash was washed up from the digital economy’s ocean. At the same time, poor images are dragged around the globe when the tide goes out. They spread truths or rumours, manipulation or protest, control or liberation. The wave sounds seemed to mock the incompetence of copyright.
Cities & Compression
Beyond it, I arrived at “Compression”. Poor image in this city had been uploaded, downloaded, reformatted, reedited, and finally shared in minimum MB. There, every image sacrifices its clarity to travel faster. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. Its citizens value speed over beauty, access over origin.
Cities & Transmission
Further, I went to the city “Transmission”. Where images age as they move. Each passage adds noise: a grain, a watermark, a glitch. Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and noncommercial cinema are resurrected again and again as poor images in this city. Those rare prints of militant, experimental, and classical works of cinema, as well as video art, reappear as poor images. They call this act of blurring “democracy.”
I returned to our empire, a city built in order.
Citizens worship clarity, high definition, and the myth of perfection. Obviously, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, more mimetic and magical, more scary and seductive than a poor one. But our vision is narrow and guarded because we see only what the empirerer permits. Outside the walls, the poor images multiply in secret—louder, freer, infinite.
When Kublai asks again, “What do these cities reveal?”
Marco answers, “They are the visual bond today — to see, to own, to share.”
He pauses, holding a cracked screen to the emperor.
“In every pixel that fails, a reality fragment will be hidden.”
Calvino, I. (2010) Invisible cities. Vintage Digital.
Steyerl, H. (2012) The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, pp. 31–45.