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The Reproduction of Poor Image

Freedom, Compression Algorithm and Motion Graphics on Social Media

Photos and images in the motion gradually become a primary language of new generations of internet habitats, tons of image being created through user action or machine algorithm, different from traditional high-resolution images which record from the High-Fi equipment and film. Internet-user uploads the pictures from their low- qualities phone camera, crop, and copies the image from the screenshot or youtube downloader, mimic the comedies or movies to produce entertaining content. We cross the era of piracy sources like P2P and Bit-torrent, then welcome the new legally digital streaming service like Netflix or Hulu. W. J. T. Mitchell describes the pictures in his article “What Do Pictures Want,” This complex field of visual reciprocity is not merely a by-product of social reality but actively constitutive of it. Vision is as important as language in mediating social relations, and it is not reducible to language, to the “sign,” or to discourse. The images being a language as a way to reflect and engrave the meaning, even though it turns to culture as commodities. In Sturken and Cartwright’s “Practice of Looking” they addressed: To interpret images is to examine the assumptions that we and others bring to them, and to decode the visual language that they “speak.” All images contain layers of meaning that include their formal aspects, their cultural and socio-historical reference.

Mitchell, Sturken, and Cartwright centering on the way image narrative the information in their language, the visual context of imaging — commercial advertising, political propaganda or art pieces. Aside from the image reference, how about the meaning distortion throughout the internet and compression algorithm, the duplication and meme on social media. Baudrillard quote Enzensberger’s For the first time in history, the media make possible mass participation in a productive social process…, As if owning a TV set or a camera inaugurate a new possibility of relationship and exchange. Baudrillard against the idea that mass media can be liberated from the capitalist, he addresses the old mass media were not reciprocal, the message controlled by the owners of media production. The new media now can democratize, serve revolutionary, subversive aims.

In Web 2.0, every user becoming a broadcaster, a contributor, the sharing platform increase the risks of spam and piracy, it also provides a host organism that poor images can cause hyperplasia and duplication. The article starts with the definition of the poor image and the way we look and the culture of visual. Then focuses on the technology which changed or adopted our abilities to perceived the information, the compression formats, moving images, and piracy. How the poor image produced seconds by seconds, and why they can play a significant character which decentralizes and disorganized privatization.

Hito Steyerl published the article “In Defense of the Poor Image”, it brings the concept of the poor image which is a copy in motion, is rap or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances. The poor image has been uploaded, downloaded, shared, reformatted, and re-edited. The files transform quality to accessibility, films into clips, contemplation into distraction. Hito Steyerl also enriches the functionalities of Low-Fi images, like a resurrection, cinemas, and video- arts reincarnation as blurring GIF and AVI from DVD to P2P and Bit-torrent platform, they embody the afterlife of many former masterpieces.

The poor image keep switching their formats each day, from the real object to virtual artificial formats, then traveling from personal desktop to other terminals, they have been deconstructed by machine algorithm and reorganized by another software, far away from original forms but still readable through human eyes, the blood drain out if you play really slowly and inspect the content frame to frame, the High-Fi information dissolving to blurring pixels, and that is the newborn infants of cheesy and tacky poor images. The rampant privatization of intellectual content, along with online marketing and commodification, also enable piracy and appropriation; it gives rise to the circulation of poor images.

Quentin Tarantino blasts the digital projection at just a few days after the 20th- anniversary screening of his 1994 Palme d’Or winner “Pulp Fiction” in 2014.”Pulp Fiction” is the only 35mm film to been screened in the 2014 Cannes, all the other films screened digitally in the Film Festival.“As far as I’m concerned, digital projection is the death of cinema,” Tarantino said, “Digital projection is just television in cinema.” Watching a movie shot on 35mm and projected on 35mm is undoubtedly a different experience, but ironically a lot of old films have been restored digitally and then printed back to 35mm, and they probably look better than they ever did due to improvements in technology. The digital filming lowing the threshold of filmmaking, that young filmmakers can bring their camera and a small crew and story to make a film. Quentin mentions even though there is a lot more work produced when the films democratized like the “flower in the dustbin, he still questions “why an established filmmaker would on digital I have no fucking idea.”

The formats and resolution in moving images been discussed frequently in recent years, the endless pursuit of sharpness and high-resolution technology developing establish a new realm of images. As Hito Steyerl described in her article “In defense of the Poor Image,” the quality of images creates “The contemporary hierarchy of images, however, is not only based on sharpness but also and primarily on the resolution.” Quentin defense on the 35mm medium and projection, the format contains the original recorded material. It is richer, so to speak. Now, even consumer formats are increasingly adapting to the tastes of cineastes and esthetes, who insisted on 35 mm film as a guarantee of pristine visuality. The insistence upon analog film as the sole medium of visual importance resounded throughout discourses on cinema, almost regardless of their ideological inflection. The high-end economies of film production firmly anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production. The rich image established its own set of hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it.

Christopher Nolan and Paul Anderson declare war with television companies on motion smoothing function, they reached out to television manufacturers to ensure their audience will be able to see films presented as close as possible to the director’s original intention. Motion smoothing is the new feature on most modern TVs that

intended to correct hi-def screens’ tendency to make objects in motion appears to be blurry. The algorithm guesses whats an interval frame should look like between two existing frames. It can be helpful if you are watching basketball or soccer games, it gives everything a crisp edge, and you can see the ball and players without delays.

The problem is that TV manufacturers have made it the default setting for most new TVs on the production line, and the average consumer will able to buy the new TVs on the display area in Target and BestBuy which streaming the sports footage. While motion smoothing tech is benefiting with the sports game, it gives everything else a “soap opera effect” that makes it cheap and tacky. If a television screen has a refresh rate of 120Hz(120 frames per second), but the TV is going to display the film recorded at the standard 24 frames per second, the computing program must analyze and

create intermediary frames to fill in an extra 94 shells each second. The goal of motion interpolation is to dive viewers into a more life-like picture. However, the too life-like picture makes films on TV look as if they recorded at the raw video footage. (Soap operas have traditionally recorded on video, not film.)

The technologies are playing away to keep evaluating the quality of images, filling the vacancy between the traditional frame rate and our organs’ abilities to perceive the media, algorithm decide and create the signal we receive. On contrary, in the digital era algorithm also creates hundreds of thousands of low-quality images through uploading and compression, Hito Steyerl defines the poor image as a copy in motion; Its quality is terrible, 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 distribution.

In the high-resolution competition of technologies, a high-resolution image looks more brilliant and impressive, but the resolution was fetishized by capitalist studio production. The cult of film gauge dominated even independent film production. The rich image established its own set of hierarchies, with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it. Being a reactionary, why we still need and produce poor quality images, the poor image produces throughout the algorithm compression model, it destructs of the original rich image into tattered pieces, then revives as a massive reproduction of information, adopted the basic level of human beings organ perception abilities.

How the compression technologies adopted our organ and maintain the pixels and color in the highest compression rate? The 24mm film initially chosen exactly because eyes and eyelids are unable to attain it. Similarly, quote Kittler’s technical media are models of the so-called human precisely because they were developed strategically to override the senses. The algorithm of compression format base on the perception of organs function and the operation minimize the size of files.

The generating and productive ways of poor images are base on the compression algorithm, the major formats of images now are JPEG(Joint Photographic Experts Group, released in 1992), GIF(Graphics Interchange Format, animation graphics form launch in 1987). Video formats are AVI(Audio Video Interleave, introduced by Microsoft in 1992) and QTFF(QuickTime File Format, sharing the same formats of MPEG-4, published by Apple Inc. in 1991). JPEG can approximately achieve 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality. The perceptual model based loosely on the human psycho-visual system discards high-frequency information, such as sharp transitions in intensity, and color hue. GIF as a photo compression algorithm which allows Graphics Control Extension (GCE), which allows various images (frames) in the file to be painted with time delays, creates a meme of video clips to motion graphic.

Video encounter the same portable plight, to make a compact format, compression format predicts signal interval each frame, cut off the redundancy connecting between frames, adopted human eyes perceptual ability. Vivian Sobchack calls the distortion QuickTime movie work as “memory boxes,” referring to diverse containers from reliquaries to shoeboxes filled with photographs or souvenirs, “memory boxes “ collects, preserves and visible recollection of memories, it cached the unseen network of past images, sounds, and texts.9 Like Joseph Cornell’s mysterious boxes, QTFF preserved “under glass” fragments of “read-only” memory. If we can’t see through the structural layers of moving contents, each compression files becoming black boxes that not barely can be checked as the same copies, the algorithm controlled the layout of the memories, the masterpieces cinemas or Low-Fi footages. Use the description way of Sobchack, the compression video is anything but quick: its “illusion of life” incomplete, and they dramatized in the “half-life” of its objects. The distortion of the algorithm, its encodes and decode transitions in the video compression also becoming the materials of art-works.

Jim Campbell is well-known as a LED-sculpture artist, he uses LED light to create blurring low-resolution images, his work “Illuminated Average #1: Hitchcock’s Psycho” is a test of overlapping low pixel density images, he scans and compresses every single frame of Hitchcock’s film “Psycho”, then generate a single visual which storage layers of databank structure. The resulting export rewrite in a ghost-like illusion, Walter Benjamin said Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of experience. Jim Campbell’s work as a questionnaire to the relationship between memories and image compression. In “Home Movies Series,” the LED matrix display abstract portraits of low-quality home videos, climbing the vice and trace of audience family memories, the nostalgic blurring photos craft by artist’s rendering machine, the resolution and algorithm distortion and manipulate our visual perception and memories.

A few minutes ago I send a GIF file through the messaging app to my friends and share my story on Instagram for the funny showcase interactive works, basically when I tired or just killing times I slicing photos trough animations images, Youtube video in 480p on my little 6' phone screens. The screen time is the new fixture on iOS 12, I’m curious about the screen using data from my friends, so I checked around 20 of my friend’s screen-time of them. The ages cross 19–35, most of the screen time killing on Instagram, then message app like Message, What’s App, LINE, WeChat, and Instagram itself, the third-place comes with Youtube or Facebook, almost all of the time they browsing the images or videos, more specifically, are GIF, JPEG, AVI, and MP4.

The mobile phone hugely changes user behavior and realizing the countercurrent of technology, even though the specification on the phone upgrading each year. Restricted by the limitation of cellular data and broadband speed, save the storage space in social-media companies’ data center, almost all of the images, motion graphics and video clips streaming online were deconstructed and compressed from their algorithm. Every time we upload the original file on their cloud, we sacrifice the damage of information to enable the files to stream online, like the electric consumption in the wires. The smooth swipe experience of apps acquired the balance of image quality and the size of the files, and so on message software, what we want to share and received in the message is only the readable essential property of images.

Facebook and Instagram provide a slightly higher experience that allows the user to post image articles. More extended video clips go on Youtube and Vimeo, even though the companies keep upgrading their options of the resolution setting, to support better resources of original files, the users still encounter the dilemma of information sabotage, the video input in the pipeline of the grinder machine, and output with uniform MP4s which encoded with H.264.

Is entertaining to see a camera-reviewing video on Youtube, I saw a bunch of technology products review on stream causes personal hobby. Inevitably, the reviewers need to display and compare the resolution from clips to clips, screens to screens in order to catch the slight differences among of the products, but every time they began the comparison, a small alarm show up in the corner “ This contains uncontrollable factors due to the video compression of Youtube.” The online streaming services became the monocrat who judges what formats your visual content should be, from Youtube to Netflix, from video clips to cinemas. Differentiate from the piracy era of the internets; we can get the same context encoded from different languages and operations; we can decide which player should be the decoder and possess the real data.

GIPHY probably is the most famous GIF online sharing website right now; they build up the API aim to share and propagate the motion graphic. GIF being a simplify video(or photo animation) files, it became more and more prevalent recently. As I observed my friends’ screen time and some of its message context, instead of typing sentences, GIF files play a vital role in the conversation. Intend to avoid being an awkward conversation killer, or merely too dull to type the keyboard, GIF fitted one of the best ways to express emotions. On Twitter or Instagram, GIF became a narrative choice the enrich users’ posts, the cultures of visual representation on these platforms seek a quick reflection of trending topics, the GIF images upload from fresh sport streaming screenshots, top video on Youtube, clips from old movies or TV series, then uploader re-edit and add up texts on the graphics. GIFs have been produced days by days like planktons reproduction on the waves, endless upload, download, share, reformat, and re-edit.

Hito Steyerl points The condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformatting, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, re-edit, or upload them. Social media create tides of fanatical followers, dedicating themselves as information generators, they fully committing in the social internet cultures, participating in the proliferate operation of poor image. They follow the trending topic, receiving and copy the fancy memes, Aria Dean connect the black culture, memes, and poor image in her article “Poor Meme, Rich meme” Like the poor image, the meme finds its home only in this circulation — its true content is the many bumps and bruises that have occurred along the way. It is a copy without an original — a copy of a copy of a copy, and so forth. For better or worse, a meme asks instead to be considered as its total sum presence in circulation. The social media push the poor image wave onto a peak, the users willing to sacrifice(or ignoring) the resolutions and restrictions but disseminate and reproduce the poor images on their editions.

In retrospect, I watched François Truffaut’s famous “400 Blows” on my 21' desktop screen in college, there’s an FTP station streaming between our small movie groups that storage hundreds of most famous cinemas from the world. The seniors gathering the clips from the VCD and P2P platform, the videos all format as AVI or MP4 around 500MB to 1GB, even some of the tremendous Taiwanese New Wave Cinemas, the films from Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Edward Yang. Technically I never seem the real “Psycho” by Alfred Hitchcock or “Citizen Kane” by Orson Welles cause we never have a chance to watch the 35mm copy in the theater. The experience of old films entirely absence of my young ages, the only way I can watch the classical cinemas is through piracy internets; the VCD usage engraved the scratches on the plastic surface, then the copies became rarer on the markets, finally out of print.

Hito Steyerl mentions a film projection accident as well, At present, there are at least twenty torrents of Chris Marker’s film essays available online…, the economy of poor images is about more than just downloads: you can keep the files, watch them again, even re-edit or improve them if you think it necessary. Due to the neoliberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, experimental and essayistic cinema became almost invisible. We lost the experience of the rich images of the original copies, but poor images and privacy ensure the resurrection of original files. Like Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka’s “Zombie Media,” which is concerned with media that is not only out of use, but resurrected to new uses, contexts, and adaptations.

Ironically, as the resistance to the neoliberal radicalization of the concept of culture as commodity, the piracy P2P platform gradually surrenders and transform to legally streaming services, the notorious Chinese illegal PPS streaming became a regular stream service provider. On the contrary, the DVD rental company also adapt the business model of online streaming like Netflix; you can pay or subscribe to the class movies. There’s still lots of BT resources if you search on the online forums like Reddit, but it is more strict of surveillance nowadays. However, on the other hand, being a reaction of rich-images centralization and consolidation, the rampant privatization of intellectual content also enables piracy and raises the circulation of poor images. Many works of avant-garde and non-commercial cinema also being resurrecting as poor images in recent years.

Regardless of Christopher Nolan and Paul Anderson declared war to Television manufacturer about the Hi-tech TV autofill the frames from 24mm to 120Hz. They finally progress on pushing Netflix teamed up with Sony to create a “Netflix calibrated mode” for its top-of-the-line TV models that would essentially serve the same function: giving consumers a choice to view things the way the filmmakers intended. Either Quentin Tarantino criticized “digital projection is the death of cinema,” they are fighting for the original format that a film should be or been watched. The industry takes excellent success in combat piracy, but now they confront the large technology companies, guarding the authentic audience experiences.

The visual formats were not merely formulated and decided our way of looking, but also transform our lifestyle and power in reality. McLuhan said This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium — that is, of any extension of ourselves — result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology. The film recording and display(or projection) industry keep developing Hi-fi and High-resolution images, it ensures the threshold of rich images, also emphasizes the possession of the original copy. Hito Steyerl proposed the concept of “Poor Image,” instead of the original, a poor image is about its real conditions of existence: swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation.

The poor image generating as a key to breaking the rich images, the centralized industries, powers of national culture implantation, and indeed copyright. The Low-Fi graphics create through compression operation, then prosperity from P2P to BT, online streaming serves to social media. The duplication of poor images produced an anti-system ordnance organism on the internet. After being kicked out of the protected and often protectionist arena of national culture, discarded from commercial circulation, these works have become travelers in a digital no-man’s land, constantly shifting their resolution and format, speed and media, sometimes even losing names and credits along the way.

Ironically, the poor image should crash the hierarchy of resolution and operating as Steyerl writes, “against the fetish value of high resolution.” In taking up this stance, it resists the co-conspirators of surveillance and neoliberalism in the ordering of bodies and desires. However, on social media, the images create a culture of masses self-censorship, the graphics being reproduction seconds by seconds, but the trending of the meme, the public consciousness restricts the content of the images. The images trigger mimetic desires and make people want to become like the products represented in them. In this view, hegemony infiltrates everyday culture and spreads its values by way of mundane representation.

Additionally, social media and cell-phone cameras have created a zone of mutual mass-surveillance, which adds to the ubiquitous urban networks of control, such as CCTV, cell-phone GPS tracking and face-recognition software. The social media becomes a large social practice and the rebirth of dictatorship, the self-awareness of mass-surveillance limited the users’ posts. Recently Tumblr bans its adult contents and Google developing the Chinese version searching engine cooperates with the Chinese government’s censorship reminded users we do not have the data even it is just tiny size Low-Fi images. However, the piracy site always plays a role verged on the illegal, Throw their arms for the massive low-quality files.

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