• The poor image is a copy in motion. (p.1)

• the poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming. (p.1)

• It mocks the promises of digital technology. (p.1)

• They testify to the violent dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images - their acceleration and circulation within the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism. (p.1)

• conspiracy theories (p.1)

• Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable - that is, if we can still manage to decipher it. (p.1)

Low Resolutions

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• Focus is identified as a class position, a position of ease and privilege, while being out of focus lowers one´s value as an image. (p.1)

• conservative in their very structure. (p.3)

Resurrection (as Poor Images)

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• insisting on rich images (p.3)

• In this case the invisibility of the image was more or less voluntary and based on aesthetic premises. (p.3)

• Twenty or even thirty years ago, the neoliberal restructuring of media production began slowly obscuring non-commercial imagery, to the point where experimental and essayistic cinema became almost invisible. (p.3)

• Thus they slowly disappeared not just from cinemas, but from the public sphere as well. (p.3)

• In this way, resistant or non-conformist visual matter disappeared from the surface into an underground of alternative archives and collections, kept alive only by a network of committed organizations and individuals, who would circulate bootlegged VHS copies amongst themselves. (p.3)

• With the possibility to stream video online, this condition started to dramatically change. An increasing number of rare materials reappeared on publicly accessible platforms, some of them carefully curated (Ubuweb) and some just a pile of stuff (YouTube). (p.3)

• Many works of avant-garde, essayistic, and non-commercial cinema have been resurrected as poor images. Whether they like it or not. (p.3)

Privatization and Piracy

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• Poor images are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images - their status as illicit or degraded grants them exemption from its criteria. Their lack of resolution attests to their appropriation and displacement. (p.6)

• Pirate copies seep out of such archives through disorganized privatization. On the other hand, even the British Library sells off its contents online at astronomical prices. As Kodwo Eshun has noted, poor images circulate partly in the void left by state-cinema organizations who find it too difficult to operate as a 16/35-mm archive or to maintain any kind of distribution infrastructure in the contemporary era. (p.6)

Imperfect Cinema

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• Espinosa argues for an imperfect cinema because, in his words, perfect cinema - technically and artistically masterful - is almost always reactionary cinema. The imperfect cinema is one that strives to overcome the divisions of labor within class society. It merges art with life and science, blurring the distinction between consumer and producer, audience and author. It insists upon its own imperfection, is popular but not consumerist, committed without becoming bureaucratic. (p.6)

• promises of new media (p.6)

• He clearly predicts that the development of video technology will jeopardize the elitist position of traditional filmmakers and enable some sort of mass film production: an art of the people. (p.6)

• imperfect cinema merges life and art (p.6)

• Most of all, its visuality is resolutely compromised: blurred, amateurish, and full of artifacts. (p.6)

• But the real and contemporary imperfect cinema is also much more ambivalent and affective than Espinosa had anticipated. On the one hand, the economy of poor images, with its immediate possibility of worldwide distribution and its ethics of remix and appropriation, enables the participation of a much larger group of producers than ever before. (p.6)

• Hate speech, spam (p.6)

• They contain experimental and artistic material, but also incredible amounts of porn and paranoia. (p.6)

• Users become the editors, critics, translators, and (co-)authors of poor images. Poor images are thus popular images - images that can be made and seen by the many. (p.6)

• Altogether, poor images present a snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd, its neurosis, paranoia, and fear, as well as its craving for intensity, fun, and distraction. (p.6)

• the condition of the images speaks not only of countless transfers and reformattings, but also of the countless people who cared enough about them to convert them over and over again, to add subtitles, reedit, or upload them. (p.7)

• Apart from resolution and exchange value, one might imagine another form of value defined by velocity, intensity, and spread. Poor images are poor because they are heavily compressed and travel quickly. They lose matter and gain speed. But they also express a condition of dematerialization, shared not only with the legacy of conceptual art but above all with contemporary modes of semiotic production.10 Capital´s semiotic turn, as described by Felix Guattari, plays in favor of the creation and dissemination of compressed and flexible data packages that can be integrated into ever-newer combinations and sequences. This flattening-out of visual content - the concept-in-becoming of the images - positions them within a general informational turn, within economies of knowledge that tear images and their captions out of context into the swirl of permanent capitalist deterritorialization.13 The history of conceptual art describes this dematerialization of the art object first as a resistant move against the fetish value of visibility. (p.7)

• On the other hand, this is precisely why it also ends up being perfectly integrated into an information capitalism thriving on compressed attention spans, on impression rather than immersion, on intensity rather than contemplation, on previews rather than screenings. (p.7)
   

What is your visual bond today?

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• The circulation of poor images creates a circuit, which fulfills the original ambitions of militant and (some) essayistic and experimental cinema - to create an alternative economy of images, an imperfect cinema existing inside as well as beyond and under commercial media streams. In the age of file-sharing, even marginalized content circulates again and reconnects dispersed worldwide audiences. (p.7)

• The poor image thus constructs anonymous global networks just as it creates a shared history. It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it. This aura is no longer based on the permanence of the original, but on the transience of the copy. (p.8)

• floats on the surface of temporary and dubious data pools (p.8)

• Dziga Vertov - He imagined a sort of communist, visual, Adamic language that could not only inform or entertain, but also organize its viewers. (p.8)

• a global information capitalism whose audiences are linked almost in a physical sense by mutual excitement, affective attunement, and anxiety. (p.8)

• production of poor images based on cell phone cameras, home computers, and unconventional forms of distribution (p.8)

• In addition to a lot of confusion and stupefaction, it also possibly creates disruptive movements of thought and affect. (p.8)

• Moreover, it reactualizes many of the historical ideas associated with these circuits, among others Vertov´s idea of the visual bond. (p.8)

Now!

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• 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. (p.8)

• The poor image is no longer about the real thing - the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities. It is about defiance and appropriation just as it is about conformism and exploitation. In short: it is about reality. (p.8)