User:File on a/readings

Poor Images (Hito Steyerl)
The Aesthetics of Silence (Susan Sontag)
Camera Lucida (Roland Barthes)
On Photography (Susan Sontag)

Notes:

Poor Images: Hito Steyerl

• The poor image: bad quality, substandard resolution, a thumbnail, a preview [freely distributed- compressed- reproduced- ripped- remixed]
• Quality is replaced by accessibility, exhibition value becomes cult value, films become clips, contemplation becomes distraction
• Subverts: national culture, copyright
• Testify to the dislocation, transferrals, and displacement of images: the vicious cycle of audiovisual capitalism
• Focus and resolution can represent a class marker of quality "consumed"
• The cinema(mainstream) as a flagship store where "high-end products are marketed in an upscale environment." This system is anchored in systems of national culture, capitalist studio production, the cult of male genius and is reactionary and conservative.
• The resurrection of experimental film into clips, away from the grave of the archive and into the public space of image-stuff.
• Steyerl remarks on the Kodwo Eshun who notes that "poor images circulate the void left by state cinema (when experimental was funded)"
• Imperfect Cinema is a radical cinema (Third Cinema Manifestos); Poor images allow many more producers
• Poor images also present the snapshot of the affective condition of the crowd: neurosis, paranoia, fear, distraction, intensity
• Poor images can be defined by their resolution, exchange value and value of speed, intensity and spread (TikTok)
• Operates against the fetishization of resolution but also ends up being perfectly integrated into capitalism
• The poor image constructs anonymous global networks and shared history
• Dziga Vertov's "visual bond" that links workers of the world with each other, albeit (in the poor image) represented within global information capitalism.
• The circulation of poor images feeds into capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies. The poor image is therefore not about the ordinary original but about the materiality ("the conditions of existence") and the circulation... between defiance and appropriation, about conformism and exploitation. It is full of contraditions.

---

The Aesthetics of Silence

• Spirituality as a set of plans ("ideas of deportment") to overcome pain
• Art as a spiritual project in the modern era(post-religion).
• Old myth of art is associated with art expressing the human consciousness. European Medieval through Renaissance period: expressing consciousness(from God unto humanism) against reality's materialism.
• New myth is about saving human's from this consciousness, the "minds need for self-estrangement." To experience art now(Sontag's "now"), is to unshackle from the self into "art" spirituality, mysticism, self negation (Buddhist non-selves/nirvana). Metaphorical, thus, art must eliminate the subject/the object/the image for the pursuit of silence(spirituality). Contradiction: this negation is not meditative but deliberate.
• Seriousness within art is to regard it as a means to something achievable only through abandoning art. The goal of the artist is to be silent by finding a voice in art. But seriousness is also not art.
• Art's value is its invisibility, unintelligibility, inaudibility, anxiety, silence (for the audience). Here, the artist uses silence against the audience's voyeurism. Art disengages from give-and-take if it is silent. But then again, art is elitist if it presupposes an audience
• A silent art can be characterized as dumb, cold, depressed... cultivating metaphorical silence suggested by lifeless subjects and constructing minimal form.
• However, silence also implies its opposite. Silence can be loud and therefore not feasible.
• Nihilism towards expression within silence ("nothing to express, nothing from which to express, no desire to express") is attached to the death wish, almost keeping it "lively"
• Notions of silence "sketch out new perspectives to looking, hearing, etc."
• The artist is also tied to history, the artist can only dream of being a-historical. In engaging with silence, the artist entails the spectator into self-forgetfulness... "it does not demand the spectator's understanding but rather his absence"
• Silence does not mean emptiness, plenitude is also opaque and impenetrable. Shock is also silencing.
• There are ways of thinking we are yet to know. Not everything that is thought can be said. //silence engages with this
• The revulsion against the proliferation of speech and images slowly diminishes the prestige of loud... as silence rises.
• Beauty is a vacant concept. Silence is not irony. But silence is contemporary: loud silence (void) and soft silence (experience)
• All projects from the consciousness eventually reveal the unraveling of thought itself.

Thesis: Susan Sontag's article analyzes silence as a concept intertwined with the argument of modernism's loss of meaning. Drawing from modernist art and psychology, Sontag approaches this silence as a means of aesthetics by way of a post-modern examination. She distinguishes the traditional forms of spiritual silence to the devolving use and abuse of silence in the contemporary art of her day.
Conclusion: Sontag's postmodern approach does not end with a synthesis. Rather, it offers perspectives into the concept of silence. She draws a link between the appreciation of silence within traditional aesthetic and spiritual traditions as well as silence's role in modern culture and psychology. In the end, she leaves behind a landscape of contemporary cultural expression, one self-aware and critical of silence as an alternative idea.

---

Camera Lucida

• Questioning the "being" of photography needs a classification of photographs along empirical and aesthetic lines.
• The photograph repeats what cannot be repeated existentially (the occasion, event, encounter, the "real"). The photograph is therefore always ties to its referent, what it refers to. The spectrum.
• A photograph results from a "doing, undergoing, looking" by the operator, photographer, referent, spectator.
• Photography also involves procedures of chemical and physical order [add computational order for nowadays].
• Posing has a history, the morphing of the self in front of the camera. It engages the self as the other and the specter. This indicates a division of image and self performance, where one is themselves (non-image) in the private zone.
• Camera is like a clock, it marks the time when the photo is taken. It also marks how you looked at a certain point in time.
• There is an immediate subjectivity attached to viewing and liking/disliking a photograph. This can be termed an encounter. Barthes is interested in this encounter and its sentimentality (his mother's photo, after her death).
• Photographs can also be experienced as scenes, and as cultural markers.
• Studium, the general feeling, enthusiasm and average trained effect.
• Punctum is the wound an image accidentally inflicts since the subjectivity of encountering an image is immediate.
• The Punctum amuses while the studium informs. Studium tends to be coded into the photograph. The studium associates the spectator with the operator. The punctum is not always the intention of the photographer.
• Photographs tend to be more descriptive than reflective. Hence, it can lend itself to ethnography and anthropological use.
• Photograph cannot detach itself from painting as its paternal reference.
• The landscape photo is associated with longing (utopic and maternal).
• The unary/general photograph is a journalistic image, there is punctum in the unary image.
• Photography and mourning: the sisyphean task of recollection(of the dead) condensed into a photograph. This extends to photos of childhood.
• The Photograph as a testament of "an existence."
• [No longer valid with considerations of manipulation] The photograph as indifferent and authentic.
• "Images are shared temporal hallucinations"
• The Banalizing... the great mutation of the photograph, simply illustrates conflict and desire... "people consume images but no longer consume beliefs."

---

On Photography

• Plato's Cave highlights mankind's obsession with images as edifying truths. Photographs give new meaning to this history of images as truths. Photographs alter what is worth looking and what we have the right to observe. It also morphs us psychically, we hold the whole world as an anthology (stream, nowadays) of images.
• There is transparency to images, but we still cannot avoid a sense of aggression (manipulation and surveillance) within the photographic enterprise.
• In modernity, photography is a social rite, a defense against anxiety and a tool of power.
• Photography and tourism, a way of certifying experience by also limiting it. The visit becomes a search for the "photographic/photogenic."
• The act of photographing can be voyeuristic and predatory.
• Photographs themselves can also be memento mori. Nostalgia, in relation to desire, is more immediate when encountering the photograph. Nostalgia, in relation to history or moralism, creates a moral position
• While an event is something worth photographing, it is also ideology which defines an event.
• The first encounter with the photographic inventory of horror is a kind of prototypical modern revelation. As time passes, we are desensitized and we begin to experience images with aesthetic distance.
• Photography can also be used as a bureaucratic managerial tool.
• Photography and its relationship with information implies we know about the world as if it is recorded as photographic images.
• When in truth, understanding the world is not accepting the world as it looks.
• Understanding is based on function, not aesthetics.
• "the omnipresence of the photograph has an incalculable effect on our ethical sensibility."

---