Hito Steyerl "In Defense of Poor Image"

Hito Steyerl brings up a lot of interesting points when it comes to images, their quality and how it relates together with art. When you look at a lot of media right now, especially on the internet, the quality of the videos that we watch aren't that good. They are substandard to be honest. Unless the video is shot in high definition (and some are), the video is almost certainly going to be grainy, the sound isn't going to be too great and while watching it, you certainly get the feeling that you are being short-changed. A part of the reason things are so poor in quality is that files have to be shrunk down in order for them to actually fit on the internet. The internet is filled with billions of movie and image files and it would eat up a lot of bandwidth and would make viewing all those files a pain. Now this is a good and bad thing. It's a good thing because we have access to basically any image we want. On the other hand, it's bad because we don't see the true identity of the image. We see the image in another form, in it's secondary shrunk form. That's when I bump into a high resolution image and it's true in form and it hasn't been shrunked or altered, I enjoy it and appreciate it for what it is because it's not often that you bump into a great picture in high quality on the internet.

Images have come a long way, and so has video for that matter. The age of technology has altered and changed the way that we interact and view these types of media's. 30 years ago, images and videos had a certain level of higher appreciation than they do now. It took a long time and effort to shoot a great photo, or a great video, and after you were done you had the satisfaction of knowing that you put a lot of effort and emotion into something. These days I feel as if everything and anything can be done by anyone. I'm not bashing the integrity and accessibility of technology. It's great having everything on the fly and having the access to create a lot of media real easily. I just feel that works of media were more original in earlier times and they had that certain aura about them that I just don't feel right now. That's just a sign of times and how different things have changed and how fast technology has moved. Beside words, the internet is basically photo's and video's and the abundance of them is just shocking.