The text considers recirculation as a process through which both visual and cultural imagery are put in motion over and over again in the current information age, especially in the context of post-Internet art. Hito Steyerl’s writings and thoughts on the ‘poor image’, namely the low-resolution digital image bound to a perpetual wandering or ‘circulationism’, here serve as major reference points for the development of the argument.
Keywords: digital images; visual culture; post-Internet art; remediation; Hito Steyerl; Allan Sekula; recirculation
[recirculation]Starting from the double meaning of circulation as ‘continuous motion’ and ‘public availability of something’, I would like to address the flow of digital images; principally the idea of recirculation as a process through which both visual and cultural imagery are put in motion over and over again in the current information age, and in the context of post-Internet art in particular.1
Recirculation has of course to do with the many ways in which images are nowadays produced and exchanged, as well as evaluated and accepted. That the accelerated dissemination of images is rapidly changing the relationship to them is already well known. More and more images affect us and, at the same time, we affect them as viewers too by repetitively circulating and framing them anew, with each Internet ‘share’, ‘tweet’, or ‘meme’ that makes them go viral as doppelgängers. But that makes us loose control over them both as senders and receivers. Once an image is online, it can presumably be accessed and used by almost everyone regardless of intent, thus distancing the image from the initial purpose for which it was uploaded.2 In this regard, it is also important to remember that, theoretically, the source of a digital image is less relevant than its destination, that is, the recipient, or rather, the vast and diverse audiences it may reach.
These new modes of distribution present, no doubt, one of the main challenges for artists, since the World Wide Web permits the large diffusion of images outside institutional contexts and can have a positive effect in terms of critique and social impact. It can therefore function as an alternative approach to the traditional system of circulation — and also production of meaning —, through which artists are able to develop different strategies of resistance, although there is still a margin for doubt. The way in which images are received and operated is in fact not predictable, and, moreover, no one can really determine who the final receiver is: if it is still human or, more likely, an algorithm.3
With its vast social communities that everyday spread large amounts of images across different screens and among distributed spectators all over the world, the Internet has merely augmented a process that is clearly nothing new. The circulation of images concerns a ‘visual economy’,4 which in the twentieth century has been reflected upon both in the tradition of ‘the wandering image’, initiated by Walter Benjamin, with the new possibilities of the mechanical reproduction of images as a crucial starting-point, and Aby Warburg’s account of the survival of ancient image forms, which he configures as an engram, a mnestic trace reactivated under specific circumstances or in the presence of specific stimuli.5
By appropriating, editing, and recirculating presumed ‘originals’,6 artists act as special ‘iconographers’ who both produce and consume images.7 In so doing, they keep questioning the ontology of the image, especially in its shift from analogic to digital, which has led to various new issues related to their life and afterlife. Just to briefly name a few: (1) the question of the transferability of images, not only from one medium or support to another, but from one context to another as well; (2) the question of their alleged immateriality, considering that the way in which images get seen online is shaped by energy and algorithmic patterns; (3) the question of the difference between what is real and what is unreal when we look at images.
Hito Steyerl’s theoretical writings, which together with her practice as a video artist and filmmaker represent some of the most influential thoughts in the current debate on the status and dispersion of digital images, will help me to unpack these issues.
For Steyerl, ‘postproducing, launching, and accelerating’ an image — that is, diffusing it — is more important than making it. The term she coined to describe this principle is ‘circulationism’, which, although it relates especially to our digital age, according to her emerged in a very specific moment in time: in 1989, namely when, in the midst of the Romanian uprising, ‘protesters invaded TV studios to make history’. Since then — Steyerl suggests — images have changed their function and have become ‘nodes of energy and matter that migrate across different supports, shaping and affecting people, landscapes, politics, and social systems’.8 And that basically means that images not only present reality, they also make it.
However, the fluidity, variability, and migration of images — in particular when artistic appropriation is involved — inevitably produce an impoverishment, if not of content, at least of form. It is in this regard that Steyerl speaks of the ‘poor image’, namely a copy of poor quality, of low resolution and definition,9 which is bound to a relentless peregrination. And which ends up being ‘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.’10
Once removed from secure places such as the archive and the film library, the ‘poor image’ is thrown into a land of uncertainty, that is, the Internet. Here it becomes available, therefore also exposed, to easy appropriation, reuse, and alteration, allowing a wider audience to participate in its new reproduction and distribution processes. Speed, intensity, and circulation become its new features; while qualities such as resolution and exchange value recede into the background, or even disappear. Though what comes back is the aura, which is no longer based on the notion of uniqueness, authenticity, and authorship, but rather — in Steyerl’s words — ‘on the transience of the copy’.11
The idea of the remediation of the image is crucial here. Granted that the original, even if reproduced as an exact copy, is never a true replica because it loses the two qualities that make it unique — the here and now —, the copy of the original gets its own aura as well, since, thanks to its refashioning, it is linked to a specific new context and time.12
Since in the digital visual domain things are evolving rapidly, Steyerl is at the same moment updating and reshaping her thoughts. As she argues, in the last decade (her text on the ‘poor image’ was first published in 2009) two main changes occurred: first, what previously would have been considered high resolution images are now very normal and diffused images; second, what once was regarded as a free circulation of images, today increasingly appears as a regulated flow, mainly under the control of powerful platforms. And, what’s more, energy has turned out to be a force or medium for circulation, which affects both natural, social, and power relations, since the transmission of digital images (Steyerl refers to videos in particular) will soon be the principal cause of electricity consumption in the world. That is why she is now progressively moving from the definition of ‘poor images’ towards that of ‘power images’.13
Allan Sekula, whose artistic work is likewise rooted in a strong theoretical basis and who produced a consistent corpus of writings throughout his entire career (he died in 2013), was even more sceptical than Steyerl is, and made similarly critical comments in relation to the photographic archive.14 For him the image’s ‘loss of context’ starts already from the archive tout court. ‘In an archive’, he writes, ‘the possibility of meaning is “liberated” from the actual contingencies of use. But this liberation is also a loss, an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use.’ This is because photographic meaning depends largely on context, which has both a spatial and temporal connotation’.15
The (archival) image abstraction described by Sekula — which can be compared to the (digital) image poverty pointed out by Steyerl — undermines, in his words, the ‘notion of mutual recognition, of global connectedness and legibility, at the heart of the promise of the Internet’, and highlights the dangers of digital iconographic greed, kleptomania, and piracy. Referring especially to digital images, in fact, Sekula warns of another main and often underestimated risk: that of the increasing privatization of images or change of ownership, and the consequent monopolization of copyright.16
Under these circumstances, the flow and recirculation of the ‘poor’ images would seem to be jeopardized by private property appetites, the control exercised by search engines, and the congestion produced by the increasing amount of ghost data that accumulate on a daily basis as ‘digital debris’ and are dispersed as spam.17
But, in the end, should this only be seen as a danger? Certainly not. If on the one side poor images show the hidden social mechanisms and political forces that rule today’s visual economy, on the other they also create an alternative circuit that fosters the reappearance and recirculation of excluded or marginalized visual materials, creating new networks and debates. Furthermore, as contemporary art practices show, it also facilitates the images’ reenactment and refashioning, thus opening ever new, eclectic visual possibilities.
Since the circulation of poor images feeds both capitalist media appetites and alternative artistic experimentation, Steyerl reserves judgment.18 Alongside sameness, anaesthesia, alienation, and control, the circulation of poor images also has the potential to create — according to her — ‘disruptive movements of thought and affect’, continuing, in the twenty-first century, the tradition of avant-garde ‘non-conformist information circuits’. The shift of attention is thus all on the afterlife of images, on their ‘swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities’. Which means that in the digital realm the focus is no more on the ‘original’ image itself (the real thing) but on the conditions of its recurrent circulation (reality) and translation.19 [recirculation]
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