What you are witnessing is real

A meditation on Hito Steyerl’s essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” and my childhood in the late 1980’s watching too much cable TV, not understanding that what I was watching was most definitely not real.

Part 1 (0:00)

“The poor image is a copy in motion… squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.” 

“Poor images show the rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable- that is, if we can still manage to decipher it.”

Part 2 (3:55)

“Poor images are… the debris of audiovisual production, the trash that washes up on the digital economies’ shores.”

“Now many of these works are back--as poor images... One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then--please, anybody--show me this real thing.”

-Hito Steyerl

Sound by me using filter resonance, feedback, and reverb on a Sequential Prophet and modular synthesizer.