BERNEVAL

Hito Steyerl “In Defense of the Poor Image” collected in The Wretched of the Screen from e-flux journal #10 11/2009. She leads us to recognize a tension in the distribution systems at play.

The circulation of poor images feeds into both capitalist media assembly lines and alternative audiovisual economies.

She earlier in the piece distinguishes between screenings and previews and in doing so contrasts intensity with contemplation. One is almost captured by the enumeration but something sticks if you slow down the reading.

On the one hand, it [the poor image] operates against the fetish value of high resolution. 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.

Circulations to and by the many. Consumption by crowds. Although operating under the label “poor” we are far away from the notion of “encounter” found in Grotowski Towards a Poor Theatre.

Poor images are thus popular images—images that can be made and seen by the many. They express all the contradictions of the contemporary crowd: its opportunism, narcissism, desire for autonomy and creation, its inability to focus or make up its mind, its constant readiness for transgression and simultaneous submission.* 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. 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.

*See Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004).

It’s the footnote on “multitude” that sends me off to read more and think more about le travail de l’image.

And so for day 1508
29.01.2011

Dionne Brand
In Another Place, Not Here
Knopf, 1996, page 117

I first noted this passage for my friend Marlene Goldman who was exploring women and mapping and working on what became Paths of desire: Images of exploration and mapping in Canadian women’s writing.

Today the sound of bees and cicadas singing tautly tightened the air, as if they were drawing a map of the place, as if they were the only ones left to do it. Their singing thick as electric wires, cicadas, bees singing thick, suspended the island, mapping the few hills, the dried rivers of the dry season, the white river stones, the soft memory of the people who lived here, the desire of rain when it came to wash rickety houses away, or the desire of sun to parch old people’s lips, children’s throats, the hot need of hillsides to incline so desperately, to inspire weakness in the knees, the cold-blooded heat of noons melting people into houses and under beds. Cicadas, bees, busy with their cartography, their sound like tender glass above, holding these few things, waiting to set them down again, the simple geography of dirt and water, intact, the way only they knew it, holding the name of the place in their voices, screaming so that the war would pass, interminably pass.

Reading it years later, I am intrigued about the combination: I have never heard bees and cicadas together. My map is limited but in my imagination thanks to Brand’s prose I can go where are the cicadas and the bees. Did find audio files for sale (at Audio Jungle) of stereo recording of bees buzzing and cicadas chirping recorded by tommiwilson — sounds I would never have thought to seek out before now live in my mind side by side or rather in a layered symphony.

And so for day 1503
24.01.2011