Recommended readings: theory

★ in defense of the poor image

by hito steyerl / november 2009

>> The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is 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.

i was introduced to this text in a video art class. hito steyerl has some very interesting ideas about tech, and she continues to be a big influence on me. this is a good introductory text for all budding net artists and thinkers.

★ duty free art: art in the age of planetary civil war

by hito steyerl / 2017

>> What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization? How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of “neurocurating,” in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity.

wow! a doozy of a book, full of dizzying and poetic ruminations of the future of a digital society. it critiques the role of museums in the current climate - who are museums for? what sort of values have they upheld? sort of apocalyptic and bleak, but hito makes powerful predictions on how tech can be used to further divide. life in the digital age is fractured, broken up, overwhelming. it can be dense at times and too abstract, but it's got very interesting ideas & totally worth a read and it's on my to-read-again list..