Hito Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image in the style of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities
The following text rewrites the first two sections of In Defense of the Poor Image as a series of fictitious vignettes, intending to translate Steyerl’s arguments on image quality, through Calvino’s sense of place.
City of Poor Images
There are two ways to enter the city. One of the first things one notices, if approaching from its outskirts, rather than its sharp central core, is a thick layer of bubbling and fuzzing froth, demarcating the city boundaries. Peering down closely at the fluctuating froth, you notice that in fact it is no froth at all, but merely an imitation of one. It is made up of multiples, copies, fakes, ripped mockeries – a cacophony of sights that strike you as familiar, yet you are unable to place, as your pupils struggle to dilate and make sense of it all. This is how the city greets you; in an effort to force a change, a group of youths poke the so-called froth with sticks, upon which it bubbles one last time before disappearing momentarily into the pavement cracks, only to re-emerge in the next instant as a version of itself even more indistinguishable than the last, ready for another set of fresh eyes.
City of Rich Images
Considered the more opportune means of beholding the city, your long journey abruptly ends when you are ejected from the city’s underbelly into its immaculate beating heart. Here, the air is remarkably light and crystal clear for a metropolis of this kind, every edge of every railing, pebble, handbag, traffic light and ashtray so perfectly perceptible and illuminated. The edges are so sharp that they cause your eyes to swell with tears, which is considered the appropriate reaction for newcomers. Your vision does not blur as the drops roll off your cheeks and land in perfect unison onto the pavement below you, joining the millions of teardrops that have fallen there before yours, and in these, you see a reflection of yourself against the cloudless night sky. The moon peaks out behind your left ear, so clear that try to reach out and pinch it, and it is only in this city that such a sensation can be felt. All others are simply lesser copies of the one in which you find yourself currently standing in, but perhaps, seeing as how the moon has just winked at you, you know that deep down, it is entirely plausible that you are standing in the most pristine version of the most pristine city.
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Unit 1: Methods of Translating – Feedback
What’s working:
- Engagement with the original artist
- The spoken element acts as a visual letter
- Choice to start arranging the pieces randomly/in a disorderly manner
- Clever alternative in light of not being able to contact the original artist
What’s not working:
- The earlier physical recreation experiments offered more of a contrast between the imitations and the originals
- The physicality of the makeshift versions was interesting and is missing from the video
- The words of the email extend the video and seemed forced the match the length
To develop this further/in future projects:
- You could develop this as a video within a video – each pixel is a shot of you constructing the replica
- Video could act as a way to share how the item is constructed
- Could explore a link between the physical movements of the video and the content of the email