PROJECT 5: Digital Painting

ASSIGNMENT 1: PLANNING FOR PROJECT 1:

PLANNING:

Screenshot → Screenshot → Screenshot (Digital Image Project)

Concept – IDEA:

·        Start with one high-quality image (my own photo or a found image)

·        Take a screenshot of it, then screenshot that screenshot, repeating the process 10–20 times

·        Each time, the image loses clarity and detail

o   I screenshotted my image 20 times and used the first 15 images

Why this fits “The Poor Image”:

·        Steyerl talks about how images lose quality as they circulate but how they can gain mobility and accessibility.

·        My work shows how copying and original image several times destroys resolution while creating a new visual language.

Meaning Shift:

·        The image stops being about what it originally depicted and becomes more about the practice of circulation, loss, and repetition.

Final Work:

• A grid or sequence of the screenshots
• Post project on my blog – also adds to the degraded resolution of the original image
• The final image is visibly blurry, pixelated, and “damaged”
• One thing I found is that maybe through the use of a different more simple image the “damage” done to the work might be more visible

ORIGINAL IMAGE FOR PROJECT:

This is a funny image of my husband while we were on my family's annual camping trip that we go on every summer! :)

ASSIGNMENT 1: FINISHED PROJECT:

                                                                       FINAL IMAGE 

WRITTEN REFLECTION

When I was working on coming up with an idea for this first project, I was struggling. I was trying to come up with this huge elaborate project that demonstrates all or many of the ideas posed in the essay we read this week, The Poor Image, by Hitlo Steyerl. One of the ideas discussed in that essay was under the title, Low Resolutions. I enjoyed reading this section because it talked about how image quality is important, the value of images on their own, and how these high-quality images can be altered and degraded. One of the lines in that section that really stuck out to me was “with new technologies offering more and more possibilities to creatively degrade it”.

After reading the essay and reading that section in particular, I decided to create a work that delt specifically with circulation and degradation.  My piece was created from the idea to take an original photograph that I had taken this summer, and screenshot it. Then, I continued to screenshot the screenshot, and I did that process about 15 times. Now, something I noticed is that at first glance the images do not appear to be severely or noticeably altered. However, as you zoom in and carefully inspect them, you can see differences in clarity, brightness, and you can see that there is an added graininess to the last photograph compared to the first photograph.

I chose to do this idea for this project because it was something that directly related to the essay we read this week, the definitions we learned about during last Monday’s class (January 12^th), and because it also explored something interesting that I had never thought to do before.