About "Participatory Poverty"
Karin + Shane Denson
Part of the larger Scannable Images project, the virtual installation Participatory Poverty consists of several static and animated images, along with video content and generative text superimposed upon them when viewed through the Wikitude AR browser (see here for a brief "user's guide" to the project).
Apart from the augmented reality components, the base layer of the installation consists of two visible objects:
1) An animated background (.gif) derived from the video experiment at the heart of this installation: "Participatory Poverty (After Hito Steyerl)". Inspired by Hito Steyerl's essay "In Defense of the Poor Image," the video draws its materials from YouTube — specifically from the search results for the term “poor image.” (See below for more information about the video.) Here, the animated gif background loops through the first few seconds of 16 of these clips.
2) A foreground image with three panels, which serves as a trigger for the installation's AR components. The three panels are:
a) A composited image, derived from the video "Participatory Poverty." Whereas the animated background (see above) places video clips next to another and thus suggests the contiguity between the "poor images" of YouTube and other digital video platforms, this composition layers them on top of one another, letting them impinge upon one another directly.
b) Another composited image of images from the video. Here again, the temporal bleeding that takes place between the various clips is translated into a spatial co-presence.
c) Finally, a digital photo of a canvas, 24" x 18", hand-painted by Karin Denson to depict a morphed grid of stills from the video "Participatory Poverty (after Hito Steyerl)." By painting the digital image in physical media, this work explores the interface between the imperceptible microtemporality of digital image processing (these images flash across the screen faster than they can be humanly perceived) and its transformation into a perceivable form. Moreover, the painting presents a meditation on the boundary and interaction between contemporary forms of virtuality and materiality, especially when the physical painting of a digital object/process is overlaid with an augmented layer that exists somewhere in between.
When scanned with the AR browser Wikitude (user's guide here), several additional components become visible (and audible):
A) The datamoshed video that forms the audiovisual core of "Participatory Poverty." This piece collects a variety of images circulating online and thinks about the status of what Hito Steyerl calls “the poor image.” Of particular interest is the conjunction of technological, political, socio-economic, and aesthetic facets, factors, and practices that Steyerl identifies in her provocative essay on the subject. Significantly, Steyerl breaks with both nostalgic or backwards-looking approaches to the “end” or “death” of cinema and with the one-sided celebration of a so-called “participatory culture,” which tends to ignore the capitalist framework within which fan-based acts of appropriation and expansion are themselves appropriated as “immaterial labor” in the service of big-business entertainment franchises. This project seeks to highlight the ambivalent status of the poor image, utilizing techniques of datamoshing and databending, themselves fan-based techniques for image impoverishment that have also been employed in high-profile projects (e.g. big-budget music videos) and projects with a high-cultural cachet (e.g. gallery art). In order to question the confluence of technical and socio-economic/political considerations at work in the poor image while avoiding too much editorial interference or interpretation on our part, the video works generatively — drawing materials from YouTube and collating them according to the itinerary dictated by the search results for the term “poor image.” That is, the first 44 search results (from a query conducted on April 8, 2015) are cycled three times, in the order of their appearance in the list of results — initially taking the first ten seconds of each clip, then the next five, and finally the next second. After combining the images, in this order, all I-frames were removed (so-called “datamoshing”), thus establishing unexpected — and, we think, interesting and sometimes telling — connections between the clips.
B) An HTML overlay displaying stills from the video, along with randomly selected statements about "Participatory Poverty" — what it is, what it wants, what it thinks, hopes, or fears.
C) Another HTML overlay, which digitally morphs the physical painting back into a grid of images and morphs each video still into the next. The text overlay uses Markov chains to randomly generate sentences on the basis of Hito Steyerl's "In Defense of the Poor Image," which theorizes the interconnection of material-technological and economic-political facets of what she calls the poor image. The associative logic of the text-generating algorithm formally mimics the logic of contiguity and promiscuous interconnection by which post-cinema operates, and according to which it distinguishes itself from the human-centered perceptual logic of classical cinema. And it is these dynamics that we hope to capture and mediate — both thematically and materially — to the viewer of "Participatory Poverty" and the larger project of "Scannable Images."
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