on digital

i previously talked about how i feel like my photographic practice has evolved to favour DIGITAL over the past couple years

lately i've been thinking more about how we create and distribute our own digital images. but also how we absorb digital images. i recently read hito steyerls spam of the earth. here are some key points i liked. 

Journal #32 - February 2012

Hito Steyerl

The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation

Image spam is our message to the future.

image spam outnumbers the human population by far. 

People who might open their inboxes every day waiting for a miracle, or just a tiny sign, a rainbow at the other end of permanent crisis and hardship. 

 images floats around the globe, desperately vying for human attention


what could images tell potential extraterrestrial recipients about contemporary humanity?

A reserve army of digitally enhanced creatures who resemble the minor demons and angels of mystic speculation: 

horny, super skinny, armed with recession-proof college degrees, and always on time for their service jobs


it is an accurate portrayal of what humanity is actually not. It is a negative image. 
hegemony infiltrates everyday culture and spreads its values by way of mundane representation.

hegemony infiltrates everyday culture and spreads its values by way of mundane representation.

What if actual people—the imperfect and nonhorny ones—were not excluded from spam advertisements 

people have started to actively, and passively, refuse constantly being monitored, recorded, identified, photographed, scanned, and taped. Within a fully immersive media landscape, pictorial representation feels more like a threat.

Additionally, social media and cell-phone cameras have created a zone of mutual mass-surveillance, which adds to the ubiquitous urban networks of control, such as CCTV, cell -phone GPS tracking and face-recognition software. 

it is a misunderstanding that cameras are tools of representation; they are at present tools of disappearance.10 The more people are represented the less is left of them in reality.

A growing number of unmoored and floating images corresponds to a growing number of disenfranchized, invisible, or even disappeared and missing people

Image spam is an interesting symptom of the current situation because it is a representation that remains, for the most part, invisible.

On the one hand, they embody all the vices and virtues (or, more precisely, vices-as-virtues) of the present economic paradigm. On the other, they remain more often than not invisible, because hardly anybody actually looks at them.

people might have learned this, and accepted that any people can only be represented visually in negative form. This negative cannot be developed under any circumstance, since a magical process will ensure that all you are ever going to see in the positive is a bunch of populist substitutes and impostors, enhanced crash-test dummies trying to claim legitimacy. The image of the people as a nation, or culture, is precisely that: a compressed stereotype for ideological gain.

the reality that with a digital image nothing is certain has always scared me. 

though the moment the image is captured within our screen feels at the time very physical, the seamless possibility for the the image to, with very little conscious effort, cease to exist,  (perhaps a malfunction or mere accidental brush of the  ‘delete’ key)- is not out of the question. 

And though its not untrue that today there is always the ‘trash’ or ‘recently deleted’ or even the preventative measure of ‘backing up’ such fallible systems, one would be lying to deny the familiar sentiment of having lost digital photos , and being confronted with the strange fact of the images extinction. we forget that when it comes down to it, our images, our whole lives optically recorded exist essentially within this imaginary online ether, less than 2 cms of metal, within our screens this collection of coloured dots narrating our lives are either trapped within the hands of corporations like Facebook, instagram, or at the risk of the temperament of literal machines!!!!!!!! it’s so scary to me that when we were young you’d have a zillion print outs of film or even digital photos of you or your parents as kids: you’d have photo albums, books, postcards….etc etc! if you always had that physical copy to hold! i don’t think i have a single print out photo of myself past the age of 10 or 11! 

the likely extinction of the the digital image is most likely what has, in the past, drawn me to the corporeal of film rather than digital as a medium, however i’ve been thinking about creating a monthly digital portrait for a while now. the funny thing about it is last time i returned from australia i experienced the same initiative to chronicle the products of both my virtual and discernible reality devoid of context, (my visual comings and goings if u will) channeled into one tangible and reoccurring object.

the notion itself (essentially a self published zine-format collection of images) is simple and by no means unique but seemed a straightforward answer to having all of this visual material recorded and existing as a collective, and yet existing only exclusively on a platform as tempremental as Instagram, where the matter itself manifests as a collection of corrugated pixels, teetering between the hands of myself, those complicit in the intimate details of my cyber consciousness, my (“followers”) , and the mass corporation who essentially own all of my optical junk, (despite the naive facade of privacy which we are promised!!!!) 

here are some oil pastels i did of some phone photos from australia. i like the idea of making drawings of stuff that's digital.