“I don’t care about what image/objects essentially are or represent. I’m fascinated about what we/they do and what happens along the way, about the interactions amongst image/objects and image/situations.”
Towards the end of this reading, this passage clarified Hito Steryl’s artistic message of showing the traces of the media’s history rather than the images of the media themselves. I found this interesting because Hito artistically enlightens us to something we don’t really pay attention to; how and what the media came to be.
Hito Steryl portrays how our modern, tech-heavy era manipulates media through compressions (which can degrade media quality), sharing (commoditizing art), and digital effects that everyone can use like filters. This manipulation gives the media its own sometimes unique history. This made me think about all the pictures and videos out on the internet and how they must have changed through time. I wonder what kinds of alterations have been done, by what technologies and methods. Definitely a unique perspective to looking and interpreting media.
In addition, we may also wonder what type of era the media originated and manipulated in. Was it scanned from a disposable film camera in the 1990s or painted on canvas at a time where technology was simple and art was more contemporary? Maybe it was created yesterday, then filtered with iPhone camera utilities and passed around tech-heavy, connected era – passed around on the internet in various compressions where it eventually lost its original resolution and true colors.