THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM

 

 

 

 

In Defense of the Copy

 

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The copy on YouTube is an activist strategy of sorts; an amalgamated grammar of ripped or re-recorded content that often aims to circumvent copyright detection algorithms. These copies traffic in the degraded image, a space between detection and illegibility that at times lays too closely to the latter. . by Jesse Darling, 2012, plays with this aesthetic. The video is a one minute and fifty second clip re-recorded with a mobile phone camera from a 1983 interview of the late filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky titled A Poet in the Cinema. Accessed by Darling as a YouTube video itself, this interview was ripped from a VHS copy and put through digital conversion; each instance of mediation is an added layer of removal from the analog ‘original’.

 

. is a hazy record of loose conversion and thrice-over digital compression. Tarkovsky’s voice crackles under the noise of its recopied static. Faint colored bands roll slowly down the video, caused by the camera and computer monitor’s different refresh rates; a common artifact of this type of production. The backlighting of the monitor serves to blow out the whites in the clip, and black areas are murky and unreadable. Darling’s re-recording is handheld, and we see the shakiness of her hand and the way its movements cause the camera to go in and out of focus. Each re-iteration of the clip has built to this degraded and residual product. Towards the end of the video, the camera moves in closely, focusing on Tarkovsky’s eyes and mouth; a directorial decision, perhaps, where the traces of image degradation become subject.

 

In her 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image”, Hito Steyerl makes a case for the copy as a discursive form of its own: 

 

It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, films into clips, contemplation into distraction… at the expense of its own substance. The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.

 

The re-recorded copy on YouTube is the product as reactionary loophole, that itself longs for the fidelity of its original; it is a means to an end of content distribution. Darling’s clip, however, revels in its deterioration. The abstraction Steyerl mentions comes through as a quasi-poetic testament to the moving image as a networked and subversive piece of audience participation; . is an impression of content meant to reframe and recontextualize. In many ways, the piece can be said to be an exercise in copies: video as the ‘copy’ of film, Darling’s own production as the ‘copy’ of directorial practice, and the moving image as the ‘copy’ of reality. Tarkovsky’s own thoughts in the video, relayed in bits of visible caption, can reductively be said to be about copies as well: “we must live our own experience, we cannot inherit it.” He speaks of each successive generation’s correct failure to adopt their parents’ experiences, instead seeking their own; the degradation of copies of copies mirrors the possible outcomes of the removal from a ‘lived’ experience or direct source.

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