Response to Poor Image
This incredible article written by Hito Steyerl in 2009 analyzed the material conditions of the poor digitized image to a tee. The analysis is so on point that I feel this piece read the trend of corporate media to invest in profiting off of the digital ecosystem. “Digital communication has also become one of the most contested markets—a zone that has long been subjected to an ongoing original accumulation and to massive (and, to a certain extent, successful) attempts at privatization.” Those massive attempts proved to be very successful as Google and Meta took over the adtech industry and infiltrated social media—now a critical infrastructure of sorts for shopping, shipping, and information. Furthermore, those same conglomerates invested billions into LLMs that have infected the web with spam-generating bots, nonstop content, and outright image fabrication from nothing but prompts and environmental destruction. No image is safe now. I can’t think of a rich and privileged image anymore that is insulated from the giant machines combing all over media, bashing images together to create Frankenstein images. If an image is not physically in front of us and printed out for us to touch and feel, what can we even say it is? Whether an image is real or not, that’s beside the point now. What is the function of an image now? Is it pure deception and performance, when we can manipulate them in any way now? Images have always been sites of contested narratives and things being left out of frame. However, are we ready to build new languages together? Or will we keep being siloed by physical location, torn between marvelling and averting our eyes from our screens as All Images, which are all now Poor Images, fuse and morph in dimensions that only the LLMs now understand?
I need to go outside. Seasonal Affective Disorder is real lol
Storyboard for Portrait Subject: The Voyag3R
For my portrait, I would like to capture a character that I made during my Alter Egos class last semester: The Voyag3R.
I will explain more in class for my presentation, but here is my storyboard below (link in case it doesn’t load properly):
Ryan Rotella 
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