Post-Internet: debates of image-agency

            Both our classes’ assigned readings and discussions, in regard to Post-Internet, orbit around a polemics of image-agency. One half of this polemics, posited in Vierkant’s essay, “The Image Object Post-Internet”, is that the Post-Internet epoch is one that offers a liberating, impersonal, democratic handling of images and objects. He writes, “ For objects after the Internet there can be no ‘original copy.’ Even if an image or object is able to be traced back to a source, the substance (substance in the sense of both its materiality and its importance) of the source object can no longer be regarded as inherently greater than any of its copies.” In his argument, the object without original becomes the great equalizer. A traditional hierarchy of value fixed on originality is broken down. Vierkant continues, “…Culture after the Internet offers a radically different paradigm which our ‘They’ idiom does not allow for. This is not to say that we have entered a fully utopian age of endless possibilities but simply to claim that culture and language are fundamentally changed by the ability for anyone to gain free access to the same image-creation tools used by mass-media workers, utilize the same or better structures to disseminate those images, and gain free access to the majority of canonical writings and concepts offered by institutions of higher learning.”

            However, artist Hito Steyerl is less optimistic about the liberating potential of image circulation within the Post-Internet epoch. Steyerl’s interview goes into great depth explaining ways in which Internet technology manufacture images in ways that only give impressions of agency, choice, taste, preference, etc. “…The technology for the phone camera is quite different. As the lenses are tiny and basically crap, about half of the data captured by the sensor are noise. The trick is to create the algorithm to clean the picture from the noise, or rather to define the picture from within noise. But how does the camera know this? Very simple. It scans all other pictures stored on the phone or on your social media networks and sifts through your contacts. It looks through the pictures you already made, or those that are networked to you and tries to match faces and shapes. In short: it creates the picture based on earlier pictures, on your/its memory. It does not only know what you saw but also what you might like to see based on your previous choices. In other words, it speculates on your preferences and offers an interpretation of data based on affinities to other data.” Steyerl offers a complex counterpoint to Vierkant. Vierkant’s more populist understanding of Post-Internet becomes clouded, knowing that some of the image creation technology being used has its own kind of agency over the images its user makes. Stereyl continues, “The result might be a picture that never existed in reality, but that the phone thinks you might like to see.” In addition to her outlining of the workings of specific software, she describes ways in which the State continues to maintain control over the use of Internet technology, what she describes as, “the not-so-discreet consumer friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.”