Unit 2, Positions through Contextualising

Bibliography and Critical Analyses

Bibliography

1. Pater, R. (2021) CAPS LOCK: How Capitalism Took Hold of Graphic Design, and How to Escape from It. Amsterdam: Valiz.

Pater’s account of how graphic design tools, formats and workflows are inseparable from capitalist logics gave me a vocabulary for something I had only been sensing in my own iterations. When I processed the same photograph through eight file formats, I was effectively staging a class system, RAW for the professional, JPEG for the public, WebP for the platform, but I lacked a framework to name the political work those encodings perform. Pater insists that no format, tool or interface is neutral; each one quietly redistributes access, ownership and labour. This pushes my enquiry beyond a formal comparison of compressions and toward asking who is served by each translation in the chain. It also sharpens my interest in “ownability”: if the conditions of digital circulation are structured by capital, then watermarks, NFC tags and clay-held URLs are not eccentric gestures but small attempts to reintroduce friction, possession and slowness into a system designed to dissolve them.

2. Vierkant, A. (2010) The Image Object Post-Internet. Available at: https://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_us.pdf (Accessed: 13 May 2026).

Vierkant’s essay is the reference I have argued with most productively. His two conditions, that nothing is in a fixed state, and that art now lacks fixity in representational strategy, describe exactly the situation my format-translation iterations expose, and gave me language for why the “original” of a digital image can no longer claim priority over its copies. However, I find his conclusion unsatisfying in the same way Jennifer Chan does: the literal hopping between digital and physical instantiations risks becoming a formal demonstration rather than a critical position, with the artist’s “hand” and relationship to the technology obscured. This tension is now driving my project. I want to take seriously Vierkant’s diagnosis of the post-internet condition while refusing the smoothness of his solution, hence the deliberately laborious, hand-formed clay objects that hold links to code. The friction of recovery, the requirement to possess every piece, is my disagreement with him made into form.

3. Nelson, T.H. (1981) Literary Machines. Sausalito, CA: Mindful Press.

Nelson’s Xanadu proposal arrived in my research as an unexpectedly tender document. Its insistence on bi-directional links, transclusion rather than copying, and the traceability of every fragment back to its source reads now as a counter-history of the web, a version of digital culture in which authorship, provenance and ownership were not casualties of the medium but its organising principles. For my enquiry into whether the digital image can be “owned” or grounded, Xanadu functions as a productive ghost: it shows that the conditions Groys and Vierkant describe were not inevitable but designed in, by the triumph of one-way hyperlinks over Nelson’s model. This reframes my clay-NFC objects. They are not nostalgic gestures toward physicality but small, hand-made implementations of a Xanadu-like logic, each piece a node that must be physically held to participate in the image’s reconstruction. Nelson lets me argue that bi-directionality is not anti-digital; it is a different digital that never happened, and that my project briefly reinstates.

4. Groys, B. (2016) In the Flow. London: Verso.

Groys reframed the question I had been circling without being able to articulate. I had assumed the digital image was a degraded version of a physical original, but his claim that contemplation online leaves traces, that every view, click and pause is archived and constitutive of the subject, inverted that assumption. The image is not weakened by digital mediation; rather, it absorbs the viewer into its data. This shifted my iteration significantly. The eight-format study stopped being about loss of quality and became about the impossibility of a neutral encounter: each format performs the viewer back to themselves and to the network. Groys’s reading of post-internet conditions as quasi-religious, with the user replacing the spectator, also helped me understand why “ownership” of an image has become such an emotionally charged question in my work. The clay-and-NFC pieces are partly an attempt to restore the offline mode of contemplation Groys describes, a mode in which the act of looking does not automatically become data.

5. Steyerl, H. (2009) ‘In Defense of the Poor Image’, e-flux Journal, no. 10. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/ (Accessed: 12 May 2026).

Steyerl’s essay sits underneath almost every iteration I have made in this unit, even when I am not citing it directly. Her description of the “poor image” as an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original, with a dubious genealogy and deliberately misspelled filenames, gave me a way of speaking about the photographs in my eight-format study as something more than degraded copies. The poor image, in her reading, is not a failure of resolution but the residue of decisions made by institutions the viewer doesn’t have access to. Resolution is class-stratified, and the JPEG you receive is what is left after those decisions have been made. That argument is what allowed my class-of-formats iteration to stop being a technical comparison and become a political one. Steyerl also pushes against my instinct to mourn the original: the poor image circulates, mutates, accelerates, and that velocity is part of its value. My clay-NFC pieces are partly a counter-move to this, a deliberate slowing, but I want that counter-move to be in dialogue with her position, not in denial of it.

6. Steyerl, H. (2013) ‘Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?’, e-flux Journal, no. 49. Reprinted in e-flux journal (2015) The Internet Does Not Exist. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Steyerl’s claim that the internet has become 4D, immersive and inescapable, so entangled with the physical world that it can no longer be located “elsewhere”, gave me the tension my project now turns on. The more spectacular and whimsical the network becomes, the more it distracts from its own material ground; the cloud is not weightless, it is server farms, cables, and depleted resources. This collapsed the easy binary I had been working with between “digital” and “physical” and forced me to recognise that my CSV-and-HTML iteration was not a translation from one realm to another but a re-routing within a single, already-physical system. It also reframes the clay-NFC objects: they are not bringing the digital “down to earth” because the digital was never off it. What they do instead is make the materiality that was already there briefly legible, by demanding that someone hold a piece of clay in order to participate in the reconstruction of an image.

7. Seu, M. (2021) ‘The Internet Exists on Planet Earth’, Source Type. Available at: https://www.sourcetype.com/editorial/24436/the-internet-exists-on-planet-earth (Accessed: 10 May 2026).

Seu’s essay does something more practical than Steyerl’s: it walks through the metaphors, “cloud,” “stream,” “wireless”, and shows how each one quietly removes the network from the ecology that hosts it. Reading her alongside Ursula K. Le Guin’s line that modern high technology treats the world as disposable was a turning point in how I think about my own tools. The Python scripts, the libraries I lean on, the GitHub Pages I publish to: all of these are not neutral conveniences but parts of an infrastructure with a footprint. This sharpened a choice in my iteration that had been intuitive: when I moved from coded animation toward clay objects with NFC tags, I was not simply adding a “physical” component to a “digital” project. I was acknowledging that the project had always been physical, and that the clay was just a more honest declaration of that. Seu’s writing helps me argue that the handmade element is not nostalgic; it is ecological literacy.

8. Menkman, R. (2011) The Glitch Moment(um). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures (Network Notebooks 04).

Menkman’s book was the reference that ended my first iteration and made the second one possible. Her distinction between “domesticated” and “critical” glitch, between a glitch that becomes a style and a glitch that pushes the medium past its operating limits in order to expose its politics, named exactly the dissatisfaction I had with my Illustrator corruption experiments. Once the glitch became an aesthetic I could control, it stopped doing critical work. Her claim that every medium has built-in assumptions which look neutral but are not, and that resolution studies is a literacy of the people, the machines, and the people being made by the machines, gave me the conceptual permission to move outward from the software interface to the file format itself. The class-of-formats iteration, and even the later move to text-data held in clay, are both attempts to keep the glitch critical, to keep finding the level of the system at which it has not yet been domesticated.

9. Lialina, O. (2013) Summer [web-based artwork]. Hosted across 21 servers. Available at: http://www.evan-roth.com/olia/summer/ (Accessed: 11 May 2026).

Lialina’s Summer was the project that gave me a working model for what I was trying to do with my 100-HTML-page iteration. Summer is a 21-frame animation of Lialina on a swing, but each frame lives on a different server. When one host goes down, the animation stutters or breaks. The piece refuses to behave as a self-contained file; its smoothness is a temporary effect of an infrastructure that is constantly degrading and being maintained by other people. That structural honesty is what I wanted in my own work. Distributing my image across 100 CSV sheets and 100 HTML pages was a direct response to Lialina: it forced the “image” to depend on the network’s functioning, and made the rendering process visible as labour rather than as a click. Lialina also matters to me because she resists the post-internet smoothness Vierkant proposes; her work insists that the early web’s slowness and fragility were not bugs to be optimised away but conditions that disclosed how the medium actually worked. I return to that argument in the extended analysis below.

10. Mohr, M. (1970) P-032 (Matrix Elements), punched card set. Victoria and Albert Museum collection. Available at: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1242174/po32-matrix-elements-punched-card-set-manfred-mohr/ (Accessed: 9 May 2026).

Mohr’s punched cards interest me less as an aesthetic reference and more as evidence of an earlier moment when the image and its underlying data could still be held in the same hand. The card is the instruction and the trace at once; the image it generates is downstream of an object you can physically touch, sort and stack. For my project this is a useful historical counter-image to the seamlessness of contemporary software. The Illustrator file or JPEG hides everything Mohr’s card displays: there is no equivalent gesture for holding the data of a Photoshop image. My clay-and-NFC pieces are partly a contemporary echo of this logic. Each lump of clay is a card, in the sense that it carries instructions for re-assembling something visual, and Mohr’s work helps me argue that this is not a craft retreat but a return to an earlier, more honest relationship between image and data.

11. Chan, J. (2014) ‘Notes on Post-Internet’, in You Are Here: Art After the Internet. Manchester: Cornerhouse / SPACE. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/7508373/Notes_on_Post_Internet (Accessed: 12 May 2026).

Chan is the writer who gave me permission to disagree with Vierkant. Her critique, that the literal translation of digital files into physical objects can feel “conceptually unsatisfying” because the artist’s hand and their relationship to the technology become invisible, named a discomfort I had with my own earlier iterations. When I exported the CSV as a spreadsheet or rendered the same image in eight formats, the work risked becoming a tidy demonstration of a thesis Vierkant had already stated. Chan’s phrase “hybridise or disappear,” borrowed from Oliver Laric, is now something I test my own decisions against. The shift toward hand-shaped clay objects holding URLs is partly a response to this: the hand is back in the work, and the relationship to the technology is awkward, slow, and visible, rather than smooth and seamless. Chan also reminds me that post-internet practice has often been more about hype-cycles than critique, and that my project needs to resist becoming yet another formal exercise in the same idiom.

12. Gollan, C.A. (2012) ‘User-Generated Content’, pooool.info. Available at: https://pooool.info/uncategorized/user-generated-content/ (Accessed: 10 May 2026).

Gollan’s essay was where I first encountered the argument that hacking on top of an existing system inherits the biases of that system, that emergent bias, in Friedman and Nissenbaum’s sense, follows the code even when it is repurposed for critique. This was a difficult reference to sit with because my whole practice in Unit 2 has been a form of repurposing: writing Python on top of rawpy, publishing on GitHub Pages, using NFC chips manufactured by companies whose values I have not examined. Gollan does not let me off the hook for any of that. But the essay’s introduction of Nelson’s Xanadu as a different digital that never happened gave me the conceptual link between my interest in ownership (from Groys) and my interest in physicality (from the feedback). The clay pieces are my attempt to take Gollan’s challenge seriously: not to discard the system, but to build a small, deliberately friction-ed alternative that knows what it inherits.

Extended Critical Analyses

Project: Olia Lialina, Summer (2013)

Olia Lialina’s Summer (2013) is a 21-frame web-based animation of the artist on a swing. Its central conceit is structural rather than visual: each of the 21 frames is hosted on a different server, and the “animation” is what happens when a browser is redirected through that chain of hosts in sequence. The image you eventually see, a looping picture of Lialina swinging against a graded blue sky, is therefore not stored anywhere as a single file. It is a temporary effect of an infrastructure that has to be running, in 21 different places, at the moment you load it. When one of the host servers fails, the animation falters, and the work briefly reveals what it has always been: a distributed performance staged by other people’s machines.

The position Lialina takes is that the medium of the early web, its slowness, its server-dependence, its visible plumbing, was not a problem to be optimised away but a condition that disclosed how the network actually worked. As Rhizome’s editorial note observes, Lialina was not romantically attached to slowness when she made My Boyfriend Came Back from the War in 1996; she was as frustrated as any other user. The work functioned within a specific technical context. What changed is the context, not the work, and that change has exposed what was always structurally true.

Formally, Summer commits to its position in ways that a more polished post-internet work would not. The image is not particularly high-resolution. The cropping is awkward. The host URLs are visible if you watch the address bar. There is no pre-loader, no fallback, no graceful degradation; if a server is down, the animation simply stops, and you are left looking at a broken link. These are all decisions, not failures. They keep the viewer aware of where the work physically lives, and they refuse the contemporary expectation that a web experience should feel weightless. In this sense Summer is exactly the kind of work Hito Steyerl has in mind when she writes about the poor image: it is not poor by accident but poor as a strategy of disclosure.

Read alongside Vierkant, Lialina sharpens my position. Vierkant’s diagnosis that the digital image is no longer fixed but in flux across many instantiations describes Summer accurately, but Vierkant treats this as something to be embraced through smooth translation between media. Lialina treats it as something to be exposed, by deliberately refusing smoothness. Where Vierkant’s image-objects move easily between PDF, sculpture and screen, Lialina’s animation insists on staying inside the network it was made for, and breaks instead of adapting. This is Jennifer Chan’s critique of Vierkant in practice: the artist’s hand and her relationship to the medium remain visible because the medium has not been hidden behind a finish.

For my own project, Summer was the reference that made the 100-HTML-page iteration possible. I had been trying to find a way of breaking up the smoothness of an image so that its dependence on infrastructure became visible, but I had been doing it inside a single Python script, which meant the infrastructure was hidden inside my own machine. Lialina’s decision to distribute the frames across 21 servers gave me a model for distributing the rendering of my image across 100 CSV files and 100 HTML pages. Each iteration of the image lives on its own page; the progressive rendering only works because GitHub Pages is serving each of them. The clay-and-NFC work extends this logic one step further, so that even the URLs require a physical object to be retrieved. Lialina also keeps me honest about scope: she needed 21 frames and a willingness to let the work fail, not 100 servers.

Text: Boris Groys, In the Flow (2016)

Boris Groys’s In the Flow (Verso, 2016) argues for a fundamental shift in how we understand the relationship between art, the viewer and the medium under conditions of networked digital reproduction. The book’s central claim, for my purposes, is that the digital image is not a thing but an event: the image file is invisible, and what we call the image is the performance of that file each time a viewer summons it. Groys compares the digital image to a musical score, silent in itself, audible only when performed, and concludes that digitalisation turns visual art into a performing art. The aura that Walter Benjamin located in the original artwork, and that he saw as dissipating under mechanical reproduction, returns under digital conditions in an inverted form: it now belongs not to the file but to each individual visualisation.

Around this central claim, Groys argues that the internet functions more like a church than like a museum, and that with the death of the offline spectator we have gained a new, universal kind of viewer whose every act of looking is recorded. The act of contemplation, which in offline conditions leaves no trace, leaves a trace online, and that trace destroys the ontological autonomy of the viewing subject. He also describes a kind of textual rebellion against this: Steyerl’s poor image, with its dubious genealogy and deliberately misspelled filenames, is for Groys an attempt to give the circulating digital file back something like a body.

Formally, In the Flow does its own argument on the page. Groys writes in short, recursive essays that re-state and slightly modify the same set of claims from different angles. The prose is plain almost to the point of austerity, and this restraint is part of the position. He is writing about a condition in which images and texts circulate too quickly to be read carefully, and his response is to slow the reader down through deliberately patient repetition. The book’s cover, a moiré of dots forming the title, performs the same logic: the words exist only as an effect of an underlying pattern, and that effect is only legible if you stop and look.

In the Flow has reframed my project in two key ways. The first happened around the question of loss. I had been working under the assumption, inherited from a romantic reading of Benjamin, that the digital image is a degraded version of a physical original, and that my work was about recovering some of what had been lost. Groys does not let me keep that framing. For him the digital image is not weakened by reproduction; it is performed by it, and the viewer is absorbed into the data of that performance rather than standing outside it as a spectator. After reading this, my eight-format study stopped being about quality loss and became about the impossibility of a neutral encounter. Each format, DNG, TIFF, PNG, WebP, JPEG, GIF, performs the viewer back to themselves and to the network that delivers it. The class system of formats I describe in my presentation is, in Groys’s terms, a series of different performances of the same invisible file.

The second reframing came through Groys’s passage on online contemplation leaving a trace. I had not previously understood why ownership of a digital image felt like such an emotionally charged question in my project. Groys made it legible. If the act of looking online is no longer separate from the act of being recorded, then watermarks, passwords and physical containers are not eccentric attempts to commodify culture but attempts to recover an offline mode of contemplation, a mode in which the viewer is not automatically absorbed into the work’s metadata. This is what my clay-and-NFC pieces are reaching toward. When someone has to hold a small piece of clay in their hand to scan an NFC tag, the act of looking is briefly returned to a body, in a room, doing something specific, rather than to a logged session on a server. Vierkant gives me a theory of the post-internet object; Groys gives me a theory of the post-internet viewer; my project is the attempt to keep both in view at once.