May 21, 2008: noise is human
Lossy compression artifacts create information that’s not there. Noise is human- messy and imperfect. Introducing compression creates distortion. These errors serve to remind us of the fragility of life- of aging, deterioration and entropy. They approach the conditions of abstraction and are important as they exist stark contrast to the perfect ambitions of digital reproduction, cloning and replication.
There should be room here for a great breadth of research- distortion, compression, the invention of imperfections. I’m reminded of dot matrix printers and old photocopy machines. The challenge is how not to romanticize the retro beauty of these obsolete technologies, but rather to use them as a technique for research.
In the early 1990s I took a series of portraits of friends and family, which I had printed into 4×6″ prints and then scanned on a 8 bit flatbed scanner. At the time I didn’t realize why these files were so small and pixelated- I couldn’t enlarge them at all without them breaking up. I didn’t understand how resolution worked.