precedent not found

Meta Claire note: I originally wrote this for submission to an online publication back in December. They didn’t take it so now I want it to live here. Intending this to kickstart my more regular writing again. Enjoy!

Somewhere out there on the Internet there exists a video of a person, with short hair, wearing a black T-shirt with GORILLAZ scrawled across it in red, dancing to a song, and I cannot find it.

I take stock of what I know in an attempt at searching. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the video is the style in which the person dances—it’s reminiscent of movements typically used by cosplayers. The song is electronic, mellow, sort of like if Skrillex made a beat right after waking up from a nap. The shirt the person is wearing is from Hot Topic (I know, because I had the exact same one). I last saw it in a reproduction of a tweet on Instagram, sometime in 2022. The general attitude around the tweet and the reproductive post commended the person in the video for moving so smoothly and being so fun to watch. When I watched it then, I already knew it was old and I had seen it elsewhere years before, and I noticed after its resurfacing that more people, in TikToks and in reels, began to move in ways that mimicked this person. Unfortunately, all this information is somewhat useless in conducting a Google search. The video cannot be found. I remain empty-handed.

Having been on Instagram for over a decade, I periodically run into this problem, and the older I get the more it unsettles me. I will sometimes have entire conversations with friends about pieces of content that both of us have seen, but neither of us can relocate. Theorizing around a piece of lost media is nothing new, but I am often left to wonder how culture will develop when the media upon which it is based is lost in real time. Trace a post of today back through its symbolic origins and somewhere within the last generation you’re bound to encounter a blank space; a seminal screenshot or tweet or video that survives only referentially, as a precedent to the content of contemporaneity, and cannot itself be accessed. Slowly, the tapestry of our collective memory that defines cultural currents of the mid-2010s to now is being eaten away by bugs. When the time arises to analyze it, what can we do if we have nothing left?

All of this starts with the poor image. In 2009, Hito Steyerl wrote of the poor image being perpetually uploaded, downloaded, shared at the expense of its own substance, dilapidated with dubious ancestry, a shapeshifter of resolution, format, and name.¹ It is unique to digital technology, and it echoes masterpieces and meanings of the fine art world as it sits ostracized on the outside. She references histories of cinema, and how the demand for richer, analogue images (like 35mm or 70mm film) marginalized experimental projects that lacked funding to be shown widely. In the age of the digital reproduction, these projects were recirculated, but as echoes of their former selves, losing their integrity through endless compression and reformatting. Thus, the poor image itself implies decay. But, when existing on a medium that famously lasts forever, this decay can never result in entire annihilation—rather, images are renamed and nested within other images, in screenshots or recordings or carousels, until the original itself can no longer be located.

The fact remains, however, that even our newest generations of poor images call back to something greater than themselves. Back in that lineage I mentioned earlier, if you can manage to trace beyond the blank space, you will find that today’s posts, tweets, reels, and memes echo back to the ‘richer’ visual-cultural objects of the pre-digital. The ways in which social media content conveys meaning is an extrusion of the Postmodernist tendencies towards subjectivity, distrust in and subversion of hegemonic narratives, eschewal of high culture, and recycling of ideas to create works that are not original, but iterative (and really, is the Pony Cum Jar Project not just, in a way, the postpostmodernist Piss Christ?). Disconnected as they may seem, our poor images are not so distantly related to both high and low analogue cultures. The key distinction is that, unlike reiterated paintings, prints, photos, and films, content is lost not to decay, but to slippage into the void; untitled, unsearchable, unattributable, unlikely to ever be seen again.

How, then, can we begin to preserve what is already slipping away? Over the past five years, a new wave of post-Internet art has emerged. The artists within it—many of them young and Internet-reared—incorporate content into their work in a way that allows viewers to engage with the content as if viewing it in its authentic, original context. Some of these works focus on meticulous visual reproduction, while others collage images together, excavating and creating meaning by considering well-known contemporary Internet motifs alongside each other rather than in isolation. @gallerydog_ is, currently, one of my favourite archives of this movement. Their manifesto talks about creating a new visual language of “commonly referenced online imagery,” thus redefining the meaning of fine arts.² They posit themselves as a “refuge for the rejected fandom artists,” creating a space that welcomes artists working primarily from poor-image precedents. The artists within this community, and others working in this current of post-Internet art, are doing something very interesting—they are taking the poorest of poor images and making them rich. They pull posts, memes, pixels and bits of Impact text, and they paint them on canvases and paste them into collages, making them part of artworks that exist primarily in the offline world. Being paintings, photos, collages, the works themselves exist in an upper echelon of the image hierarchy, but they resist degradation, for the content that they depict is often already degenerate. Their working over of this content opens a line of questioning into how images are created on the Internet in the first place, and in reproducing them through other media, these artists imbue the images they use with their subjective experiences of them. As a result, these works begin to more intentionally archive and analyze the vast vat of content-soup that has shaped the past ten years’ worth of digital culture.

Something striking about these works is that many of them convey a high level of technical skill. Although they hold steady with the postmodern ideologies that shape Internet content and culture, their style trends towards the representational. Perhaps this is because the images they aim to immortalize are already so abstract in meaning. cum for all, all for cum is immediately clear to some as depicting The Pony Cum Jar Project (more colloquially known as Rainbow Dash Cum Jar), a cornerstone event in Internet subculture from the mid-2010s onward. In order to wholly understand this, the viewer should have an elementary working knowledge of 4chan syntax and semantics, My Little Pony, bronies, and have been at least passively privy to gooner history and the life cycle of memes through different platforms online. The image that this work depicts is already abstracted through so many layers of context that to represent it in such a realistic way is arguably more subversive than to abstract it further. The subjects of these works are already so striking, odd, niche, and in some cases so abject that to depict them representationally, to ground the image when its content is already several times removed from reality, is its own abstraction.

Similarly, transgender for everybody collages together a number of images from various points in the Internet’s cultural history. The provision of text, reading “TRANSGENDER FOR EVERYBODY,” gives a point of analysis for viewers unfamiliar with this history, but even so, its meaning remains nebulous to those who haven’t seen a Fred video or had the pleasure of being introduced to Miku Binder Jefferson. By arranging an array of images in relation to each other, the artist invites the viewer to consider their meaning relative to each other, and begin to conceptualize of a canon in which all of these images exist as moments within a cultural movement. The greater familiarity a viewer has with the poor images that compose this collage, the richer the work itself becomes to that viewer. Suddenly, fluency in low culture, in poor images, is sublimated beyond the sum of its parts.

This wave of post-Internet art documents images to prevent their being lost. It depicts these images in such a way that both preserves them and invites analysis into their role as cultural objects, both independently and as part of a movement. In simply representing them, this wave of post-Internet art recontextualizes these images and revels in their absurdity while grounding them in relative and subjective cultural meaning. In curating them alongside each other, it places these images, and their resulting artworks, within a cultural canon that bridges the gap between fine artistic richness and online ephemera. This wave of post-Internet art takes poor images and imbues them with so much significance as to make them nearly priceless.