untitled (authenticity machine)
Jpg compression is a patina, evidence of movement. It proves provenance, or at least gestures towards it. Hinting that the digital object has a history even if the metadata are wiped clean. Files don’t have birthdays. They are passed back and forth until they become illegible, or become something else.
I have written a program which will change a pristine image file into a compressed jpg. No longer do images have to be passed back and forth over time to become compressed, degraded, or illegible. Now with a few commands typed into a program, a user can apply this faux finish to any image, thereby implying a history of online exchange.
“The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its
resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It
is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant
idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed
through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced,
ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other
channels of distribution.”