Final

     Hito Steyerl's article talked about the merits of the poor image, and was a sort of commentary on the life of an old image or art movie.  According to her, an old image can be shared over the decades, whether physically or over the internet via torrent or otherwise, and eventually end up a completely different piece because of quality degradation.   This was something I never considered until reading her essay.  I always assumed that an image or video was always the same, even if the same image exists in a different quality.  She argues that that isn't true, that while the ones and zeroes that make the image exist might be the same, the quality transforms it into something different, for better or worse.
     This concept is what I tried to keep in mind while making my final video project.  I meant to take preexisting pieces of video and audio and, instead of copying endlessly to degrade the quality, edit them and put effects on them until they're unrecognizable.  Starting with the audio, half of the sound comes from feedback sounds I found online.  One clip was feedback from a guitar amp, and the other, which is the loud second half of the video, is just a really loud feedback from an unknown source.  Each of these was then altered, duplicated, pitch shifted, and layered in a way so that there is an escalation and crescendo that doesn't end until the video stops.
     The other half of the audio is the white noise that starts out the video and plays underneath the rest of the sounds.  For this, I used audacity in a way that I had never thought of before.  I imported two .jpg images into audacity, one of a forest and one of a desert, and converted the raw data of those still images into a wave form.  I then played with effects on those until I had a desirable white noise effect to act as the foundation of the rest of the audio.  This aspect of the audio relates back to Steyerl's article, as the raw data that makes up the white noise can be seen as the lowest quality image possible, so bad in fact that you cant even see it.  The image was broken down into nothing more than raw data, and then that data was used to help make a dense, claustrophobic soundscape.
     For the video aspect I used the same techniques.  I combined two clips of TV static, and two clips of a kaleidoscope visual and used different effects on them.  This is where I tried to introduce Steyerl's idea of the poor image.  Since I didn't have time to copy these clips over and over until they begin to degrade, I used different effects on multiple duplications of the same clip until each bore nearly no resemblance to the original clip.  On some duplicates I actively tried to make the quality suffer by way of filters, some aptly called "Bad TV," and on others I just layered on so many filters the image became something else entirely, like the colorful vortex that was once a simple kaleidoscope.
     After uploading the video to youtube, I noticed that it has a different aesthetic if watched at the lowest resolution of 144p.  It's not drastically different, I can still tell that it's my video, and the audio is pretty much unaffected, but the first half of the video that is made up mostly of effect ridden static feels different.  The added graininess distorts the finer details of the static particles, making those clips have a different quality to them, though I couldn't say if it's for better or worse.  This seems to be Steyerl's theory in motion, the same exact video at a lower resolution comes off as slightly different.  I wouldn't say that it makes the video into a different life form of sorts, but the difference is enough to be noticeable and make me wonder whether it would end up being a completely different video if the image quality was degraded much more.  Based on her article, I'd have to assume that it would be.