Vernacular Digital Photography: Generative Potential of Low Resolution (on the Material of «Digital Low» Virtual Communities)

In this paper, an attempt is made to identify and assess the generative potential of imperfect photographs created using outdated mobile devices. Being a marginal phenomenon of Internet culture, such a photograph does not have a generally accepted designation and does not stand out as a distinct genre. For this reason, we propose using the combination of digital low as a general notion — one of the self-names that captures two characteristic features of such a photograph: its digital nature and low resolution. The appearance of this latter in the form of compression artifacts and other digital defects is a keystone for us in the study of how weak images of digital low-photographs devoid of semantic depth are able to produce a new aesthetic experience. In our work, we strive to combine the optics of media archaeology, image theory, and posthumanism in an effort to discover the transformative potential of visual noise. Our thesis is that digital low is a creative strategy for media revitalization, which can be considered, on the one hand, as a way to resist the tendencies of modern digital culture towards achieving transparency and erasing traces of medial presence, on the other as a form of defense against the state of aesthetic excess and disinterested viewing. Such a photograph confronts the viewer with the banal, familiar and most often unnoticed, creating micro-events and situations of short—term "enchantment". At the same time digital low turns out to be not-fully-immersive since images always elude the viewer, not allowing them to overcome medial mediation. Based on this, we believe that the generativity of low-quality photography lies in the reconfiguration of the structure of the image itself and the disclosure of the sensual and affective dimension of its imperfect surface.