Media-as-things: The Intensified Materiality of Degenerated Images

Abstract

This paper adopts an art-based research model to investigate how media objects, as entangled material agencies, can become co-creators with artists and condition the viewers' memory and imagination. My work Recycled Series among other artists’ work are the subjects of this analysis. All these works involve images that are degenerated with a copy machine. The degenerated images lose coherence and become forms of ruins that the copier builds. Drawing from theories of things (Brown; Harman; Shaviro), I examine these works as the examples of “media-as-things” to show when media is misused, the potential of media is revealed. I place these works in the context of “broken-tech art” (Boym) and “haptic visuality” (Marks). I argue that these images determine a different object-subject relationship for their audience and their “thingness,” which is intensified through degeneration effects, becomes a major factor in their aesthetic reception.