Jordan Cassidy Anthony, Tzung Hui Lauren Lee & Shayna Rosendorff, Sharing, Resharing, Screenshot & Reshare, 2020, screenshot

Jordan Cassidy Anthony, Tzung Hui Lauren Lee & Shayna Rosendorff

Sharing, Resharing, Screenshot & Reshare

Considering our increasing digital existence, there are certain images that generate energy through resharing and editing which, not only in its circulation, brings a digital movement but also loss. Such images like the black square in #BlackOutTuesday are an example of this.

Looking at the adaptations and creation of the black square and the ways in which people ‘created’ their images online consisted of taking a screenshot of another person’s post, cropping and sharing, - this continuous thread of actions and in-between chopping and editing meant that, the more sharing that took place, the more altered it became and the more resolution it lost. There might never have been an ‘original’ black square to begin with and the loss of digital information forced the image to become emptier in its circulation. Along with the saturation came subsequent loss and this duality eventually turned into something else.

We selected a screenshot from Instagram of a post of a black square and shared it on Whatsapp, each person took turns screenshotting the image, cropping and resharing it. Working with a 'lossy compression', every time an image is reshared, it permanently removes a selection of pixels for it to be compressed, when it decompresses, it can’t regain that information because that information is lost so it makes guesses using the surrounding pixels.

The collection of these shared images form the intimate circuit of exchange and an alternate form of artistic collaboration over the course of three days is our digitally crafted artwork that becomes a symbol of the consequence of the oversaturation that we are currently experiencing on the digital plane.

Shayna Rosendorff

Jordan Anthony

Tzung Hui Lauren Lee