To double or diffuse: Art and the mobility of images, ca. 2005

In this essay I examine how artists responded aesthetically to the new order of image mobility and transience that unfolded around 2005, when social media instigated the imperative to share and exchange files. With video-based works by Slater Bradley and Seth Price as cases, I explore how low resolution imagery around this time was purposefully deployed to signal the travels of an image through a network. Contributing to the growing scholarship on circulation and distribution of art and media, I develop the models of ‘doubling’ and ‘diffusion’ as analytical tools to differentiate between two distinct material-technical and networked practices of image reproduction and distribution evoked in these works, as well as between the affective charge they induce.