Compression: A Loose History

As new communication infrastructures develop, aesthetic representation becomes an engineering problem, especially where people make representational demands upon infrastructures that exceed their carrying capacity. Today, the word compression is used to describe any technical process that renders a mode of representation adequate to its infrastructures.

Too often, humanists, engineers, and journalists alike still evaluate media in terms of their ability to produce verisimilitude effects. Starting with a close analysis of the audio compressor as a paradigm, this paper offers an alternative perspective. It explores examples of compression from the 19th and 20th centuries to argue that in each case, infrastructural concerns around efficiency, mobility and circulation shaped important aesthetic dimensions of mediatic experience. If compression transforms representation for the purposes of technical media, it also transforms media to render them adequate to representation. This helps to explain why efficiency and efficacy, along with so-called fidelity to experience, is a driving concern in the theory and history of media. It also offers an important pathway toward understanding how and why lower-definition experiences are sometimes among the most intense, momentous and meaningful moments in modern life.