Lo-Fi: Compression, Drift, and Appearance Without Ground

By: Sawyer, Chris

Lo-fi is usually understood as an aesthetic of degradation: grain, noise, compression artifacts, damaged recordings, blurred images, and imperfect copies. Lo-Fi: Compression, Drift, and Appearance Without Ground asks what these phenomena disclose about appearance itself.

Developing the concepts of compression, drift, and remainder, Chris Sawyer argues that mediation does not simply distort an otherwise intact original. Determinate appearance is already structured through selection, exclusion, transformation, and persistence. Lo-fi matters because it makes these operations perceptible.

Moving across philosophy, media theory, phenomenology, aesthetics, information theory, and the politics of technological systems, the book examines degraded signals, perceptual thresholds, adaptive bitrate streaming, synthetic artifacts, surveillance, and algorithmic mediation. It engages figures including Hito Steyerl, Friedrich Kittler, Vil m Flusser, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Gilbert Simondon, and Mark Fisher while developing a systematic account of mediated appearance without recourse to an untouched ground.

The book concludes with an inventory of practical protocols for copying, degradation, translation, encoding, reconstruction, and generation, returning its philosophical concepts to material operations that can be performed and compared.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HKDR7JJ3
• ISBN13: 9798996433834
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Green Lion
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"