ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the project that started as an inquiry into precisely how images were impoverished by compression. By visualizing the difference between film and digital video one could see what was being added in the compression process. There are two types of compression: lossy and lossless. Lossy compression sacrifices faithful reproduction of the original media to reduce file size. Media on the web and in personal media devices are lossy copies of larger files. The compression starts by removing the 'least significant' media. The aesthetic, political, ideological and phenomenological implications of such determinations are the subject of the Lossless series. Lossy files require a degree of imagination to reconstitute. In some strange way that thinking eye is the subject and the material of digital media, and the subject of Lossless. Images are references to other images, and may prove powerful enough to prevent us from seeing what is on the screen in front of us.
