Technoaesthetics as Aesthetics of Error: Reading for the Botch

When Zibahkhana: Hell’s Ground (Omar Ali Khan, 2007), a Pakistani remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, ends up on Amazon Prime not as a pristine file formatted for the digital stream but as a recording of a DVD, how should we watch it? This paper thinks this question by connecting the literature on poor images with the openings onto error and incompletion provided by Simondon’s category of the technoaesthetic. While technoaesthetics has usually been interpreted by commentators on Simondon as a category of fit and connectedness, this paper excavates a different sense of the term—one geared towards ideas of mutation, botchery, and error—and in so doing, assembles an alternate, speculative model for how we might read moiré, glitch, and other uncanny effects of low resolution.