"Poor image," a term coined by filmmaker and artist Hito Steyerl in the essay In Defense of the Poor Image, draws attention to the decaying quality of digital media due to its circulation on the internet. Steyerl writes, "The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free."
Loosely inspired by this, the Poor Image Collective hopes to incorporate the ideas of a decaying image and the messy reality of digital exhibition into the initial stages of filmmaking and production intentionally. Founded by Hannah Fleisch and Amelia Waud, this collective worked primarily in 2021-2022 through a series of meetings and workshops culminating in a final film.