Snipping is the record of an access problem. The digital distribution architecture – invisible, infrastructural, designed to control who has access to material and who does not – becomes visible in the frustrated attempt to screenshot a licensed image.

By capturing the blacked-out laptop screen via a flatbed scanner [...] the image undergoes a second, optical and mechanical access attempt. The scanner attempts to access the image in the same way it would read a document: systematically, line by line, with a light source of its own.