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Abstract: In Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man (1964), Marshall McLuhan explains the distinction between «hot» and «cold/cool» media on the basis of the distinction between the different degrees of definition that characterize the different media and their messages. Interpreted according to this perspective, media such as the printed book, photography, cinema, and radio are defined as «hot», while media such as oral communication, telephone, television, and the comics are considered to be «cold/cool». McLuhan's media theory may therefore be understood as a «media meteorology» in which the distinction between different media temperatures has a series of implications that are at the same time aesthetic, epistemic, and political. This essay refers to McLuhan's distinction between «hot» and «cold/cool» in order to study the implications of high and low definition in contemporary visual culture: a culture which seems to be characterized by a double tendency, a drive towards ever higher degrees of definition which is imposed by technological development and industrial marketing, and the persistency and survival of «poor», low– definition images, images that are blurred, pixelated, or degraded. This double dynamic is at the center of the four artists that are here analyzed: Hito Steyerl, Thomas Ruff, Jacques Perconte, Thomas Hirschhorn. Keywords: Media, Aesthetics, Image, Photography, Cinema.

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