I try to project a question. It often takes the form of an experiment, a “what if.” And after asking this question we construct the model, we test the hypothesis—and sometimes we do it to absurd lengths. . . . The approach is to project something on a nonexistent future.
Hito Steyerl, in Łukasz Zaremba, “To Work as a Pixel: Interview with Hito Steyerl,” SZUM Magazine (Warsaw) online, December 20, 2014, available at magazynszum.pl/to-work-as-a-pixel-interviev-with-hito-steyerl/.
Filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl has studied philosophy and documentary filmmaking, written journalism, trained as a camera person, and spent her formative days as a stuntwoman and bouncer.1 At seventeen she cast close friend Andrea Wolf in her first film—a feminist remake of Russ Meyer’s 1965 action adventure Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, only enacting the fighting scenes with a gang of three vigilante women. Steyerl later used footage from the film for November (2004) and Lovely Andrea (2007) to traverse the real-life tragedy of Wolf’s death in Kurdistan, where she had joined the women’s army of the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party). When Wolf died, Steyerl envisioned her original action film with Wolf as a form of documentary—albeit contrived—about women fighting for justice.2 The artist’s recirculation of images from the original fiction, interwoven with images of the Turkish government’s repression of the Kurdish struggle for independence, complicates the relationship between fact and fiction.
Stefan Landorf, “Hito Steyerl,” e-flux, October 10, 2012, available at e-flux.com/program/65176/hito-steyerl/. ↩︎
Verónica Tello, “Counter-Memorial Aesthetics in an Era of Contemporaneity: Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, Hito Steyerl’s November and Other Engagements with Too Much Time,” in Tello, Counter-Memorial Aesthetics: Refugee Histories and the Politics of Contemporary Art (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 174–78. ↩︎
Hito Steyerl investigates the circulation of images. “They are nodes of energy and matter that migrate across different supports,” she writes.1 Images have become alive and active, actuating events and dictating our understanding of the world around us—a shift Steyerl dates to the Romanian uprising in 1989, when protesters stormed the national television broadcast headquarters and overtook the station: “Around 1989, television images started walking through screens, right into reality.”2 At this moment, images no longer recorded the news but instead began constructing it.
Hito Steyerl’s futuristic films are based on the strangeness of contemporary life: “Real biographies are so much more interesting than anything I can imagine,” says the artist, who studied documentary filmmaking.1 Screened in an immersive grid of glowing blue LED lights—a kind of Star Trekkian “holodeck” able to materialize a different world in three dimensions2—Factory of the Sun (2015) tells the story of workers whose forced dance moves in a motion-capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine. The surreal story is loosely based on an actual YouTube phenomenon— homemade dance videos made by Steyerl’s studio assistant’s brother went viral and were then used as a model for Japanese anime characters—and a news story about an experiment at CERN nuclear research facility in Geneva that claimed to have measured a particle traveling faster than the speed of light.3 On screen, Steyerl rendered such a reality through “images and avatars”4 using a montage of YouTube dance videos, drone surveillance footage, video game characters, fictitious news, and real documentation of recent international student uprisings. Modern warfare, corporate culture, and anti-capitalist resistance movements are played out by disembodied characters—avatars, bots, or proxies for human viewers who watch the video from the vantage of reclining beach chairs.
Hito Steyerl, in “What Is Contemporary: A Conversation with Hito Steyerl,” conversation with Lanka Tatersall, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, February 21, 2016, available at youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=sNW1PP-034Q&feature=emb_title. ↩︎
Hito Steyerl, in “What Is Contemporary: A Conversation with Hito Steyerl,” conversation with Lanka Tatersall, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, February 21, 2016, available at youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=sNW1PP-034Q&feature=emb_title. ↩︎
Hito Steyerl, in “What Is Contemporary: A Conversation with Hito Steyerl,” conversation with Lanka Tatersall, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, February 21, 2016, available at youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=sNW1PP-034Q&feature=emb_title. ↩︎
Nicolas Linnert, “All Access Politics: Reality and Spectatorship in Two Film Installations by Jean-Luc Godard and Hito Steyerl,” X-TRA 19, no. 3 (Spring 2017), available at x-traonline.org/article/all-access-politics-reality-and-spectatorship-in-two-film-installations-by-jean-luc-godard-and-hito-steyerl/. ↩︎
Examining human relationships with artificial intelligence (AI)—a looming technology still in its infancy—Hito Steyerl asks, “does AI have a shadow?” She speculates that shadows can exist even when the objects casting them are not yet visible.1 For example, for her 2019 work City of Broken Windows, Steyerl filmed engineers in the United Kingdom smashing hundreds of windows in a large airplane hangar to teach artificial neural networks how to recognize the sound of breaking glass. Destruction, in this case, is used as a mode of progress in the development of security technologies—one Steyerl sees reflected in the tech industry’s economic impact on places like California’s Bay Area, where extreme inequality emerges as a kind of shadow, a forecast of technological futures.2
Hito Steyerl, “The Language of Broken Glass,” lecture on the occasion of Stop Making Sense at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 12, 2019, posted February 26, 2019, at youtube.com/watch?v=iyyM4vDg0xw. ↩︎
Hito Steyerl, “The Language of Broken Glass,” lecture on the occasion of Stop Making Sense at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, January 12, 2019, posted February 26, 2019, at youtube.com/watch?v=iyyM4vDg0xw. ↩︎
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