Hito SteyerlBreaking Through the Screen

Hito Steyerl lecturing at “The Photographic Universe II” conference, The New School, New York, April 2013. Courtesy of The New School.

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.

  1. Hito Steyerl, “Is the Internet Dead?,” in Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London: Verso, 2017), 143. ↩︎

  2. Hito Steyerl, “Is the Internet Dead?,” in Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (London: Verso, 2017), 144. ↩︎