The Wretched of the Screen (2012) Hito Steyerl
The text is a collection of essays by artist and writer Hito Steyerl that considers the agency and circulation of images in our contemporary media. The essays examine the politics of representation in the digital age where images circulate constantly. The essays mobilise cinema studies, critical theory, feminism to offer a critique of information capitalism and its effects on contemporary art. Steyerl looks at the state of images, rejecting the perspective of the image as a mode of objectivity. Instead she considers how a new politics of representation can be considered and derived from the swirl and dispersion of images through contemporary technology.
The value of Steyerl’s analysis is provided not only in her erudite written analysis of contemporary technology but also through her practice as a an artist that works extensively with lens based media. Through eleven essays Steyerl interrogates and weaves a complex journey through contemporary media relating a wide range of sources from actions of the Turkish Army in Eastern Anatolia to the compression of AVI files and pixelated jPEGS to the history and powerplays of linear perspective. All the essays insist on the political and ideological frameworks that inhere to the circulation and use of images. But more importantly she insists on how the circulation of the image inculcates new reading and possibilities that can overturn their original creative intention. Images in Steyerl’s operate semiotically but also materially as ‘things’ in the world that generate affects opening new planes of immanence. Freeform images such as lowly jPEGS (or poor images) dilute foundational metaphysical or political myths that uphold a variety of different political, social, and corporate institutes. The Museum is now a factory or the factory is now a museum. Such is the indeterminate nature of our contemporary culture the denudes the traditional boundaries of representations of sex, gender, race, politics, corporate money, artworks, collectors.
Steyerl in her essays and art practice generates a biting and profound analysis of contemporary media and the politics that it generates. Her attitude, practice and critique provides a generative resource when considering an AoC in relation to digital technology.
Mick O’Hara
TU Dublin
Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.