Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013
Following text from MOMA website: https://www.moma.org/artists/43752
Hito Steyerl
German, born 1966
Artist, theoretician, and educator Hito Steyerl has wondered, “Are people hidden by too many images? . . . Do they become images?” To make sense of global, digital, networked life, Steyerl integrates communications media into cinematic installations, blending documentary film techniques, speculative fiction, and first-person narrative. “There is a very valid reason for artworks about ‘real’ events to be more interesting than generic news reports,” she has said. For her, that reason is an artist’s ability to closely observe the world as it is, and at the same time assert how “things could be different.”1
Documentary and speculative film are integrated in her video November (2004). Steyerl examines the 1998 disappearance and death of her friend, sociologist Andrea Wolf, who was arrested during a battle for Kurdish independence from Turkey. Intercutting a martial arts film the pair made as teens with news footage, Steyerl shows Wolf as the fighter she portrayed, and who in death exists only as memory and image.
Steyerl studied filmmaking in Germany and Japan, then earned a philosophy PhD in Vienna. The cinematic and the philosophical are deeply intertwined in her influential essay “In Defense of the Poor Image.”2 Articulating the communicative power of “images based on cell phone cameras, home computers, and unconventional forms of distribution” characterized by “collective editing, file sharing, or grassroots distribution circuits,” Steyerl argues for the democratic, subversive potential of this anonymous, low-quality, high-circulation information.
Steyerl’s interest in visibility and disappearance is taken to an absurd extreme in How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013). Satirizing instructional videos through a blend of analog and digital media, the artist demonstrates practical and comical ways to maintain privacy in an age of high visibility.
In more recent works Steyerl examines the flow of money and power through the global economy. Liquidity, Inc. (2014) looks back at the 2008 financial crisis, telling the story of a financial analyst through the metaphor of water. Projected on a curved wooden viewing platform, the work is intended to create the feeling of riding a battered raft or experiencing financial instability.
In her ongoing practice, Steyerl mobilizes contemporary media to do “what art...is best at: look, listen, and interpret with precision, imagine without compromise or fear.”3
Jennifer Tobias, Reader Services Librarian, 2020
Göksu Kunak. “Hito Steyerl: Zero Probability and the Age of Mass Art Production.” Berlin Art Link. November 19, 2013, accessed March 2020, .
Hito Steyerl. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” E-flux Journal, no. 10, November, 2009, accessed March 2020, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image.
Ana Janevski, Roxana Marcoci, and Hito Steyerl. “Conversation: Hito Steyerl with Ana Janevski and Roxana Marcoci. post. June 20, 2018, accessed March 2020, .
Notes: I'm interested in Steyerl's ideas of integration of different media and elements, both public sources and self-made videos, and how they are made into an interwoven series of imagery as a structure to critique as well as provoke thoughts on how society sees things/what sources affect society's perception of the surrounding world.
In her 2009 essay In Defence of the Poor Image, in relation to everyday internet imagery, Steyerl explains how an image degrades from elitist realms of cinema or painting into a mass distribution of copies, reprints, edits, commercialised advertisements and illicit files. Rather than condemning them, Steyerl insists that such poor images are crucial to the way that reflects society through a more organic manner. In reflection, my interventions at sites result in producing experimental, often rough and blurry videos through ad-hoc filming supports. I think Steyerl’s ‘poor image’ allows a wider engagement within its cultural and social orbit, as it reflects its surroundings through its borrowing, interfering, recreating, and sharing, as a fundamental way of communicating ideas within society.
'How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013' is very a deadpan as well as straightforwardly delivered work which is a little how I treat my own making, shared also by humour and absurdity that results from this type of conveyance. Instructional, or as Steyerl titles 'educational,' mixes satire and playfulness as well as researched, fact-based scientific narratives as well as occasional philosophical passages. I find her compilation method really engaging, as she has taken all these differing sources from a vast territory and formed them into a narrative, that, whilst nonsensical and pretty absurd, still makes you think about the relationship between humans, images, how we see things and how images operate in our everyday lives. This opens up a dialogue around how we as humans feel in a world full of technology and images - Steyerl almost exposes the things we find comfort in or traits and norms that we have around the internet or imagery that circulates in our daily lives.
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