The German artist, Hito Steyerl, is driving on full throttle nowadays, her subject is totally hot. Steyerl has been engrossed in her field New Media Art as artist and lecturer at the Universität der Künste in Berlin for quite some time, more specifically in the digital image, media technology and the global circulation of images.
HOW NOT TO BE SEEN starts as an educational video aiming to inform viewers about how we can become invisible in an era of unbridled increase in (digital) images. In this video she starts with a relic from the not-so-distant past. In the Californian desert the calibration targets which were used in the era of analogue aerial photography are still there. The targets look like giant pixels with which the camera resolution can be tested from the air. Making oneself smaller than one of these pixels increases the chance of invisibility, Steyerl wryly remarks.
Despite all the hilarity and miniature human dancing pixels HOW NOT TO BE SEEN is a cutting critique on present-day “over-visibility” and surveillance, which nevertheless permit minorities, political refugees, activists, … to disappear into thin air.
In English
Germany/US, 2013, 16 min.
Production: Hito Steyerl, 2013 Commandée par: Massimiliano Gioni, Venice Biennale Support: the International Production Fund (IPF) - 2013 partners: Outset England, Dermegon Daskalopoulos Foundation for Culture and Development, Outset USA, Outset Netherlands with Promoters Van Abbemuseum, Maurice Marciano Family Foundation, Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam
