Hito Steyerl

This book recalibrates literature’s political role for the 21st century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency. From Aristotle to Arendt and from the novella to the video story, short narrative forms hence become tangible as active vectors that enable and radically modulate the ontology of human encounters.

“Civic Storytelling lays bare the complex legacies and persistent powers of short narrative forms. Fuchs guides the reader with assurance and learning through fascinating moments in the history and theory of literature”
—Daniel Heller-Roazen, Princeton University

“Why has the novel stolen so much attention from the equally robust lineage of short forms? In his erudite and wide-ranging alternate literary history, Florian Fuchs rebalances accounts, revealing a long backdrop to our data floods and snippet reading. Short forms do not lead us out of the world, but into full engagement with it; they are the democratic media of the commons.”
—John Durham Peters, Yale University

“Civic Storytelling is a timely intervention in our age of debates about fact and fiction. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of enacted stories, Florian Fuchs makes a convincing case for the particular cognitive productivity of short narratives.”
—Eva Geulen, Humboldt University Berlin and ZfL Berlin

Encompassing experimental film and video, essay film, gallery-based installation art, and digital art, Jihoon Kim establishes the concept of hybrid moving images as an array of impure images shaped by the encounters and negotiations between different media, while also using it to explore various theoretical issues, such as stillness and movement, indexicality, abstraction, materiality, afterlives of the celluloid cinema, archive, memory, apparatus, and the concept of medium as such.

Grounding its study in interdisciplinary framework of film studies, media studies, and contemporary art criticism, Between Film, Video, and the Digital offers a fresh insight on the post-media conditions of film and video under the pervasive influences of digital technologies, as well as on the crucial roles of media hybridity in the creative processes of giving birth to the emerging forms of the moving image. Incorporating in-depth readings of recent works by more than thirty artists and filmmakers, including Jim Campbell, Bill Viola, Sam Taylor-Johnson, David Claerbout, Fiona Tan, Takeshi Murata, Jennifer West, Ken Jacobs, Christoph Girardet and Matthias Müller, Hito Steyerl, Lynne Sachs, Harun Farocki, Doug Aitken, Douglas Gordon, Stan Douglas, Candice Breitz, among others, the book is the essential scholarly monograph for understanding how digital technologies simultaneously depend on and differ film previous time-based media, and how this juncture of similarities and differences signals a new regime of the art of the moving image.

Displayed on two high-definition television screens, Hito Steyerl’s work Abstract (2012) vies for the viewer’s attention, even as it severs it. On one screen, Steyerl herself comes into focus wearing a Ramones T-shirt. Within the frame, Steyerl holds another screen: that of a smartphone, the logo of its American super-corporation tugging at the center of a shot framed, in turn, by the Brandenburg Gate and a Berlin office building belonging to weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin. The words “Shot/Countershot” light up a black transition across both screens: “one opens the door to the other.” The references Abstract makes are instantly manifold. On the one hand, “shot/countershot” refers to the filmic technique of characters looking at each other across distinct frames, and on the other, to the sentiment of counterattack in battle. Abstract is about Andrea Wolf, a childhood friend of Steyerl turned radical activist and Kurdish militant, who was murdered in 1998 by Turkish forces. Abstract is about the ways in which “the grammar of cinema follows the grammar of battle,” including the inherent violence of the cut and the edit, carried out by filmmakers in pursuit of their craft. At the remote desert location where her friend was murdered, Steyerl is guided through a taxonomy of detritus by a local Kurdish man. “This is a piece of cloth. This is a jacket. This is an ammunitions container.” On the opposite screen, film, battle, and conceit flicker white on black once more: “This is a shot. This is a hellfire missile.”

Written as the keynote for the Graduate student conference “Flanking Maneuvers: Lateral Thinking” at Cornell University in April 2018, the manuscript puts Edward de Bono’s concept of Lateral Thinking (1970) in conversation with the German word Nebenschauplatz, understood as a way of seeing that is off-center, marginal, and askew. It develops the latter from an etymology of the word itself and in conjunction with passages in Siegfried Kracauer’s novel Ginster (1928) that emphasize unaccented words and cast-aside details to unearth a different kind of meaning. Taken together, the three concepts suggest a lateral methodology to be used as a way of reading and seeing.

In the lecture, this lateral methodology is put forward vis-à-vis the vertical phenomenon of drone warfare. Looking at Louise Lawler’s installation No Drones (2010/11) and Hito Steyerl’s essay A Sea of Data (2016), I propose the perceptual techniques of anamorphosis and apophenia as two visual forms that practice a looking askew, which allows them to counter what Donna Haraway has called the god trick. The artworks put forward two ways of dealing with contemporary regimes of power and knowledge via a re-reading and re-viewing of their images.

In a last move, this kind of re-reading and re-viewing is applied to the discipline of literary studies, as the conference was hosted by the Department of German Studies at Cornell University. I ask literary studies to integrate texts and tools from visual studies, and return to the methodological discussions taking place in the late 1980s and early 1990s, because it might be there that ‘we’ can find something to methodologically grapple with the present.

Este artigo discute as possibilidades de agenciamento de uma sensibilidade queer em diálogo com os feminismos dissidentes no documentário Lovely Andrea, produzido em 2007 pela artista e pesquisadora alemã Hito Steyerl. O filme mostra a autora no Japão, em busca de uma fotografia de si mesma feita 20 anos antes, em um ritual de bondage. O artigo se baseia principalmente nas contribuições teóricas da própria Steyerl (2010, 2012, 2014, 2015), Preciado (2008, 2015) e Berardi (2016) para acionar um debate sobre manifestações não normativas do desejo, práticas sexuais dissidentes e política das imagens.

A short discussion of Hito Steyerl's poetics with particular reference to her celebrated film installation 'Factory of the Sun'. Her rejection of Wim Wenders's poetics partially motivates aspects of her poetics, which are further shaped by her use of motifs from Soviet constructivism, especially from Dziga Vertov.

One connecting element between the two artists is a long-standing concern with sociopolitical situations and questions of power. Their oeuvres both address the fundamental question of how people organize their coexistence or, rather not organize but cement it via more or less differentiated forms of hegemony—be it systems such as states, classes, religious, and ethnic groups, or the family and everyday interactions between individuals. Both artists are concerned with links between the political macro-level on the one hand—the structures of the public sphere—and people’s private lives on the other. Addressing various fields of conflict such as migration, gender issues, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, war, urban development, economics, or consumerism, the artists examine the mechanisms of power relations within society.
Kunstmuseum Basel, 2018.

prologue, intro and afterword of book
Publication date: October 20, 2016
Abstract:
Restrictive border protection policies directed toward managing the flow of refugees coming into neoliberal democracies (and out of failing nation-states) are a defining feature of contemporary politics. In this book, Verónica Tello analyses how contemporary artists--such as Tania Bruguera, Isaac Julien, Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Hito Steyerl, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green--negotiate their diverse subject positions while addressing and taking part in the production of images associated with refugee experiences and histories. Tello argues that their practices, which manifest across a range of contexts including Cuba, the United States, Australia and Europe, represent an emergent, global paradigm of contemporary art, 'counter-memorial aesthetics'.

Counter-memorial aesthetics, Tello argues, is characterized by its conjunction of heterogeneous signifiers and voices of many times and places, generating an experimental, non-teleological approach to the construction of contemporary history, which also takes into account the complex, disorienting spatial affects of globalization. Spanning performance art, experimental 'history painting', aftermath photography and video installation, counter-memorial aesthetics bring to the fore, Tello argues, how contemporary refugee flows and related traumatic events critically challenge and conflict with many existing, tired if not also stubborn notions of national identity, borders, history and memory.

Building on the writings of such thinkers as Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, this book offers a useful concept of 'counter-memory' for the twenty-first century. It shows how counter-memorial aesthetics is not only central to the nexus of contemporary art and refugee histories but also how it can offer a way of being critically present with many other, often interrelated, global crises in the contemporary era.

http://bloomsbury.com/us/counter-memorial-aesthetics-9781474252737/

This is my review of <Tactics>(Nam June Paik Art Center, Feb 25- Jun 3, 2021), an exhibition curated by Lee Chaeyoung, along with Kim Sun Young where a group of artists such as Gu Minja, Song Min Jung, Jun Sojung, Johanna Billing, Bad New Days, Park Sunmin, Park Seungwon, Jonas Staal & Laure Prouvost have participated.

According to the leaflet, this exhibition "contemplates the art and life tactics to respect and consider diversity, by which nature, things, and humankind can coexist.

The term ‘tactics’ used in the exhibition is borrowed from the French scholar Michel de Certeau’s concept. He utilizes it to discuss the ‘performativity of the subject,’ a method of practice by which the excluded others resisted concentrated power in everyday life in modern society.

The participating artists are making a gap by small physical performances in this wartime-like period. This exhibition tries to observe a movement by which others refuse to be a target of suppression and surveillance and create a crack in the system continuously using little stories.

It cherishes the slight hope that it might poke a hole in the solid world with these small artistic practices and look inside of it."

An extended, revised version of this review will appear in the catalogue as an essay sometime during this summer.

이 글은  1980년대 이른바 '포스트모더니즘'은 물론 '문화연구(Cultural Studies)'의 부상과 함께 영미권에서 큰 반향을 얻었던 드 세르토의 '전략 없는 전술' 개념을, '함께 살기' 혹은 '공동체'의 문제가 그 어느 때보다 첨예해진 2021년 코로나 위기 속의 세상에 소환해 풀어낸 전시 <전술 Tactics>(백남준 아트센터, 2021.2.25-6.3)에 대한 리뷰이다.

이 전시를 최근 몇 년간 집중적으로 곱씹고 있는 ‘수행성(performativity)’과 ‘픽션’ 및 '게임'이란 키워드를 중심으로 살펴보면서, 나는 할 포스터가 '퍼포먼스의 제도화'라 비판적으로 규정한 아트씬의 어떤 경향을 '게임과 구분(불)가능한 것으로서의 파업'이라는 측면에서 보다 당대적으로 제기하려 했다. 

이는 트럼프 이후에도 다양한 방식으로 토양화된 '전지구적 트럼프주의'를, 벤야민이 '비관주의를 조직하기'라는 이름으로 정식화했던 간전기의 문제의식과 중첩시킨다는 것이기도 한데, 이에 대한 보다 확장된 논의는 여름에 출간될 전시도록에서 전개할 예정이다.

This paper aims to explore and examine the possible determination
of Internet memes as different types of images such
as pathos formula, dialectical image and poor image, as defined
by the theoretical writings of Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin, and
Hito Steyerl. As a widespread phenomenon, the Internet meme is
part of a dynamic, ongoing debate within the fields of linguistics,
political sciences, pop culture, visual culture, and media studies.
Consisting of images and words that are intended to convey a certain
message to the spectator, its structure is an inspiring basis for
the comparison between the contemporary Internet memes and
the “old”/analog/traditional forms of everyday expression, political
activism, fight, or propaganda, as well as between Internet memes
and different forms of art and pop culture. However, in this paper, I
will try to understand Internet memes in a more theoretical sense,
as part of the “Image theories” by Aby Warburg, Walter Benjamin,
and Hito Steyerl, keeping in mind the aforementioned comparisons
and existing discussions on the subject.

https://www.ipu.hr/article/en/1123/digital-art-history-iii

This article argues that various contemporary media articulate an aesthetic of stealth, that is, the staging of acts of becoming- imperceptible. Furthermore, the article contends that the aesthetic of stealth resonates with a broader shift in the functioning of contemporary political culture, the requirements it formulates, and appropriate modes of action. The argument is presented in three case studies, each articulating one step in the argument: through Steyerl’s video piece How Not to Be Seen, the author situates stealth aesthetics in the political context of a shift away from struggles for visibility to a withdrawal from representation and the preoccupation with becoming-imperceptible. In an engagement with the TV series The Americans, the author explains how exactly contemporary media, in this case television, produce an aesthetic of stealth, foregrounding the notion of ecological perception. Finally, an analysis of the changes in gameplay in the video game series Tomb Raider allows the author to elaborate,  rst, on how stealth gameplay fosters the embodied performance of ecological perception and, second, on how the media aesthetic of stealth in ltrates genres that traditionally rely on open confrontation and combat.

This paper closely examines the theory and video essays of Hito Steyerl while also arguing that they are mapped onto three interrelated concepts. The first is post-representation, which signifies a fundamental break from the paradigm of modern visial culture that assumes an image as a transparent and stable representation of the pre-existing world. The second is post-truth, which explains a rupture from the aesthetic and epistemolotical assumptions of traditional documentary, and which underlies Steyerl’s elaboration of the essay film in her videos. The final concept is post-internet, which points to the situation that the expressions of the internet, as well as digital technologies’ techniques and ways of accessing and using information, have not be perceived as being grounded in digitally unique forms and platforms but fundamentally permeated with contemporary subject and world. This situation is what Steyerl has recursively addressed and critiqued in her writings and videos since the 2010s.

The movement of global populations, and subsequently the task of translation, underlies contemporary culture. Economic and environmental migration, forced political exiles, and the plight of refugees are now superimposed upon the intricacies of ancient and modern diasporas, generations of colonization, and the transportation of slaves. This timely anthology considers translation's ongoing role in cultural navigation, empathy, and understanding disparate experiences. It explores the approaches of artists, poets, and theorists in negotiating increasingly protean identities—from the intrinsic intimacy of language, to translation's embedded structures of knowledge production and interaction, to its limitations of expression, and, ultimately, its importance in a world of multiple perspectives.

Artists surveyed include Meric Algün Ringborg, Geta Brătescu, Tanya Bruguera, Jesse Darling, Chto Delat, Chohreh Feyzdjou, Susan Hiller, Glenn Ligon, Teresa Margolles, Shirin Neshat, Hélio Oiticica, Pratchaya Phinthong, Kurt Schwitters, Yinka Shonibare, Mladen Stilinović, Erika Tan, Kara Walker, Wu Tsang

Writers include Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Walter Benjamin, Judith Butler, Luis Camnitzer, Jean Fisher, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Sarat Maharaj, Martha Rosler, Bertrand Russell, Simon Sheikh, Gayatri Spivak, Hito Steyerl, Lawrence Venuti

La presente reseña del libro Los condenados de la pantalla de la videoartista Hito Steyerl pretende dar cuenta críticamente tanto del contenido del libro como de su forma fragmentaria y ensayística. Se trata entonces de una exploración ensayo a ensayo de un volumen que atraviesa diferentes aspectos de la problemática de la imagen y la apariencia estética en su coyuntura contemporánea, la digital. Aquí se pretende dar cuenta de la apuesta fuerte de la autora, que va de emprender un abordaje teórico posmarxista sobre el fenómeno de las pantallas, sin dejar intactas ni las categorías propias de los estudios visuales ni aquellas propias de la teoría crítica.

Texto en linea: http://www.e-imagen.net/project/de-kepler-a-google-street-view-la-perspectiva-cenital-como-dispositivo-de-la-vision/

Resumen

El siglo XVII ha sido llamado la época de la observación. Perspectiva y descripción fueron dos modos de hacer visible la visión y representarla. Se trataba de dos modos de producir una imagen. Evidencia, medición y observación se combinaron para producirlas. A diferencia de la cartografía, donde la proyección matemática no suponía la existencia de una posición de sujeto, la perspectiva cenital – entendida como un dispositivo de la visión – define la posición de un sujeto que mira o es mirado. El ojo de Dios (un ojo telemático, que puede estar en todas partes) establecía una relación del ser humano con el cosmos, una posición de sujeto en el interior de un microcosmos. Pero qué sucede con los nuevos medios digitales. Qué posición otorgan al sujeto dispositivos como Google Earth y Google Street View. La transposición de la perspectiva cenital como dispositivo de la visión a la cultura visual 2.0 supone una mirada que ya no alude al ojo de Dios. Estos nuevos dispositivos combinan la perspectiva vertical con ciertos elementos de la experiencia inmersiva y la utopía telemática, presentes a lo largo de la historia de los medios de la imagen como es el caso de los Panoramas del siglo XVIII o los espejos en la Edad Media. Una mirada cenital donde las cámaras robóticas de los 9 ojos de Google despliegan el ejercicio de una soberanía vertical descorporizada (Hito Steyerl) que instaura una nueva normalidad visual incorporada en las tecnologías de vigilancia, creando una especie de hábito corporal y visual completamente alejado de la celebración de las lentes del siglo XVII y la pasión por la descripción del mundo.

Abstract:
The seventeenth century has been called the time of observation. Perspective and description were two ways to make the vision visible and to represent it. Unlike cartography, where mathematical projection did not imply the existence of a subject position, the zenith perspective – understood as an apparatus of vision – defines the position of a subject that looks or is looked at. The eye of God (a telematic eye, which can be everywhere) established a relationship of the human being with the cosmos, a position of subject within a microcosm. But what happens with the new digital media. What position the subject gives devices such as Google Earth and Google Street View. These new devices combine the vertical perspective with certain elements of the immersive experience and telematic utopia, present throughout the history of the media of the image as is the case of Panoramas or mirrors in the Middle Ages. An overhead view where the robotic cameras of the 9 eyes of Google display the exercise of a vertical de-corporated sovereignty (Hito Steyerl) that establishes a new visual normality incorporated in surveillance technologies, creating a kind of corporal and visual habit completely removed from the celebration of the lenses of the seventeenth century and passion for the description of the world.

Dieses Buch zoomt in informationsreiche und pixeldichte Welten in HD. Digitalbildliche Hochauflösung ist hier ein Potenzial, das es ermöglicht, mit und an Bildern Wirklichkeit zu erforschen und zu befragen. Dokumentarfilme, Videokunstarbeiten, Galaxiefotografien, Blockbuster, Pressebilder und Netflix-Serien bestellen diese visuelle Kultur in HD und zeigen auf, dass Bilder und Wirklichkeit nicht in fixierten Rahmen sitzen, sondern im Prozess werden. HD heißt Image Processing. Lässt man sich darauf ein, entfaltet sich das Angebot, mit HD zu denken und sich vom Denken der Bildprozesse mitreißen zu lassen.

Michel Chion defines his notion of the ‘Acousmêtre’ as a voice in the cinematic image distinct from a visualised body. The existence of a disembodied voice behind the moving image has far-reaching applications in discourses of artistic authorship. These become
particularly relevant when discussing the essay film, in which the acousmêtre often is the author, or some surrogate of the author as manifested in the film’s soundtrack. Drawing on Simon Starling’s 'Metamorphology' exhibition and Hito Steyerl’s essayistic works in both written and moving image contexts, I will address the implications of voice and authorship as the moving image migrates from its more traditional sources of exhibition to its contemporary applications in media arts and practice. In art museums and galleries, the dislocation of the author’s voice from the image creates a discursive space in which the ideological sound and image relationship can be negotiated and redrawn in a public sphere.

Scommettendo, con Marcel Broodthaers, che “la definizione dell’attività artistica avviene, in primo luogo, nell’ambito della distribuzione”, l’articolo segue le linee principali del dibattito in corso sulla circolazione online delle immagini e, più in generale, dell’arte contemporanea, e di come questa stia influenzando non solo il livello del consumo, ma anche quello della produzione. Partendo dal seminale saggio Dispersion di
Seth Price, attraverso le idee di Groys, Joselit, Bourriaud e Steyerl, il saggio arriva a considerare il lavoro di artisti che hanno fatto della dispersione digitale il fulcro della loro pratica artistica, e a sollevare questioni come: può la Rete essere considerata un contesto legittimo di fruizione dell’arte? Cosa differenzia lo spazio immateriale della comunicazione dallo spazio istituzionale del museo? Cosa succede all’arte quando esce dal suo contesto protetto e viene messa in circolazione senza connotazione artistica? Che fine fa la figura dell’autore?

Domenico Quaranta, "Arte contemporanea e distribuzione digitale", in SketchBOOK - Postmedia journal, Issue 1, Postmediabooks, Milano, 2016, pp. 60 - 70

After works by Chris Marker, Gerhard Richter, James Coleman, Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Nancy Davenport, and Alex Verhaest, to name just a few, how can we update Walter Benjamin's question, "the [real] question is not whether photography is art...but whether the invention of photography had not changed the entire character of art"? Does the status of photography remain intact after the advent of, say, 'GIF' archives? By (re)reading Kracauer, Benjamin, Krauss, Crimp, Baker, Costello, Mulvey, Bellour, Azoulay and Steyerl carefully, we will draw increasingly fuzzy boundaries between picture, photography and cinema anew, along with their contour lines.

“The phenomenon of art activism is central to our time because it is a new phenomenon” insists Boris Groys in his 2014 eFlux essay “On Art Activism,” and yet art activism has a solid backstory brimming with risks and minor victories, compromises and outright failures, just the same as any other cultural narrative, even if this one remains largely closeted within mainstream art history. How then do we approach the new wave of art activism emerging today across the globe,  and what perception of time, repetition and the archive must be invoked or forgotten in order to counter what Marx described as the nightmarish weight of tradition that presses upon the brains of the living? [Published in http://field-journal.com/ ]

Persisting in ambiguity is at the heart of our experience with works of art. Ambiguity is embedded in the genre and content, in the movement between philosophical investigation and artistic expression, in the tension between aesthetic attitudes focused on beauty and ethical and political attitudes. In the individual chapters devoted to the works of Adriena Šimotová, atonal music or contemporary political video art, Bierhanzl is mainly departing from the underlying themes of aesthetic-philosophical considerations of E. Levinas, J. Butler and M. Foucault and shows the artwork as a reflection of the prevailing conditions and as the creation of a new, purely aesthetic reality irreducible to historical and social determinations.

In her essay "In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Verticality," artist and theorist Hito Steyerl traces the historical shift in visual perspective from the linear to the vertical throughout the last century.  Vertical perspective, she argues, is a view from above that exacerbates the distance between subject and object and, thereby, turns perspective into a "one-way gaze of superiors onto inferiors, a looking down from high to low." Steyerl analyzes paintings and new technologies that, she argues, are central to the acceleration of the predominance of vertical perspective.  Using Steyerl's proposition as a point of departure, I argue that a reorientation from vertical perspective to immersive perception can help shift the political, ethical, and social values of our time.  I am interested particularly in immersive forms of perception as achieved through contemporary, participatory artworks that empower horizontal, democratic systems as well as the production of subjectivity.  Blurring the boundaries between art and life, these artworks facilitate an environment in which traditional roles of immobile and observational spectatorship are exchanged for activated, rhizomatic forms of thinking.  This immersive form of perception offers a position of resistance to the damaging perspective of verticality.  Through multisensory perception and multi-perspectival viewpoints, immersive perception effectively eliminates the dichotomies of perspective: up/down, inside/out, subject/object.  In this thesis, I argue that participatory artworks should be reconsidered as models of resistance to the damaging, predominant perspective of verticality and contend that they have the power to create possibilities for plurality, collective power, and community.

Turks, Jews, and Other Germans in Contemporary Art provides the first monographic multicultural perspective on visual art in today’s Germany, exploring works by over thirty artists active today and in the recent past. Many if not most of these artists will be new to readers, as the book goes beyond the usual suspects who dominate discussions of contemporary German art, such as Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, or Rosemarie Trockel. Artists discussed include Rozbeh Asmani, Said Baalbaki, Candice Breitz, Esther Dischereit, Nezaket Ekici, Parastou Forouher, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Manaf Halbouni, Silke Helmerdig, Mwangi Hutter, Natasha A. Kelly, Maziar Moradi, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Hito Steyerl, Nasan Tur, and Tanya Ury. These and the other artists discussed work in a variety of media and are part of contemporary German culture and its art world by nature of citizenship and/or long-term residence in Germany. The book is organized thematically in five chapters: 1. Languages; 2. Bodies; 3. Foods; 4. Mass Media; and 5. Spaces and Times.|
ISBN 9780262045766 (hardcover)
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/turks-jews-and-other-germans-contemporary-art

Often used as a synonym of ‘definition’, the term ‘resolution’ indicates the quantity of detail a raster digital image holds, and may refer to image resolution (the size of a digital image file), display resolution (the total number of pixels or the pixel density of a digital visual display), or optical resolution (the number of image sensor elements in a digital camera). Resolution may be increased or decreased, and its various degrees determine not only the visual appearance of an image, but also the conditions of its production, storage, and circulation. As a way of measuring and controlling visibility, resolution raises a whole series of aesthetic, epistemological, and political implications, and may be tackled from the different perspective of media theory, media archaeology, and visual culture theory. Reaching back to McLuhan’s reflections on the low definition of the television screen and on its analogies with mosaics and pointillisme, this introduction examines the question of resolution in a number of film, media, and artistic practices from the 1960s to today.

Art, for Hegel, is not only distinct but self-distinguishing of and from nature-it happens in and through the latter. It liberates us from being merely natural creatures, and it does so by a dynamic of a cut or break-even though this liberation is achieved only through natural sensuousness, and hence, keeps us tethered to nature in some particular way. Inspired by Todd McGowan's emphasis on the central role of contradiction in Hegel's philosophy, this paper considers the possibility to applying the dialectic between art and nature as it is unfolded in Hegel's Aesthetic to a more insidious constellation-namely, what Marxists came to refer to as second nature: the world of commodities, in which man-made things appear to those who produce them as a naturalised and repressive opposite, a pseudo nature, an alienated solidified history.

Artificial intelligence today represents a constantly growing sector that is influencing a large part of society. Our economy, our life, every our ehavior is influenced (or driven) by the introduction of new machine and deep learning mechanisms. If we look at the production of images, we realize we are entering in a new regime. The images are now increasingly constructed by machines whose processes and logics are inaccessible to the human, to quote the American artist Trevor Paglen: human eyes become “anachronistic”. An interface is no longer conceivable as a single “object”, rather it is a “hyperobject”, an intertwined network of media “distributed in time and space”.
Hyperinterfaces are no longer media that access information; they are the world, the humus, the atmosphere, in which we immerse ourselves, and, at the same time, they emerge and behave within a world made of organic materials, nature, minerals, plants and animals. Hyperinterface means
conceiving media as a hyperobject, namely, hypermedia. The text aim at investigating this new media condition beyond new media. The last chapter is dedicated to the work of the artist Hito Steyerl.

Publicado originalmente en Revista Nexos el 24 de junio de 2017.
Link: http://cultura.nexos.com.mx/?p=12942
¿Qué son los memes? ¿Qué es la imagen pobre?
Lejos de ser un tema menor, el meme y el momo son un asunto complejo que se vuelve necesario discutir, no sólo por su omnipresencia sino por la fácil reproducción de éstos a causa de la gran capacidad de síntesis con que tocan temas de actualidad combinándolos con lo cómico. Es decir, lo cómico parece ser el elemento detonante que hace al meme crear masa y colectividad. Pero si es ésta una de sus principales características, nos encontramos ante el peligro de que mediante el uso de memes se pueden minimizar, ridiculizar e incluso normalizar ciertos temas e ideas.

Hito Steyerl es cineasta, escritora y docente, desarrolla su obra en diversos campos del cine y el videoensayo, media art y videoinstalación, preocupándose por temáticas como el feminismo, el militarismo y, sobre todo, la proliferación y difusión del conocimiento a través de las imágenes técnicas. En Buenos Aires dio a finales de 2014 una clase magistral, presentará un libro y una exposición y se exhibirán tres de sus videos más recientes.

TikTok is a social network for making and sharing short videos that has become a global phenomenon beyond the teen market for which it was created in 2018. We explore what it is that makes the experience of using this app based on infinite scroll and algorithmic architecture unique, the experience of time and the circulation of sexual and emotional capital that it offers, as well as the overrepresentation of certain realities to the detriment of others.

This paper aims to analyse how COVID-19 pandemic is changing our perception of reality. It starts looking at our situation from the point of view of Riegl's distinction between optical and tactile, and then it compares the nature of the relationship between these two approaches to Lévi-Strauss's description of bricolage. Our current world-view turns out to be not only an optic one, because the optical approach is just the means by which we can articulate a private and social life messed up by Coronavirus. Thereby, optical takes care of tactile without replacing it, and this article draws parallels between this aspect and language as described by Heidegger. Finally, after having argued the presence of an aura in this "optical house of tactile" in both Walter Benjamin's and Hito Steyerl's forms, this article tries to figure out how this perspective could last beyond the end of this emergency.

Vermehrt halten "operative Bilder" (Farocki) Einzug in das Feld zeitgenössischer Kunst. Trotz einer affirmativen Ästhetik wird ihrer künstlerischen Appropriation häufig ein kritischer Impetus zugesprochen. Doch was unterscheidet den subversiven vom repressiven Bildgebrauch? Dem Text liegt die Frage nach einer spezifischen Ästhetik der Kritik zugrunde. Wie verhalten sich Form und Inhalt zueinander-gelangen sie durcheinander zum Ausdruck? Anhand einer Analyse digitaler Montagetechniken bei Hito Steyerl und Forensic Architecture fragt der Aufsatz danach, ob deren bildliche Kritik reziprok einem emanzipatorischen Projekt der Bildkritik verpflichtet ist. Er formuliert die These, dass eine gegenwärtige Emphase des Kunstfelds zur Kritik einem Kritikalitäts-imperativ unterworfen ist, der häufig weniger kritische Distanzierung von Wahrheitsdiskursen denn ihre direkte Affirmation produziert.

Este texto é um relato do processo de criação da obra Mineração 1: Rio Potengi pelo artista natalense Ygor Anario. Tomando o Rio Potengi enquanto um rio sem acesso, cujas águas não desfrutam mais do prestígio histórico que outrora tiveram quando deram nome ao nosso estado, o artista, baseado no líder indígena Ailton Krenak fala de uma despersonalização de lugares como o rio, associando-a à forma como primeiramente o experienciamos por meio das plataformas digitais. Como essas tecnologias mudam nossa relação com o Rio Potengi? Que imagens permanecem conosco dos motores de busca e seus filtros invisíveis? Quais padrões de representação emergem dessas imagens? A foto ou o rio está em baixa resolução? O termo “mineração” provém da tecnologia da informação, mineração de dados, um processo de explorar grandes quantidades de dados em busca de padrões consistentes.