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FE TURESSEX TOOLS: NEW QUEER NARRATIVESAS COM MUNITY ACTION CINEMABradford NordeenROMANTI C CONCEPTUALISM:A CONVERSATION WITHGUIDO VANDER WERVEHarry J WeilFALLING INTO THE DIGITAL DIVIDE :ENCOUNTERS WITH THE WORK OFHITO STEYERLDaniel Rourke

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7/30/2019 Falling into the Digital Divide: Encounters with the Work of Hito Steyerl by Daniel Rourke

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INTO THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: ENCOUNTERSIT THE ORK OF HITO STEYERL

isplayed on two high-definition television screens,Hi o Steyerl 's work bstract (2012) vies for the viewer'sattention, even as it severs it. On one screen, Steyerl

rself comes into focus wearing a Ramones T-shirt. Within thee, Steyer holds another screen: that of a smartphone , the

go of ts American super-corporation tugging at the center of aot framed, in turn ,.by the Brandenburg Gate and a Berlin office

belonging to weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin.he words Shot/Countersho t" light up a black transition across

screens: one opens the door to the other." The referencesbstract makes are instantly manifold. On the one hand , "shot /

re fers to the filmic technique of characters lookingeach other across distinct frames, and on th e other, to the

ntiment of coun terattack in battle. bstract is about Andrea, a childhood friend of Steyer turned radical activist and

sh militant, who was murdered in 1998 by Turkish forces.bstract is about the ways in which the grammar of cinemas the grammar of battle," including the in herent violence

f the cut and the edi t, carried out by filmmakers in pu rsuit ofcraft. At the remote desert location where her friend wasered, Steyer is guided through a taxonomy of detritus by

local Kurdish man. "This is a piece of cloth. This is a ja cket.his is an ammunitions container." On the opposite screen, film,

e, and conceit flicker white on black once more: "This is ahot. This is a hellfire missile."he attention granted video works projected onto white canvases

left to repea t, indefinitely, on freestanding high-definitionlevision s, chimes between three main subjects: artist, artwork,viewer. But in an era of multiplicity, arguably brought on bysubmersion in the internet and the web, the stasis of he video

i.e., this work is thirty-one minutes long and willepeat at five minutes pa st each hour" says nothing ofnetworkedubject-ivities. Video is inherently a broadcast medium, for

n if its consumers can walk in and out whenever they please,ey may never be "prosumers," capable of producing as they

each mutating act an equivalent of its other. Although.s "digital," "networked" mentality has caught the tonguespens of the art establishment , because art objects still sit

plinths and numerous art videos still play from beginning tond without audience participation , it often feels as though thedigital condition has not been direc tly translated through oldeans to new artistic ends.ccording to Claire Bishop in the beginning of a recent riforum

" the appearance and content of contemporary art haveeen curiously un respo nsive to the total upheaval in our labor

leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution." 1 Bishop goesto make some va lid assertions about the ever-burgeoning

AboveSti l l from ovember 2004) by Hi to Steye rl ; H ito Steyerl; court esy

Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam and Wi lso n L. Mead Fund

digital condition, even as she recant s ' new media' art as aspecialized field of its own, not worthy of consideration withinthe log ic of her own argument. H er comments, which sent ripplesof disaffection through MFA semi nars and new media webzinesalike, exemplify the very disavowal of the digital about whichshe warns:

While many artists use digital technology, how many reallyconfront the question of what it means to think, see, andfilter affect through the digital? How many thematize this , orreflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, thedigitiza tion of our existence?2

Steyer may be such an artist. Both her video work which isessayistic in content and approach and her written essays areemblematic of the transcriptions the art world ha s undergonein the pa st two decades. The poetic collapse of signifier andsignified performed by btract attests to these pu rsuits inSteyerl's work. Although not immediately obvious in a ga llerycontext, mo st contemporary video work is digitally generated .The once physical acts of cutting film and splicing frames is nowdone through software in terfaces that , as theorist Lev Manovichattested in the late 1990s, metonymica lly fabricate the conditionsof film. As Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin have suggested,computers do not have a recognizable or significant aesthet ic

that possesses some kind of authenticity and completeness,"3 butthat very lack is not an absence, for the digital is anything it canbe made to stand in for. Aesthetically, perhaps , there is nothingto distinguish finely encoded video, music, or images from theirmaterial precursors.Yet at the level of code, artworks produced digitally are alsoindistinguishable from one another. Writing about the continued

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detachment of currency from commodity, Jean-Joseph Gouxpoints out what might be the most authentic condition of thedigital: "the detached, abstract, divested, and even whynot? inconvertible mark4 of the desemanticized zero and one.The "completeness of the digital, then, appears to be locatedat infinite distance from any affective experience, whether thatbe the hardships wrought by collapsing stocks and sha res, therepeated "ping" of an SMS message, or the intellectual impactof a gallery-based video work. Zero s and ones do one thing verywell indeed: they appear to move at the speed of light. Acro sscircuit boards and TCP IP networks alike, the inconvertiblemark exerts its power in what N. Katherine Hayles ha s called aflickering" metamorphoses: "Information technologies do more

than change modes of production, storage, and dissemination.They fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. 5

One of Steyerl's more widely disseminated essays, In Defenseof the Poor Image" (2009), explicitly confronts the aestheticconditions of digital images. In a twist indicative of her work,Steyerl defines an image'svalue by its ease of low and distribution.The highly compressed, deteriorated poor image mocks thepromises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded tothe point of being ju st a hurried blur, one even doubts whether itcould be called an image at all. The aesthetic affect of digitalimages thus stands in metonymically for the networks theynavigate and the means by which those networks are exposed.Built on the derelict protocols and centerless infrastructure of the1970s military communication network ARPANET (AdvancedResearch Projects Agency Network), the content of the internetis manifest today on more screens than there are human eyesto view them. Steyerl offers the poor image as a metaphor fordissemination itself. Our capacityto wallow in images is enhancedby those images being dilapidated and bruised, forced throughbandwidths far slighter than their display po tential would seemto allow. Images are not valuable because of an originary aura;instead it is their transience, the likelihood they will be copied andre-disseminated in ever-mutating forms which marks them outas significant. This association of replication with the apparent

failure of verisimilitude chimes for botthe commodity fetish and an appeal tdigitization.In Walter Benjamin's The Work o rt in thAge o ts TechnologicalReproducibility (1936mechanization and mass productiobegin at the original and work tdistance the commodity from the formcaptured by each iteration. For Benjamincopies reduce the aura of the originalbut as poor images propagate, not onldoes their aura remain intact, that auris actually heightened in a system of everpoorer repetitions and redisplays.The Internet exemplifies Its owdemocratic potential because every biand byte is treated equally by the TCP

IP protocols that drive its traffic. Th us slick HD advertisementfall short of the potential of lossy JPEG spam to be seen, angovernment propaganda is drowned out by the shout of viravideos. Messages from the perverted environs of culture maktheir way to our eyes and ears more readily as wre cked anruined impressions their signifiers flickering with each act orecompression, copy, and display. The poor image affirms HilleSchwartz's observation in The Culture o he Copy: Striking LikenessesUnreasonable Facsimiles (1996) that it is within an exuberant worlofcopies thatwe arrive at our experience oforiginality,7 offeringperhaps a final affirmative answer to his query:

Pr actical distinctions between the unique and the multiplehave t o r i c l l y been entrusted to theologians, notaries,connoisseurs, and curators. None of these now seems to beable to keep the One apart from the Many. Can we stilluphold or is it time to abandon any distinction betweenoriginal and replica?8

Poor images, seeming to prolifera te independently from thsinuous optical cables and sup er-cooled server banks thadisseminate them, are absolutely reliant on the process ocopying. Copying is a fundamental component of the digitanetwork where, unlike the ma ter ial commodity, matter inot passed / parsed along. The digital thing is always a copyis always copied, and is always copying. Abstr acted fromits material context, copying is "a universal principle" 9 odigital dissemination, less flowing within the circuits as beinthat circuitry flow in and of itself. Enabled by over-usecomp ression software , digital copies escape atrophy as thenaviga te multiple bandwidth streams. Hiding in the randomaccess memo ry of a user's personal computer, the coded imagwaits patiently for browser software to determine which typ

boveInstal lation view of bstract 2012) by Hito Steyerl; Hito Steyerl;photograph by Ray Anastas

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decompression will best suit its visual demonstration, before,microseconds, it emerges as a fifty-nine frames-per-second

on a dirty, regularly fingered, poorly maintainedmonitor. Expressed at the level of the digital, it is the

the coding artifact that signifies the potential of theencounter the digital condition" in the perceptual

of a visual glitch, or the auditory pop-hiss that sometimesthe compression of audio. Yet the glitch evades us,

as soon as it appears resolved. -her essay "A Thing Like You and Me (20 10), Steyer calls

tap into" the power of the bruise and the glitch, into participate in the forces that compel contemporarycapitalism.1 In the case of digital copies, error-managed

and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers," outer markssignalling a constellation of forces" petrif ied within:

In the commodity fetish, mater ial drives intersect with affectand desire, and Benjamin fantasizes about igniting thesecompressed forces, to awaken the slumbering collectivefrom the dream-filled sleep of capitalist production" to tapinto these forces Things are never just inert objects,passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions,forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged.

Copies, being copied, forever copying, exert an unruly behaviorevery stage of their transmission, it is only within the event of that exposes the material world.

encounter that Steyerl's "bruises" become manifest. Codedo not see a glitch as an aesthetic abhorrence, but

of the kinds of errors that copied-copying may havesubjected to. Once an error, perhaps resulting in a glitch

a bruise, is allowed to creep into an image file, that errormanagement will maintain the conditions that produced

glitch just as readily as it maintains the intended image.at the

of the digital copy. As . hese boundaries between digitaland their flow are blurred, the market forces that bind

are partially exposed: a mutual encounterflattens interrelations; that brings seemingly distinct beings

autonomy emerges from a participation,in the error, but in the "bruises of images its glitches

boveStill from In Free Fall 2010) by Hito Steyerl; Hito Steyerl; courtesyWilfr ied Lentz Rotterdam

In one of her longer video works, Lovely ndrea (2007), Steyertravels through Tokyo's pornographic subculture in searchof lost bondage images of herself. We are never told why, asa student in the 1980s, Steyer came to be photographedwhether her likeness was captured for artistic, monetary,or other, more subversive, ends. Rather, the search for theimages in the vast erotic archive emphasizes the effect of thephotographs on the Hito Steyer of today: the filmmaker,artist, and theorist of images. The whole affair feels tooperfect, too coincident with the works and words Steyerwould make in the twenty interceding years. Fictional andfactual incidents are left equally fractured in their collisionwith one another a montage intertwined with clips fromold Spider-man cartoons and live bondage performances.The dissemination of Steyerl's own image has left signallingmarks on the questionable subculture the film navigates,but rather than trace those marks to a political or ethical

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conclusion, Lovely Andrea knowingly betrays the authority ofits producer, never directing us to a final or originary instanceof identification.In another profile piece, this time of the Boeing 707 jet plane,Steyerl is more explicit in her depiction of imagemaking,dispersion, and reappropriation. As with Abstract, viewers of InFree Fall (20 10) are necessarily confronted with the conditions ofdigital video stock. Accompanied by pristine surround sound, anddisplayed as an enormous projection onto a specially prepared,high-definition surface, the film is an obvious foil to its poorernamesakes. Treating the Boeing 707 as a quasi-subject, worthyof its own biography, the film traces the economic and politicalconditions that accelerated the plane toward deterioration.Beginning as a glamorous embodiment of the American dream,a 707 is used in an Israeli military hostage rescue operation atEntebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976, is subsequently the subject ofseveral movies about the terrorist plot, and is eventually ploughedinto and explodedfor the penultimate scene in the film Speed (1994,directed byJan de Bont). The final twist comes at the expense ofthe Hollywood studio that paid for the 707 to be destroyed, as itswarped and charred remains are shipped to China to be recycledinto DVDs. Steyerl uses this narrative arc as a metaphor for therepeated rise and crash of world markets. Human subjects aresent reeling by the waves of economic forces that are, at base,materially traceable. The plane object, having been liberatedfrom its status as mere thing, echoes the concerns of SergeiTretyakov's text The Biography o he Object (1929), liberally quote din the film. As it moves along the assembly line, the object plots aconstellation of forces, its lines of flight intersecting with subjectsas "producers," rather than the heroes of their own (illusory)narratives. Reusing the film's title for a written essay, originallypublished in the same year, Steyer stretches the conditions ofthe fall and the crash yet further: "Pilots have even reported thatfree fall can trigger a feeling of confusion between the self andthe aircraft. While falling, people may sense themselves as beingthings, while things may sense that they are people."12

The essay alludes to the history of perspective in the visual art s,and the illusion of distance, and more explicitly height, madepalpable on the two-dimensional surfaces of canvas or paper. Asif to con emporize John Berger's comment that the "invention"of perspective made the single eye the centre of the visibleworld,"13 Steyer invokes the critical function of he visual arts as asymptom of a wider perspectival shift. Digital technologies allownew ways of seeing, as well as being seen. We inhabit a reversepanopticon, where each of us co-regulates the structures thatmediate our control, zooming in to our own abodes on Googlesatellite maps, allowing portable universal devices to track ourevery move, and sharing across social networks built as muchto regulate our consumer subjectivities as to convince us of ourfreedom from those regulations. "Traditional modes of seeingand feeling are shattered," and "[n]ew types ofvisuality arise," 14which are not to be taken as they appear. We are falling, Steyerlsuggests, over a new landscape, through corrupted images,untraceable copies, and complex material forces that buffer uson our way down. The pilot and plane things are sensed as one

object, mutually falling to earth. Without an anchor, perspectivitself should no t be trusted.Here, perhaps, the re-emphasis on human subjectivity is oneSteyerl's most surprising jolts in perspective. Apart from Steyeherself, the mutually falling human figures in the works I havhighlighted here often seem too interchangeable to warracloser inspection. Even Andrea Wolf, Steyerl's childhood frienhas her image torn and tugged across a series of narrative arcuntil we are unsure of the realities she inhabited. The earliework on show at e-flux gallery, No vember (2004), attests to thisetting up the conditions for WolPs appearance across othworks. Is Wolf a friend, a hero, an icon, or merely a nameSerendipity finds Steyer face to face with a poster depicting Woas rebel hero Sehit Ronahi, a pin-up martyr tacked to the samwall as a series of pornographic film posters. The identitiesWolf and the producer Steyer may be the anchors our frefalling perspectives are looking for; images aware of, but no mocomplicit in, the processes of their subjectification. In a nework, Guards (2012), we are introduced to two security guardwho work for the Art Institute of Chicago. Tracing the path ofaimaginary foe around works by Bruce Nauman and Eva Hessex-policeman and gallery security guard Ron Hicks describes hthoughts in neat sentences that could have been plucked, wholfrom the middle of a Steyerl essay: "Museums can be consideresoft targets. I am engaged on my subject."As one ofSteyerl's more expressively human-centricworks, Guaris also a personal profile of the art world as economic force. Awith other works, the film can be twinned with an essay, ArtOccupation: Claims for an Autonomy o Life (2012), in which Steyeargues for a reconsideration of the terms of occupation. Eacof us carries with us potential anchors for perspective mobiphones hooked to the web, replete with digital eyes, ears, another sensory prostheses. Rather than consume in the blind favof our own heroic narratives, we should render these surveillanctechnologies in the production of new critical territories, makinspace and time, once again, the subjects of our occupation oto echo the words of security guard Ron Hicks: I run my wallnot missing anything. No threat. Nothing changes about me bmy location."D NIEL ROURK is a writer artist, and researcher based at GoldsmithUniversity ofLondon . His workfinds itsel f n print and online never straying toof

from territories his website ma chinemachine.net, maps and navigates.NOTES 1. Claire Bishop, 'V igitaLDivide: ContemporaryArtandNew Medw, Artforum , September 2012, httpar fornm.wm/i.nprint/issue=201207&id=31944, 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Olga Goriunoua and Alexei Shu/gin, G iJch,Software Studies: a Lexicon, ed. Al/atthew FuU.er (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008}, 110- 18. 4. Jean-JosGoux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca: ComeU. Universify Press, 1990). 5. N. KatherHqyles, How We Bec ame Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Liter ature, and In format(Chicago: n i v e r s i ~ o Chicago Press 1999), 29- 30. 6. Hito Steyer, The Wretched of the Screen, (New Yo

e . f t u x j o u m a ~ Berlin: Sternberg Press 2012), 31- 44. 7. Hillel Schwartz, Th e Culture of the Copy: StrikLikenesses, Un reasonable Facsimiles (New York: :(one Books, 1996), 212. 8. Ibid. 9.J ussi Parikka, "Copy,Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Malthew Fuile1: 10. Steyer , The V\'retched of the Screen, 54. 11. Ibid. 1Steyer , The Wretched of the Screen, 12. 13.John Berger Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin C l a s s i c J ~ 2008},14. Steyerl, Th e Wretched of he Screen, 12.