“I think it’s important to keep up with the latest consumer technology. [It] expresses some kind of technological-social-political condition or contraction of desires and misunderstandings…to keep up with that is to keep up with the nexus…the complication around it.”—Hito Steyerl
Today’s video, from Tate Modern, is an introduction to what is arguably Hito Steyerl’s best-known work, How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), a video installation and homage to a 1970s Monty Python sketch. The film is a dryly comic meditation on technology and visibility in the twenty-first century (“How to be Invisible: Living in a gated community…being a superhero…being female and over fifty”).
Hito Steyerl is one of the most renowned video and multimedia artists working today, having recently been awarded the 2019 Käthe Kollwitz Prize and appearing in the top ten of ArtReview’s Power 100 for the last three years running. A filmmaker, visual artist, and writer, Steyerl’s work examines technology, media, and the circulation of images.