THE JOURNAL OF MEDIA ARTS AND CULTURAL CRITICISM

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2
6
11
16
19
REPORT
THE IMPORTANCE OF SEEING FOR
ONESELF THROUGH THE EYES OF
OTHERS
Bill Kouwenhoven
ESSAY
WHAT DO SUBJECTS WANT?
J oscelyn Jurich
FEATURES
SEX TOOLS: NEW QUEER NARRATIVES
AS COMMUNITY ACTION CINEMA
Bradford Nordeen
ROMANTI C CONCEPTUALISM:
A CONVERSATION WITH
GUIDO VANDER WERVE
Harry J Weil
FALLING INTO THE DIGITAL DIVIDE:
ENCOUNTERS WITH THE WORK OF
HITO STEYERL
Daniel Rourke
EXHIBITION REVIEWS
23 GAS PAINS
Robert Raczka
25 STAR OF THE EXHIBITION
J ulia Bradshaw
27 BODY OF EVIDENCE
Tim Maul
28 UNCANNY BY COINCIDENCE
]ody ,(ellen
30 ACTS OF DEFIANCE
Yesomi Umolu
BOOK REVIEWS
32 MOBILIZI NG TACTICS
33
J oanna Gardner-Huggett
BLACK, WHI TE, AND BLUE
Thomas McGovern
ETC.
34 MEDIA NOTED AND RECEIVED
Contributor: Patrick Friel
PORTFOLIO
[ J
Megan Mette
(INSIDE COVER SPREAD)

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NYSCA
Cover
Still from Community Action Center (2010) by A.K. Burns and A .L. Steiner;
photo by A . L. Steiner
FALLING INTO THE DIGITAL DIVIDE: ENCOUNTERS
.
.
ITH THE ORK OF HITO STEYERL
isplayed on two high-definition television screens,
Hi to Steyerl's work Abstract (20 12) 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, Steyer! 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 Steyer! 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, Steyer! 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."
The attention granted video works proj ected onto white canvases
or left to repeat, indefinitely, on freestanding high-definition
televisions, chimes between three main subjects: artist, artwork,
and viewer. But in an era of multiplicity, arguably brought on by
our submersion in the internet and the web, the stasis of the video
exhibition i.e., "this work is thirty-one minutes long and will
repeat at five minutes past each hour" says nothing of networked
subj ect-ivities. Video is inherently a broadcast medium, for
even if its consumers can walk in and out whenever they please,
they may never be "prosumers," capable of producing as they
each mutating act an equivalent of its other. Although
.
this "digital," "networked" mentality has caught the tongues
and pens of the art establishment, because art objects still sit
on plinths and numerous art videos still play from beginning to
end without audience participation, it often feels as though the
"digital condition" has not been directly translated through old
means to new artistic ends.
According to Claire Bishop in the beginning of a recent Ariforum
essay, " the appearance and content of contemporary art have
been curiously unresponsive to the total upheaval in our labor
and leisure inaugurated by the digital revolution."
1
Bishop goes
on to make some valid assertions about the ever-burgeoning
Above
Sti l l from November (2004) by Hito Steyerl ; Hito Steyerl; court esy

Wilfried Lentz Rott erdam and Wi lson L. Mead Fund
digital condition, even as she recants '"new media' art" as "a
specialized field of its own," not worthy of consideration within
the logic of her own argument. Her comments, which sent ripples
of disaffection through MFA seminars and new media webzines
alike, exemplify the very disavowal of the digital about which
she warns:
While many artists use digital technology, how many really
confront the question of what it means to think, see, and
filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or
reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the
digitization of our existence?
2
Steyer! may be such an artist. Both her video work which is
essayistic in content and approach and her written essays are
emblematic of the transcriptions the art world has undergone
in the past two decades. The poetic collapse of signifier and
signified performed by Abstract attests to these pursuits in
Steyerl's work. Although not immediately obvious in a gallery
context, most contemporary video work is digitally generated.
The once physical acts of cutting film and splicing frames is now
done through software interfaces that, as theorist Lev Manovich
attested in the late 1990s, metonymically fabricate the conditions
of film. As Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin have suggested,
"computers do not have a recognizable or significant aesthetic
that possesses some kind of authenticity and completeness,"
3
but
that very lack is not an absence, for the digital is anything it can
be made to stand in for. Aesthetically, perhaps, there is nothing
to distinguish finely encoded video, music, or images from their
material precursors.
Yet at the level of code, artworks produced digitally are also
indistinguishable from one another. Writing about the continued
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detachment of currency from commodity, Jean-Joseph Goux
points out what might be the most authentic condition of the
digital: "the detached, abstract, divested, and even why
not? inconvertible mark"
4
of the desemanticized zero and one.
The "completeness" of the digital, then, appears to be located
at infinite distance from any affective experience, whether that
be the hardships wrought by collapsing stocks and shares, the
repeated "ping" of an SMS message, or the intellectual impact
of a gallery-based video work. Zeros and ones do one thing very
well indeed: they appear to move at the speed of light. Across
circuit boards and TCP /IP networks alike, the inconvertible
mark exerts its power in what N. Katherine Hayles has called a
"flickering" 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 Defense
of the Poor Image" (2009), explicitly confronts the aesthetic
conditions of digital images. In a twist indicative of her work,
Steyerl defines an image's value by its ease of flow and distribution.
The highly compressed, deteriorated "poor image" "mocks the
promises of digital technology. Not only is it often degraded to
the point of being just a hurried blur, one even doubts whether it
could be called an image at all."
6
The aesthetic affect of digital
images thus stands in metonymically for the networks they
navigate and the means by which those networks are exposed.
Built on the derelict protocols and centerless infrastructure of the
1970s military communication network ARPANET (Advanced
Research Projects Agency Network), the content of the internet
is manifest today on more screens than there are human eyes
to view them. Steyerl offers the poor image as a metaphor for
dissemination itself. Our capacity to wallow in images is enhanced
by those images being dilapidated and bruised, forced through
bandwidths far slighter than their display potential would seem
to allow. Images are not valuable because of an originary aura;
instead it is their transience, the likelihood they will be copied and
re-disseminated in ever-mutating forms, which marks them out
as significant. This association of replication with the apparent
failure of verisimilitude chimes for both
the commodity fetish and an appeal to
digitization.
In Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the
Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (1936),
mechanization and mass production
begin at the "original" and work to
distance the commodity from the form
captured by each iteration. For Benjamin,
copies reduce the aura of the original,
but as poor images propagate, not only
does their aura remain intact, that aura
is actually heightened in a system of ever-
poorer repetitions and redisplays.
The

Internet exemplifies

Its own
democratic potential because every bit
and byte is treated equally by the TCP I
IP protocols that drive its traffic. Thus, slick HD advertisements
fall short of the potential of lossy JPEG spam to be seen, and
government propaganda is drowned out by the shout of viral
videos. Messages from the perverted environs of culture make
their way to our eyes and ears more readily as wrecked and
ruined impressions, their signifiers flickering with each act of
recompression, copy, and display. The poor image affirms Hillel
Schwartz's observation in The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses,
Unreasonable Facsimiles (1996) that it "is within an exuberant world
of copies that we arrive at our experience of originality,"
7
offering,
perhaps, a final affirmative answer to his query:
Practical distinctions between the unique and the multiple
have been entrusted to theologians, notaries,
connoisseurs, and curators. None of these now seems to be
able to keep the One apart from the Many. Can we still
uphold or is it time to abandon any distinction between
original and replica?
8
Poor images, seeming to proliferate independently from the
sinuous optical cables and super- cooled server banks that
disseminate them, are absolutely reliant on the process of
copying. Copying is a fundamental component of the digital
network where, unlike the material commodity, matter is
not passed/ parsed along. The digital thing is always a copy,
is always copied, and is always copying. Abstracted from
its material context, copying is "a universal principle"
9
of
digital dissemination, less flowing within the circuits as being
that circuitry flow in and of itself. Enabled by over-used
compression software, digital copies escape atrophy as they
navigate multiple bandwidth streams. Hiding in the random
access memory of a user's personal computer, the coded image
waits patiently for browser software to determine which type
Above
Installation view of Abstract (2012) by Hito Steyerl; Hito Steyerl ;
photograph by Ray Anastas
of decompression will best suit its visual demonstration, before,
in microseconds, it emerges as a fifty-nine frames-per-second
flicker on a dirty, regularly fingered, poorly maintained
computer monitor. Expressed at the level of the digital, it is the
glitch the coding artifact that signifies the potential of the
network. We encounter the "digital condition" in the perceptual
slip of a visual glitch, or the auditory pop-hiss that sometimes
results from the compression of audio. Yet the glitch evades us,
dissolving away as soon as it appears resolved.
-
In her essay "A Thing Like You and Me" (20 1 0), Steyer! calls
for us to "tap into" the power of the bruise and the glitch, in
order to participate in the forces that compel contemporary
digital capitalism.
10
In the case of digital copies, error-managed
and artifacts, the traces of its rips and transfers," outer marks
signalling "a constellation of forces" petrified within:
In the commodity fetish, material drives intersect with affect
and desire, and Benjamin fantasizes about igniting these
compressed forces, to awaken "the slumbering collective
from the dream-filled sleep of capitalist production" to tap
into these forces .... Things are never just inert objects,
passive items, or lifeless shucks, but consist of tensions,
forces, hidden powers, all being constantly exchanged.
11
Copies, being copied, forever copying, exert an unruly behavior
at every stage of their transmission, it is only within the event of that exposes the material world.
the encounter that Steyerl's "bruises" become manifest. Code-
savvy artists do not see a glitch as an aesthetic abhorrence, but
as a signal of the kinds of errors that copied-copying may have
been subjected to. Once an error, perhaps resulting in a glitch
or a bruise, is allowed to creep into an image file, that error
will itself be reproduced accurately by the systems it navigates.
Error management will maintain the conditions that produced
the glitch just as readily as it maintains the "intended" image.
Crucially, there is no distinguishing between the two at the
level of the digital copy. As . these boundaries between digital
things and their flow are blurred, the market forces that bind
the networks to us are partially exposed: a mutual encounter
that flattens interrelations; that brings seemingly distinct beings
together. For Steyer!, autonomy emerges from a participation,
not in the error, but in the "bruises of images ... its glitches
Above
Still from In Free Fall (2010) by Hito Steyerl; Hito Steyerl ; courtesy
Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam
In one of her longer video works, Lovely Andrea (2007), Steyer!
travels through Tokyo's pornographic subculture in search
of lost bondage images of herself. We are never told why, as
a student in the 1980s, Steyer! came to be photographed-
whether her likeness was captured for artistic, monetary,
or other, more subversive, ends. Rather, the search for the
images in the vast erotic archive emphasizes the effect of the
photographs on the Hito Steyer! of today: the filmmaker,
artist, and theorist of images. The whole affair feels too
perfect, too coincident with the works and words Steyer!
would make in the twenty interceding years. Fictional and
factual incidents are left equally fractured in their collision
with one another a montage intertwined with clips from
old Spider-man cartoons and live bondage performances.
The dissemination of Steyerl's own image has left signalling
marks 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 of
its producer, never directing us to a final or originary instance
of 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 In
Free Fall (20 1 0) are necessarily confronted with the conditions of
digital video stock. Accompanied by pristine surround sound, and
displayed as an enormous projection onto a specially prepared,
high-definition surface, the film is an obvious foil to its poorer
namesakes. Treating the Boeing 707 as a quasi-subject, worthy
of its own biography, the film traces the economic and political
conditions 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 at
Entebbe Airport in Uganda in 1976, is subsequently the subject of
several movies about the terrorist plot, and is eventually ploughed
into and exploded for the penultimate scene in the film Speed ( 1994,
directed by Jan de Bont). The final twist comes at the expense of
the Hollywood studio that paid for the 707 to be destroyed, as its
warped and charred remains are shipped to China to be recycled
into DVDs. Steyerl uses this narrative arc as a metaphor for the
repeated rise and crash of world markets. Human subjects are
sent reeling by the waves of economic forces that are, at base,
materially traceable. The plane object, having been liberated
from its status as mere thing, echoes the concerns of Sergei
Tretyakov's text The Biography of the Object (1929), liberally quoted
in the film. As it moves along the assembly line, the object plots a
constellation of forces, its lines of flight intersecting with subjects
as "producers," rather than the heroes of their own (illusory)
narratives. Reusing the film's title for a written essay, originally
published in the same year, Steyer! stretches the conditions of
the fall and the crash yet further: "Pilots have even reported that
free fall can trigger a feeling of confusion between the self and
the aircraft. While falling, people may sense themselves as being
things, while things may sense that they are people."
12
The essay alludes to the history of perspective in the visual arts,
and the illusion of distance, and more explicitly height, made
palpable on the two-dimensional surfaces of canvas or paper. As
if to con temporize John Berger's comment that the "invention"
of perspective made "the single eye the centre of the visible
world,"
13
Steyer! invokes the critical function of the visual arts as a
symptom of a wider perspectival shift. Digital technologies allow
new ways of seeing, as well as being seen. We inhabit a reverse
panopticon, where each of us co-regulates the structures that
mediate our control, zooming in to our own abodes on Google
satellite maps, allowing portable universal devices to track our
every move, and sharing across social networks built as much
to regulate our consumer subjectivities as to convince us of our
freedom from those regulations. "Traditional modes of seeing
and feeling are shattered," and "[n]ew types ofvisuality arise,"
14
which are not to be taken as they appear. We are falling, Steyerl
suggests, over a new landscape, through corrupted images,
untraceable copies, and complex material forces that buffer us
on our way down. The pilot and plane things are sensed as one
object, mutually falling to earth. Without an anchor, perspective
itself should not be trusted.
Here, perhaps, the re-emphasis on human subjectivity is one of
Steyerl's most surprising jolts in perspective. Apart from Steyer!
herself, the mutually falling human figures in the works I have
highlighted here often seem too interchangeable to warrant
closer inspection. Even Andrea Wolf, Steyerl's childhood friend,
has her image torn and tugged across a series of narrative arcs
until we are unsure of the realities she inhabited. The earliest
work on show at e-flux gallery, November (2004), attests to this,
setting up the conditions for WolPs appearance across other
works. Is Wolf a friend, a hero, an icon, or merely a name?
Serendipity finds Steyer! face to face with a poster depicting Wolf
as rebel hero Sehit Ronahi, a pin-up martyr tacked to the same
wall as a series of pornographic film posters. The identities of
Wolf and the "producer" Steyer! may be the anchors our free-
falling perspectives are looking for; images aware of, but no more
complicit in, the processes of their subjectification. In a new
work, Guards (20 12), we are introduced to two security guards
who work for the Art Institute of Chicago. Tracing the path of an
imaginary foe around works by Bruce Nauman and Eva Hesse,
ex-policeman and gallery security guard Ron Hicks describes his
thoughts in neat sentences that could have been plucked, whole,
from the middle of a Steyerl essay: "Museums can be considered
soft targets. I am engaged on my subject."
As one ofSteyerl's more expressively human-centric works, Guards
is also a personal profile of the art world as economic force. As
with other works, the film can be twinned with an essay, Art as
Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life (20 12), in which Steyer!
argues for a reconsideration of the terms of occupation. Each
of us carries with us potential anchors for perspective mobile
phones hooked to the web, replete with digital eyes, ears, and
other sensory prostheses. Rather than consume in the blind favor
of our own heroic narratives, we should render these surveillance
technologies in the production of new critical territories, making
space and time, once again, the subjects of our occupation or,
to echo the words of security guard Ron Hicks: "I run my walls,
not missing anything. No threat. Nothing changes about me but
my location."
DANIEL ROURKE is a writer, artist, and researcher based at Goldsmiths,
University of London. His work finds itself in print and online, never straying too far
from territories his website, machinemachine.net, maps and navigates.
NOTES 1. Claire Bishop, 'V igitaLDivide: ContemporaryArtandNewMedw," Artforum, September, 2012, http://
ar!fornm.wm/i.nprint/issue=201207&id=31944, 1. 2. Ibid. 3. Olga Goriunoua and Alexei Shu/gin, "GiiJch," in
Software Studies: a Lexicon, ed. Al/atthew FuU.er (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008}, 110- 18. 4. Jean-Joseph
Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud (Ithaca: ComeU. Universify Press, 1990). 5. N. Katherine
Hqyles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
(Chicago: of Chicago Press, 1999), 29- 30. 6. Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, (New York:
Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 31- 44. 7. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking
Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: :(one Books, 1996), 212. 8. Ibid. 9. J ussi Parikka, "Copy," in
Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Malthew Fuile1: 10. Steyer!, The V\'retched of the Screen, 54. 11. Ibid. 12.
Steyer!, The Wretched of the Screen, 12. 13. John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin 2008}, 15.
14. Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, 12.