Hito Steyerl Book order

What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization? How can one think of art institutions in an age defined by planetary civil war, growing inequality, and proprietary digital technology? The boundaries of such institutions have grown fuzzy. They extend from a region where the audience is pumped for tweets to a future of “neurocurating,” in which paintings surveil their audience via facial recognition and eye tracking to assess their popularity and to scan for suspicious activity. In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art, in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums, and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as currency in a global futures market detached from productive work? Can we distinguish between information, fake news, and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring subjects as diverse as video games, WikiLeaks files, the proliferation of freeports, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.

Das Buch versammelt Essays der Filmemacherin und Autorin Hito Steyerl. In Kapiteln wie „Reisende Bilder“, „Wiederkehr des Realen“ oder „Kulturfabriken“ werden Phänomene der digitalen Gegenwart, der aktuellen Kunst wie der Alltagskultur analysiert und mit politischen und ästhetischen Transformationsprozessen quergelesen. Der Band beschäftigt sich mit Bildern und Tönen, die in einer sich verändernden Welt neue Verhältnisse zu Objekten eingehen, selbst zu Objekten werden sowie andere Objekte und Bilder herstellen.

In Hito Steyerl's writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl's landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image. Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings. e-flux journal Series edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle