Negotiations of in/visibility: Surveillance in hito steyerl’s how not to be seen

Abstract

In this paper, I analyze Hito Steyerl’s artwork How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) from the perspective of surveillance. Looking back at one of the most influential artworks of the last decade, I understand How Not to be Seen as a discursive practice using images that poses an ambivalent surveillance critique through media-and wordplay. I first outline the historical references of Steyerl’s critique of technology, including Heidegger’s (1938) “image as world picture,” and position her in relation to other relevant surveillance-resistant practices. Drawing on analytical theory by Rancière (2006), I argue that the video is an example of a documentary fiction that organizes heterogenous visual, semiotic, and sensory material horizontally. From here, I move on to analyze the artwork focusing on how in both its content and form it engages humorously in discussions of (in)visibility, targeting, resolution, and data extraction. Using discourses on Steyerl’s work from herself and others, I show how the .MOV file, in playing with representational media, subverts categories used for surveillant targeting and data extraction. Hence, I argue that Steyerl ultimately advocates for resistance through ambivalence as a playful counter-visuality in the face of ubiquitous surveillance. In an era of intelligent imagery, this implicates using the image as an object that is part of the medium and not as subject representation.