Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Installation view from Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2016. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. Photography by Anders Sune Berg.
Upon entering the latest Taiwan International Video Art Exhibition, visitors are greeted by Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen. A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, carefully positioned a bit left of center. The curators have inscribed the political gesture of visibility invoked by Steyerl into the show, most evidently in its title, Offline Browser—a deliberate commentary on the contemporary domination of life by technology. It is worth mentioning that, compared to How Not to be Seen’s strategic rejection of surveillance systems, Offline Browser evinces another aspect of Steyerl’s oeuvre, namely its suffusion with the engineered sense of time and space made possible by the very same system that produces this excess of technological domination. How Not to be Seen, first shown at the far end of Arsenale in the 2013 Venice Biennale, arguably marked the tipping point from which the artist turned from her previous practice of antagonistic documentary to lecture performance. Two years later, her Factory of the Sun, unveiled at the German Pavilion of the Venice Biennale 2015, haunted spectators with a critique of technological culture via the grammar of gaming and sci-fi, making a typically incisive statement on societal conditions. But how do we fathom the contrast demonstrated here between two seemingly different stances on technology?
Back in 2013, at a one-day group exhibition organized by Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin, Steyerl discreetly noted the following on the display tag for her work In Free Fall: “The author wishes to personally insult anyone attracted by accelerationism by calling it a bout of dead white Ferrari envy, dripping from head to toe with stale testosterone.”
Since 2013, the intensity of Steyerl’s disdain for accelerationism has only escalated. Advocates of this philosophy suggest that, given the inevitability of the impending transformations technological development will bring about in the economic, political, and social relationships of our world, and in anticipation of the radical changes that will ensue, this shift should be hastened so as to pass the turning point sooner. Although accelerationists politics have lately come under fire for their neoreactionary affiliations I would argue that a similar ontology remains in our sight.
Steyerl’s critique hinges on the way this new school of knowledge imagines an impending, apocalyptic moment, invoking a particular kind of grand narrative. Accelerationists, in expectation of this moment, view contemporary human and ecological crises as opportunities for revolution that require further investment, rather than as problems to be fixed by alternative solutions. To put it differently, accelerationists believe these crises to be part of the foundation for the construction of a grand “future,” whereas in Steyerl’s view, a slow and violent endtime has already taken place in reality, in a subdued aesthetic form.
Factory of the Sun was exhibited on a holodeck. Referencing Star Trek, the installation incises a black box space with blue neon beams shot into a virtual world made up of small matrixes, where you can already see several other viewers sitting or lying in lounge chairs in front of you, watching Factory of the Sun on the big screen.
“This is Not a Game/This is Reality”
In the opening scene of the film, the above line appears on screen in magnified and metallic font. Although it may sound like a tacky tagline from a computer game commercial aimed at seducing consumers, its inversive tone is present throughout the work. All “real” contexts are infused with computer game-like codes. Even as you accept its computer game rhetoric, the interface will nevertheless assert itself, in turn, as one in which the audience is played. As if in the beginner mode of a game, you are informed of all rules by a kind of “first-and-a-half-person” film narrative, which clearly allows us to take in the complex plot of the work more easily.
The heroes in the game are modelled after four protesters who were shot by drones owned by Deutsche Bank. As the key social monitor of this generation, these drones also play the role of the “boss” in the game world. Through the introduction of Yulia, the programmer of the game, we become aware of the background of Naked Normal, the protagonist. He is played by Yulia’s brother, who previously rose to unprecedented fame on Youtube because of some videos of him dancing freestyle. These internet videos have been seized upon by Japanese anime fans, who employ motion capture techniques to produce a large number of videos of Japanese virtual characters dancing. As a concept, motion capture is also employed in the game. A digital off-screen sound explains to us, “As soon as the game begins, you are a slave labourer of the Motion Capture Studio. All your movements will be transformed into sunlight.”
The protagonist we see on screen (Yulia’s younger brother) is capable of channelling the light ball in his hands through a variety of dance moves. In a mode set in the Berlin Magic Mountain monitor station, the protagonist must execute intricate wavings of his limbs to generate more power, so that he can stand against the boss that once struck him dead. Halfway through the game, we gradually become accustomed with how the dance moves play out: for instance, if Yulia shoots the assistant in the game with his light ball, he will gain a bonus (“to expose the substructure”); if you press the return button at some specific moments in the game, the player can even accelerate the movement of light.
As in all dystopian narratives, the masses relegated from labourer to consumer statuses are totally subjugated by the society of surveillance. Again, the protagonist is shot by drones owned by Deutsche Bank. Later in the film, the virtual dancers transform into many spectres who once participated in revolutionary movements around the globe, played by several actors, including Gintoki Sakata from Japanese manga Gin Tama, all of whom are constantly changing their costumes while speaking in various internet-generated languages about the battle in which they were attacked and how they lost their lives.
The realities involved in these plots—for instance, that the most equitable and clean energies no longer present opportunities for democracy, as put forward in the narrative—are explicit criticisms of new “empires,” the most prominent of which is the financial system. Meanwhile, it is also worth noting that this video may have the potential to reinvigorate the paltry epistemological revelation of “newness” that has prevailed in contemporary art for a long time (in the past decade, what we have witnessed at best is the sterile notion that “the future is already here”).
To explain this, we must first look at how Steyerl “accelerates” the instability of this kind of image. Just as she claims that the film is a game in which the viewer and the work are mutually passive (or we should say, rather, that it is a video essayist’s computer game), within many of the rhetorical structures of this piece, starting with this claim that the computer game is more real than reality, the relationship between truth and falsity is constantly inverted by the artist. For this reason, we should not consider “beyond the speed of light,” mentioned several times in the film, a mere instance of her German humor, but a Freudian slip. This is because the most basic way to destabilize a substance or form is to increase its speed. On the origin of the “beyond the speed of light” statement, Steyerl says in an interview that instead of just a metaphor, it is more like reality itself, bordering between the fantastical and the real—for light is in fact the medium through which information is transferred in today’s reality. In addition, she specifically brings up the “high-speed trading” algorithms invented by the financial system, which break currency trading away from the laws of physics. Here, to “accelerate” something means, to some extent, dissociating it from the balanced relationship on which it originally depended. In this work, fiction and reality are displaced precisely in this manner. It could be said that Steyerl has swayed the fundamental status of “realness,” following the trajectory set by cinema vérité. From this perspective, this video can be considered a perverse “reality computer game,” or a documentary film made by some director living in a Baudrillardian simulacrum.
Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Installation view from Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2016. Courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York. Photography by Anders Sune Berg.
What I want to suggest is that this equation of acceleration, which employs the cognitive appropriation of disequilibrium as an artistic method for her visual rhetoric, in fact happens to be one of the ontological tools of accelerationism as well. In an essay in #Accelerate: the accelerationist reader, Ray Brassier concludes that Prometheanism is one of the sources of accelerationism, which suggests there’s no such ontological or theological assurance to grant such “fragile equilibrium between what is made and what is given,” and that the cognitive “appropriation of disequilibrium,” according to Brassier, relies on the Enlightenment concept of linear time (“Knowing takes time, but time impregnates knowing”): time always has its effect on man, no matter how we approach it. Since one cannot deny this fact, then, any production is actualized through (accelerating) the use of time.[1]
Though Steyerl positions her rhetoric in direct opposition to that which accelerationism endorses, from the speculative curve of engineering to the dreamwork imagery that pervades her recent work, she has in actuality internalized the accelerationist intuition of disequilibrium in a way that provides a fruitful foundation for reflection on the issue of “newness” within the context of today’s politics of the sensible. If a given state of equilibrium behind truth and fiction, political realities and aesthetics can be shattered, and even accelerated into new form, as in Factory of the Sun — then, just as in Steyerl’s re-engineering the visual codes of internet and computer games, our interaction with contemporary technologies and the various forms of biopolitics is not simply one in which our only choice is to not to be seen or rendered online. The paradigm with which we traverse the grand fantasy that is the apocalypse should be one that exposes the grotesquerie of the Enlightenment concept of linear time. It is not a question of whether the future can be reached, only of how the existing means and relations of production can be further subverted.
[1] Ray Brassier, “Prometheanism and its Critics”, in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, eds R. Mackay and A. Avanessian, (Falmouth and Berlin: Urbanomic/Merve, 2014), 469.
Hito Steyerl. Factory of the Sun, 2015. Single channel HD video, environment. Image CC 4.0 Hito Steyerl. Image courtesy of the Artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.
* This essay is supported by The Visual Art Critic Project, sponsored by National Culture and Arts Foundation, Taiwan, Winsing Arts Foundation and Mrs. Su Mei-Chi.
