It begins as a joke. A voice, clipped and didactic, instructs: “How not to be seen? Become invisible.” The image shudders—low-resolution, a ghost of a file, a degraded pixel smear. Then: a military testing site in California’s Mojave Desert. The camera hovers over numbered targets, relics from an era when satellites learned to identify bodies from the sky. A green-screened figure materializes and promptly vanishes, replaced by a JPEG of the landscape. The voice resumes: “Or, be female and over 50.” Laughter—or is it static?—crackles through the compression artifacts.
This is Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), an absurdist survival guide for life under algorithmic surveillance. But the work is more than satire; it is an invitation to consider who gets to disappear, and who is forcibly seen. To step into Steyerl’s world is to enter a digital war zone where images are weapons, surveillance is omnipresent, and the battle for visibility is both waged and lost before it begins.
To ignore Hito Steyerl is to ignore the wiring behind the walls—the networks of power that shape what we see, what we click, what we believe. Her work doesn’t just expose the scaffolding of digital capitalism; it makes you feel its weight. If you’ve ever watched a video glitch mid-stream, if you’ve ever scrolled past a compressed, pixelated news clip of a protest in a country you’ll never visit, if you’ve ever wondered why some images spread like wildfire while others vanish without a trace, you’ve already brushed against her ideas. Steyerl matters because she deciphers the language of the systems we live inside, the ones most people take for granted. In an era where algorithms know us better than we know ourselves, understanding her work isn’t just an intellectual exercise—it’s self-defense.
The Guerrilla Theorist of the Image Economy
Hito Steyerl does not merely make art—she interrogates its material conditions, the infrastructures that scaffold its circulation, the geopolitical violence embedded in every pixel. Born in Munich in 1966, Steyerl studied filmmaking at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image before earning a PhD in philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The hybrid approach—part theorist, part filmmaker, part digital agitator—would become her signature.
She is, by now, an institution unto herself. Through essays, video installations, and large-scale immersive works, she has shaped contemporary debates on digital aesthetics, algorithmic governance, and the neoliberal entanglement of art and finance. Her concept of the “poor image”—low-quality, compressed, pirated, and infinitely reproduced—has become shorthand for a new kind of visual economy, one in which images are both democratized and devalued, stripped of context and weaponized.
Glitches in the System: The Art of Hito Steyerl
Factory of the Sun (2015)
Commissioned for the German Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, Factory of the Sun transforms the exhibition space into a pulsating LED grid, somewhere between a video game and a nightclub. A voice narrates a tale of exploited digital labor: workers in a motion-capture studio, forced to dance to generate sunlight. It is a parable of neoliberal absurdity—how even joy, even movement, is fodder for monetization. The viewer, bathed in shifting light, becomes implicated in the machinery of spectacle. Art historian Karen Archey describes it as “literalizing Marx’s concept of abstract labor.” Here, Steyerl doesn’t just show us the circuits of capital; she makes us feel their pulse.
Liquidity Inc. (2014)
“Be water, my friend.” The Bruce Lee quote, a mantra for adaptability, serves as the guiding logic of Liquidity Inc.—a work that weaves together the story of Jacob Wood, a former financial analyst turned MMA fighter, with footage of typhoons, stock-market graphs, and digital waves crashing into each other. It is a meditation on financial instability, migration, and the forces—both liquid and economic—that shape our lives. The film itself refuses fixity; it undulates, shifts, crashes. If capital flows like water, Steyerl asks, who gets drowned?
Power Plants (2019)
Steyerl’s recent work moves beyond the critique of images to the critique of data itself. Power Plants, exhibited at Serpentine Galleries, is an AI-generated video installation where neural networks trained on climate data and protest songs generate speculative “predictions”—alternative futures, flickering just beyond the frame. The soundtrack, developed in collaboration with Kojey Radical, translates algorithmic noise into sound, a reminder that even data, even the so-called “neutral,” carries ideology.
The Politics of the Poor Image
Steyerl’s In Defense of the Poor Image (2009) remains one of the most influential essays in contemporary media theory. She argues that the low-resolution, compressed, endlessly shared image—what she calls the “poor image”—is both a site of subjugation and subversion. These images are “wretched,” stripped of their value, degraded by their circulation, yet they are also the currency of a new underground economy. They are protest footage, bootleg films, memes. They refuse the fetish of the high-resolution, the museum-bound object. They live, they move, they spread.
Yet the poor image is no longer an act of resistance alone. AI now feeds on these degraded scraps, repurposing them into predictive models, deepfakes, and training data for surveillance systems. Steyerl’s work confronts this paradox: what happens when radical visibility becomes indistinguishable from exploitation?
Where to Find Hito Steyerl’s Work
For those who wish to disappear (or, more likely, to better understand why they cannot), Steyerl’s works are widely exhibited in institutions such as the Tate Modern, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Stedelijk Museum. Her writings—Duty Free Art and The Wretched of the Screen—offer a deeper dive into the intersection of art, finance, and algorithmic power.
In an era where every movement, every click, every search query is another data point for the archive, Steyerl’s work reminds us that there is still a politics of refusal. Perhaps the only way to win is to glitch, to scramble, to become something the system cannot parse. To become, in her words, “too much world.”
References and Resources
Books & Articles by Hito Steyerl
Steyerl, H., 2009. In Defense of the Poor Image. e-flux Journal, 10.
Steyerl, H., 2012. The Wretched of the Screen. Sternberg Press.
Steyerl, H., 2017. Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War. Verso.
Books, Journal Articles, and Essays
Albuquerque, P., 2015. Too Much World: A Hito Steyerl Retrospective. NECSUS.
Alter, N.M., 2017. Hito Steyerl’s Liquid Modernity. Artforum.
Apprich, C. et al., 2018. Pattern Discrimination. University of Minnesota Press.
Archey, K., 2022. Hito Steyerl: Power Structures and Institutional Critique. Stedelijk Museum.
Breen, C., 2018. Review: Duty Free Art by Hito Steyerl. Media Theory Journal.
Kreps, A., 2020. The Work of Hito Steyerl. Andrew Kreps Gallery.
Pek, Y.S., 2022. Reality Expanded: The Work of Hito Steyerl, 1998–2015. Princeton University Press.
Rainforth, D., 2019. Hito Steyerl: The Essay as a Form of Moving Image. Monash University.
Sluis, K., 2024. Subprime Images: Hito Steyerl on AI and Photography. Aesthetics of Photography.
Tattersall, L., 2016. Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun. Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Wood, B.K., 2017. Duty Free Art: The Work of Hito Steyerl. Verso.
Exhibition Catalogs, Interviews, and Media Features
Fakewhale LOG, 2024. Hito Steyerl: Framing the Global Imagery.
Flash Art, 2021. Prediction in the Era of Digital Stupidity: Hito Steyerl.
Fino-Radin, B., 2022. Art and Obsolescence Podcast: Hito Steyerl. Small Data Industries.
LUMA Foundation, 2025. The Flood of Rights: Hito Steyerl. LUMA Live.
Ohmer, S., 2023. Self-Suspension in Frames: Hito Steyerl’s Lovely Andrea. Camera Obscura.
Schipper, E., 2024. Hito Steyerl Biography. Esther Schipper Gallery.
Spector Books, 2019. Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive.
Surveillance & Society, 2021. Negotiations of In/Visibility: Surveillance in Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen. Queen’s University.
Tate Modern, 2016. Hito Steyerl – ‘Being Invisible Can Be Deadly’. TateShots.
UC Davis, 2025. Hito Steyerl Biography. The California Studio.
Wikipedia, 2024. Hito Steyerl. Wikimedia Foundation.
XIBT Magazine, 2022. Hito Steyerl / I Will Survive. XIBT Contemporary Art Magazine.
Youn, B., 2023. Hito Steyerl: A Sea of Data. Andrew Kreps Gallery.
