Factory of the Sun is an immersive video installation, where one is inserted in a fictional video game set in a motion capture studio, with the movement of workers being converted into light beams. We enter the game from its opening credits, the viewpoint of a screenless apple computer floating inside a universe of spinning golden light bulbs, while we read about technology’s primal relation to irradiating electromagnetic frequencies, themselves sun beams. Switching between narrative levels – from fiction to documentary – the flow of the game is narrated by an off-screen voice which points towards the conditions of labor of the players and the supremacist matrixes where their actions are inserted. This absurd, playful, and futuristic installation was first presented by Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich/Berlin) in the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
Both humorous and fiercely critical, Steyerl’s practice as an artist, essayist, and educator has imparted reflections which have a strong hold on the status of the image today. Her prolific writings, such as The Wretched of the Screen (2012), accompany the meta-structure of her video-essays and audiovisual installations, providing viewers with an expanded sense of embodiment that challenges the accuracy of our sensorial perception.
Take for example Liquidity Inc. (2014), a video projection backed up by strong bass speakers mounted on a wave-like structure for visitors to lie in. In this video we are taken through a series of images of liquidity from Hokusai’s 19th-century illustrations of waves to a stock-market weather forecast, where liquid assets are mapped along with anticyclonic weather patterns. The glossy appearance of the video’s Tumblr aesthetics overlaps with the sharp-edged capitalist critique in times of neoliberal decay, bridging generations of Marxist thinkers and post-Internet artists that would otherwise not necessarily be in dialogue with one another.
By reflecting on what an image does, instead of merely what it is, Steyerl’s oeuvre is deeply invested in exposing the ideology of technology – from its materiality to its circuits of distribution. Steyerl sees data collection, the phantom of an image, under the lens of the ripple effects of the very conditions of production of visualizations today. Strike (2010) is an enigmatic example of this. In this short film, the artist hits a plasma screen with a hammer which, within a fragment of a second, starts to emit the digital image of a endless corridor. The strike of the image workers hits (strikes) the medium by which information is conveyed, the plasma, transforming the image surface into a spectral labyrinth that pulls the viewer beyond its spatial dimension. The resistance and resilience of the medium and the producer are put at stake. MM
