Hito Steyerl: The City of Broken Windows

Drafted by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio
Preview: October 31, 2018, 7pm

Hito Steyerl focuses on the role of media, technology and the circulation of images in the era of digital nativism. The artist creates installations in which film production is associated with the construction of architectural environments.

For her exhibition at Castello di Rivoli, she premieres The City of Broken Windows (2018), stemming from research into the practices of Artificial Intelligence industries and urban painting. The City of Broken Windows revolves around the process of teaching artificial intelligence how to recognize the sound of breaking windows. Steyerl explores how AI affects our urban environment and how alternative practices may emerge through pictorial acts in the public space. Chris Toepfer, protagonist of the new work, will board up Castello di Rivoli with trompe l’oeil window paintings. Steyerl’s new project offers an intriguing perspective on how the digital contemporary imagination shapes our perception of reality.

Screens, windows, liquid and non-liquid crystals all tie together in this new installation.

Amongst Hito Steyerl’s most influential texts are In Defense of the Poor Image in e-flux journal in 2009. Most recently, her writings have been collected in volumes such as The Wretched of the Screen (e-flux journal series, Sternberg Press, 2012) and Duty Free Art. Art In the Age of Planetary Civil War (Verso Press, London and New York, 2017) which includes Duty Free Art (published first in 2015) and A Tank on a Pedestal (2016).

The exhibition will be accompanied by a new Castello di Rivoli publication and by a one-day Symposium and study day on Artificial Intelligence, which will be held on December 12, 2018. Participants to be announced and include Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London.

The exhibition was made possible with the support of:
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Fondazione per l’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea CRT
Collection E. Righi
Marco Rossi
Andrew Kreps Gallery