Hito Steyerl: Factory of the Sun

San José Museum of Art presents the landmark installation Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015), a joint acquisition between the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and SJMA. The critically acclaimed, immersive video debuted at the 2015 Venice Biennale. It is inspired by a quote from Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto (1985), describing machines as “made of pure sunlight.” In the video, Steyerl explains: “Our machines are made of pure sunlight. Electromagnetic frequencies. Light pumping through fiberglass cables. The sun is our factory.” The premise of machines made of pure sunlight is not a romantic one for the Berlin-based artist. Steyerl has long attuned herself to the power of image and their reproduction, particularly documentary images, to manipulate our worldview.

“We were delighted to partner with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, to acquire Factory of the Sun and ensure its vitality far into the future,” said S. Sayre Batton, Oshman Executive Director, San José Museum of Art. “Hito Steyerl invites viewers to reflect on important issues of our time. We are excited to activate the Museum’s galleries this summer with her work and look forward to the discussions that will occur as a result of this presentation.”

This will be the Museum’s inaugural presentation of Factory of the Sun. Upon entry into the immersive installation, audiences will feel as though they’ve been transported into a lurid cyberspace glowing in a grid of blue LED lights. Onscreen, the distinctions between reality and fiction dissolve in a montage of YouTube dance videos, drone surveillance footage, video games, fictitious news, and real documentation of international student uprisings. Notions of time and space expand and collapse within this virtual world, reflecting our contemporary reality and the ceaseless transmission of images and information (and misinformation) around the globe.

Kathryn Wade, SJMA assistant curator, shares “Factory of the Sun is a truly immersive experience. It creates an imaginative reality where modern warfare, corporate culture, and anticapitalist resistance movements are played out by digitally embodied characters. This exploration of the flow of data in our current digital landscape is a reflection on how today, we knowingly surrender our personal data to corporate interest so that we might participate, often delightfully, in the digital landscape.”

Factory of the Sun tells a surreal story of workers whose forced dance moves in a motion-capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine. The story is based on an actual YouTube phenomenon (a studio assistant’s brother whose viral homemade dance videos were used as a model for Japanese anime characters) and a news story about an experiment at CERN—the European Organization for Nuclear Research facility that claimed to have measured a particle traveling faster than the speed of light.

Further exploring ideas of labor in the digital economy, an interactive virtual interpretive experience designed and developed by New Art City with students from San José State University’s Art and Art History Department is available beginning August 6, 2021 here. New Art City is an online multiplayer exhibition space for digital art and performance. They are an artist-run organization dedicated to supporting artists, providing virtual space for those who are denied physical space, and amplifying the work of those who face systemic injustice.