The Wretched of the Screen
Hito Steyerl
In Hito Steyerl’s writing we begin to see how, even if the hopes and desires for coherent collective political projects have been displaced onto images and screens, it is precisely here that we must look frankly at the technology that seals them in. The Wretched of the Screen collects a number of Steyerl’s landmark essays from recent years in which she has steadily developed her very own politics of the image.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, these essays uncover a rich trove of information in the formal shifts and aberrant distortions of accelerated capitalism, of the art system as a vast mine of labor extraction and passionate commitment, of occupation and internship, of structural and literal violence, enchantment and fun, of hysterical, uncontrollable flight through the wreckage of postcolonial and modernist discourses and their unanticipated openings.
With an introduction by Franco “Bifo” Berardi
Edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood, Anton Vidokle
Contents
Preface
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Introduction
In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective
In Defense of the Poor Image
A Thing Like You and Me
Is a Museum a Factory?
The Articulation of Protest
Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy
Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life
Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries
Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy
The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation
Cut! Reproduction and Recombination