How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013), on view from Tuesday, March 22 through Monday, April 5, 2021.

Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File examines the politics of visibility and the means for opting out of being represented in the digital age. Structured as a “how-to” video, Steyerl’s work presents a variety of practical techniques to avoid being captured by the camera’s lens. While playful in tone, the video’s message is gravely serious; the digital networks that visualize the world today serve to exploit the masses in the name of control, power, and profit. And, as more of us use smartphones to document ourselves and keep tabs on one another through social media, we are implicitly aiding and abetting these monitoring systems through a “regime of (mutual) self-control and visual self-disciplining.” Steyerl cautions that “hegemony is increasingly internalized, along with the pressure to conform and perform, as is the pressure to represent and be represented.” Here, the act of disappearing becomes synonymous with refusal—a refusal to give in to such pressures, and a refusal to participate in these networks of exploitation.

How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File is presented here as one of four films in Part Four | Optics of Truth: Media and Alternative Facts, the fourth of five programs in the online series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists‘ Films programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film.

True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists‘ Films runs from February 9 through April 19, 2021. The films in each part will screen for two weeks. The next parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Tuesday.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.