PRESENTATION: Hito Steyerl-A Sea of Data

Hito Steyerl is involved in prolific filmmaking and writing work that occupies a highly discursive position between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, constituting a deep exploration of late capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries. Her films and lectures have increasingly addressed the presentational context of art, while her writing has circulated widely through publication in both academic and art journals.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MMCA Archive

“A Sea of Data” is the first large-scale solo exhibition in Asia by Hito Steyerl. In her artwork and writings, Hito Steyerl has raised important points about media, images, and technology through her analysis of the ontology of the image amid the accelerating trends of global capitalism, the digital society and the post-internet era, and its political and social contexts. The exhibition title “A Sea of Data” comes from her essay “A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition” (2016), alluding to the exhibition’s aim of directing a new perspective on a digitally based data society that has been transformed into a different reality today. The exhibition features 23 representative works showing the full gamut of Steyerl’s artistic vision, from early documentary-esque video works such as “Germany and Identity” (1994) and “The Empty Centre” (1998) to the more recent “SocialSim” (2020) and the new MMCA-commissioned work “Animal Spirits”, which explore digital technologies such as algorithms, artificial intelligence, and robot engineering in relation to human beings and society. The exhibition poses a number of other questions: Can technology rescue human beings from the maelstrom of disasters and wars that we currently face? What is the role of the contemporary art museum in an era defined by planetary civil war, rising inequality, and monopolistic digital technology? How have digital visual systems transformed our perceptions of human beings and society? How do the low‒resolution digital images that the artist refers to with the term “poor image” relate to our ways of life? In the process, the exhibition seeks to provide an opportunity for broader consideration of and reflection on the new images, the visuality, the state of the world, and the status of the contemporary art museum brought about by digital culture in the context of accelerating digital capitalism and networked spaces. To that end, the exhibition consists of five sections: “A Sea of Data,” “How Not to Be Seen: Digital Visuality,” “Technology, War and Museum,” “Liquidity Inc. – Global Fluidity,” and “Documentation and Fiction”. Part 1, titled “A Sea of Data,” introduces major works by the artist that focus on issues of image production and circulation, data labor, and the current state of the contemporary art museum within a network society rooted in digital technology (data, AI, algorithms, and the metaverse). These include “Factory of the Sun” (2015), “The City of Broken Windows” (2018), “Mission Accomplished: BELANCIEGE “(2019), “This is the Future” (2019), “SocialSim” (2020), and “Animal Spirits” (2022). The new work “Animal Spirits” quotes the concept of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who used the term “animal spirits” to refer to situations where human greed and fear cause markets to spiral out of control. It juxtaposes this idea with the ecological powers of Spanish shepherds centering around a cave showing wall paintings from the Paleolithic era, as it comments on the wild capitalist markets that have emerged today in areas such as bitcoin and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Part 2, titled “How Not to Be Seen: Digital Visuality,” centers around Steyerl’s representative work “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File” (2013), identifying particularities of the digital visual system as it raises questions about the hierarchy between the “seen” and “unseen” in a digital world of widespread surveillance cameras and mass collection and recording of data. Part 3, titled “Technology, War and Museum,” presents “The Tower “(2015) and “Hell Yeah We Fuck Die” (2016), works that raise questions about technological utopias and explore the hidden aspects of technology and war from a new perspective. Also featured are “Duty Free Art” (2015) and “Guards” (2012), which analyze the new role of the contemporary art museum as a place interacting with various social phenomena rather than as a sacred shrine. Part 4, titled “Liquidity Inc. – Global Fluidity,” presents “Liquidity Inc.” (2014) and “In Free Fall” (2010), works that express the “circulationism” of a global network era where all things circulate, including objects, people, capital, information, and data. Steyerl also applies the term “poor image” to redefine the new value of the image in the era of fluidity, urging a new perspective on art and the value of the contemporary image. Part 5, titled “Documentation and Fiction,” focuses on contexts of “documentation vs. fiction” and “truth vs. falsehood” as it presents the artist’s early experiments with documentary film from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, in which she focused on issues of inequality and of racism and anti-Semitism in the wake of Germany’s reunification. In the process, this section traces the origins of her documentary perspective today.

Photo: Hito Steyerl, SocialSim, 2020, Photography by © Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf, age courtesy of the Artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin

Info: MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea), 30 Samcheong-ro, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea, Duration: 29/4-18/9/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 10:00-18:00, Fri-Sat 10:00-21:00, www.mmca.go.kr