How are Complex Questions of Surveillance Negotiated in Contemporary Art?
In the post below, Joachim Friis reflects on his article, “Negotiations of In/Visibility: Surveillance in Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen,” which appeared in a recent issue of Surveillance & Society.
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I asked myself this question after reading another artist, Trevor Paglen’s, thoughts on how the vast majority of our online pictures today are actually invisible to humans, made by machines and for other machines to see. Artificial intelligence has made a new type of image and a new structure of power that subtends these humanly invisible images trained by machine learning in dangerously biased ways. This complexifies the discussion around surveillance and therefore I wished to investigate how contemporary art can deal with this complexity in unique ways that general debate and research cannot.
Instead of choosing a variety of artists to analyze, I homed in on one of the most influential artworks of the last decade, German artist Hito Steyerl’s video work How Not to be Seen from 2013 — an ironic and playful guide on how to hide from different types of visibility. This allowed me to synthesize the research that has already been done of this artwork while bringing Steyerl’s own writing in play and adding my own analysis and critique.
What especially interested me with this artwork was how it negotiates the issue of surveillance in both its form and its content. I call this practice image-discursive in the way that it plays with the media of the movie in different ways to underline the complexity of surveillance. For example, Steyerl, the protagonist of the video, is at one point covering herself with military paint to show a way to become invisible, but the paint is not simply covering her, rather it makes her disappear into the background of the screen. Later in the movie the desktop-screen we know from a Mac is used as a backdrop in a physical landscape as a way of materializing the digital. These are ways Steyerl practices a sort of digital sabotage of her own work, but it is also a way to complexify and challenge categories of surveillance. Categories are necessary for data, and data is the object of surveillance — therefore category disturbance can be seen as a challenge to surveillance systems, the work seems to suggest.
Category disturbance can be seen as a challenge to surveillance systems.
This leads to another example of how Steyerl negotiates visibility and invisibility: through analogy and wordplay. She shows us how the way we talk about issues of (in)visibility entails great complexity. For example, she thematizes in the voice-over of the movie how invisibility can be interpreted as both a privilege given to the ones with the economy to sustain an excluded existence but also as the paperless and undocumented refugee. At the same time the visible category is both an opportunity for validation and participation, such as on social media, but also a precarious position of exposure and capture. Capture and target are other word playing metaphors Steyerl uses in different ways throughout the movie to emphasize both military warfare and the apparatus of photography. In this way the artwork humorously, but not without serious critique, engages in discussions on how targeting, data extraction and resolution are all concepts we must understand the complexity of in the age of intelligent imagery and AI.
