Hito Steyerl

Hito Steyerl. Eye Explosion. November 10th, 2015. Nouvel Building, Protocol Room

Hito Steyerl: This talk is called "Media" and it starts off with a term the great film maker Harun Farocki once coined and he was talking about "suicides cameras" (...) He was describing the cameras mounted on top of missiles during the first US intervention in Iraq in the early nineties (...) the suicide camera didn't really die during the impact, instead it seems to have splintered into countless little shots that came to be embedded into cell phones. (...) The camera on the missile top it was supposed to identify and track and destroy objects but as itself destroyed it multiplied, it proliferated, it is not only identifying objects or targets more precisely, but also their owners, their motions, their emotions. Most of their actions and communications. (...) But what if not only the cameras exploded but also the images they produced? What if this created a situation in which most images become unintelligible? (...)

How to learn to see images that are made by machines for machines? Maybe there are tutorials for this kind of post human vision. (...)

Machines communicate by images that humans cannot understand but they are used as models to create social reality. So what kind of reality is created if you have this kind of model that the humans cannot understand? (...)  What kind of state would be created as a sort of consequence of the production of these images? It's this basically a deep state which is shrouded in secrecy and opaque legislation? If the models for reality increasingly consists of data sets that humans cannot understand then probably the reality that is created after them it's not really rationally accessible for humans either. It creates images in which whole lives become patterns that autonomous machines used to gossip about you or pull the trigger. Images that if they are implemented create a reality that looks in part as if your brain was damaged by a sniper, a reality (...)  in which you don't understand your own eyes.