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

Hito Steyerl ‘stays up with’ the latest consumer technologies in order to stay informed of the latest desires, politics and complications with ‘GIF Telepathy’ or the ‘shareable’ telepathy of the poor image. She notes that contemporary reality is already so fantastic that she couldn’t invent it and that, in this condition, it is necessary to deploy. Her work How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013) offers lessons in disappearance and instructions on how to pretend you are not there, such as to wear an invisibility cloak, to be a superhero or to be a woman over fifty. Steyerl extends the lineage of Conceptual art’s central engagement with the invisible and dematerialization—as well as waveform phenomena of image visibility, transmissibility and modulation (ultrasonic and electromagnetic)—whilst placing a greater emphasis on the spectral politics of images. Steyerl also champions the poor image as a way to transform quality into accessibility. Using degraded and over-disseminated images is not just a communist strategy, it is also a strategy for the sharing of affect and of telepathic transmission. By staying up to speed with avatars, DARPA, drones, imaging and surveillance technology, Steyerl’s work inevitably chases new distributions of the sensible and thus new “technotelepathy” and new politics of empathy. How Not to be Seen is a deadpan and technist demonstration and deconstruction of the magic of visual illusion in contemporary media; for example, how a camera crew disappears after invisible rays emanate from an iPhone.