The Material Impact of ‘the Digital’ in Counter-Archival Video Works by Hito Steyerl and Brenda Lien
Annie Ring
From Citational Media: Counter-Archives and Technology in Contemporary Visual Culture (2025), pp. 133-154, doi:10.59860/vc.c58c2cc
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| Part of the book: Citational Media Edited by Annie Ring and Lucy Bollington Legenda Abstract. In response to the ubiquity and purported immateriality of Internet cultures, contemporary screen artists Hito Steyerl and Brenda Lien have both deployed aesthetic strategies aimed at a new defamiliarisation, to reveal and explore the material impacts of new technologies. Repurposing some of the most familiar content and interfaces of the contemporary Internet, the citational screen works by these artists draw attention to the computational practices of our present day that are creating real but often hidden impacts on lives, bodies, and environments. Ring analyses video works by Steyerl and Lien in which portrayals of apparently abstract technological processes are intruded upon by surprising images of materiality. Full text. This contribution is published as Open Access and can be downloaded as a PDF, or viewed as a PDF in your web browser, here: |
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