#rp26 speaker Hito Steyerl

“At the moment, AI image generators define right-wing authoritarian aesthetics,” says author and filmmaker Hito Steyerl in an interview with ZEIT. What matters is not whether the generated images look credible or realistic, but only that they’ll go viral. What does this mean for power relations and future aesthetics? And how can we deal with the paradox that technology based on probability calculations seems to be making our future increasingly unpredictable?  

In her award-winning works, Hito Steyerl combines political analysis with visual poetry and addresses the pressing issues of our time: from postcolonial and feminist criticism to surveillance, image, data, and attention economies, to the role of artificial intelligence. She also demonstrates this in her current work, the video installation “Mechanical Kurds". In it, she debunks the myth of autonomous technology by revealing the invisible, often precarious human labor in war and crisis zones that is necessary to train AI systems. In her latest book, “Medium Hot”, she also reflects on how aesthetic, political, and technological systems intersect and what new forms of perception and responsibility arise from this.