How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)¶
How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File by Hito Steyerl (2013) from Artforum on Vimeo.
References¶
Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File examines the politics of visibility and the means for opting out of being represented in the digital age. Structured as a “how-to” video, Steyerl’s work presents a variety of practical techniques to avoid being captured by the camera’s lens. While playful in tone, the video’s message is gravely serious; the digital networks that visualize the world today serve to exploit the masses in the name of control, power, and profit. And, as more of us use smartphones to document ourselves and keep tabs on one another through social media, we are implicitly aiding and abetting these monitoring systems through a “regime of (mutual) self-control and visual self-disciplining.” Steyerl cautions that “hegemony is increasingly internalized, along with the pressure to conform and perform, as is the pressure to represent and be represented.” Here, the act of disappearing becomes synonymous with refusal—a refusal to give in to such pressures, and a refusal to participate in these networks of exploitation.
How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File 2013 is a fourteen-minute, single-channel video projection. It consists of five chapters or lessons, each proposing ironic and often humorous ways in which an individual can prevent themselves from being captured visually by digital technology, and adopts the structure and tone of an instructional presentation. Featuring the artist and other actors, including members of the crew that helped to shoot it, and narrated by an automated male voice with an English accent, the video addresses the condition of hyper-visibility that emerged in the early 2010s following developments in the way digital images can be created and disseminated, and archived online for the purposes of surveillance. The title of the video makes reference to a sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a British comedy series that was broadcast on BBC One between 1969 and 1974. In the original satirical sketch, ‘How Not to Be Seen’ purports to be a British government film explaining the importance of remaining invisible within a landscape. The video was produced in an edition of ten, of which this copy is number five, plus two artist’s proofs.
As the narrator explains in the video, ‘resolution determines visibility; whatever is not captured by resolution is invisible’, which is why the artist chose to shoot the video at a crumbling concrete resolution target in the California desert, once used by the US Airforce to test the resolution of aerial cameras. There Steyerl set up a green screen – a special effects prop used for composing and overlapping two images – against which much of the footage was shot.
Each lesson is introduced by a text, for example, ‘Lesson I: How to make something visible for a camera’. The first three chapters feature the artist facing directly at the camera performing instructions articulated by the narrator in front of the green screen. One proposition is to camouflage oneself, which the artist demonstrates by covering her face with green paint. Another tactic suggested by the automated voice is to become smaller than the size of a pixel. To illustrate this, three individuals appear on camera wearing pixel-like black or white boxes and dance slowly, possibly making an art historical reference to modernist theatre productions. An aerial shot of a black and white pixel target – a more contemporary version of the resolution target – remains as a backdrop, rendering them apparently invisible. Other strategies are to live in a gated community or in a militarised zone, to get caught in a spam filter, or simply to walk off screen. After these tactics are outlined, the film crew disappears from the resolution target and a video clip starts playing on the green screen to the 1974 chart hit ‘When Will I See You Again’ by the soul group The Three Degrees. At the same time, a series of humorous notes, which appear to be directions from the artist (for example, ‘pixel hijack camera crane’) signal the conclusion of the video.