Hito Steyerl’s book, The Wretched of the Screen (interpretation, summary, talking points)

Hito Steyerl is a German filmmaker, artist, and writer part of the conceptual art movement. She is known for her films, “How Not to Be Seen” and “A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File” and much more. In this blog post, I will be talking about her book, The Wretched of the Screen where she analyzes and theorizes the politics of images in the technologically charged world of today. She goes in-depth about the art system as a labor factory, capitalism, and the artist’s loss of control as viewers decide the time spent viewing the work. She also mentions issues of “the poor image” as visual bonds, the hierarchy of resolution, artists' need for autonomy and freedom of life, and regression or withdrawal from representation.

A part of the book that I find especially interesting is when she explains the loss of perspective as a way to show displacement, uprooting, and social or political unrest in the chapter “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective”. She references the paintings The Slave Ship (1840), by J. M. W. Turner, and  Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844) by the same artist. She uses these to make a case against the use of the horizon line and move towards a vertical, freefall, non-perspective way of viewing the world. She also mentions aerial views as a sort of free-falling, non-grounded perspective that allows to intensify the work’s visuality. 

In the book, she also talks about bodies being “cut,” reproduced, and recombined into new amalgamated creations. She mentions the importance of understanding these cuts in the economic discourse, body politics, and historically (by citing Nietzche). 

Her work is incredibly important in analyzing and contextualizing digital media, film, and museums in the modern era of increased technological advancement.