The Harvard Advocate Staff

*Hito Steyerl is a visual artist, a filmmaker, and a writer. Her work across media is known for “twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics” and shaking up our default orientation towards screens, media, vision, and technology. She has defended the poor image, mobilized morphsuited and pixel-headed figures in a comedic critique of digital visibility, and created a world in which workers are forced to dance in order to produce artificial sunshine. She lives in Berlin and is a professor of experimental film and video at Universität der Künste. Advocate President and staff writer Lily Scherlis spoke with Steyerl over the phone in December 2017.*



 



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*You treat images as things themselves, rather than as images of something. You’ve said that “contemporary visual artifacts project instead of representing,” and I know that Vilém Flusser has influenced your notion of projection. I’m a big fan of *Into the Universe of Technical Images*, in which he writes that the “image is directed toward a person. It presses in on him and finds him in even the most secret reaches of his private space.” This valence of exposure, of being vulnerable to images that Flusser connotes seems entangled in your notion of visibility. How do you relate the processes of being imaged, of being visible, to receiving an image, to seeing the visible? Can we distinguish between the two? *



 



Between being an image and receiving an image? Bergson found a way of relating the two by inventing a world in which everything is an image basically but also a sensible image. Image that basically has some faculties of perception as well, so in that sense there is no difference between being an image and being able to sense or receive other images. He basically reformulated ideas by Leibniz, who had similar ideas in his monadology, whereby he said that basically everything in the world is a monad and some are lower resolu-tion than others, so they have less faculties of perception. Only one, namely God, the most highly resolved monad, is able to see everything.



 



*So are we images with faculties for perception? *



 



No, we are more complex than that, but interestingly I think that technology is headed in the direction of creating more and more sensitive assemblages ranked according to their faculties of perception. There are very stupid devices and much smarter ones, if you will. 



 



*There is a moment from your essay “Medya: Autonomy of Images” in Laura Poitras’ exhibition catalogue Astro Noise that haunts me. You write: “Machines show one another unintelligible images, or, more gen-erally, sets of data that cannot be perceived by human vision”—about how machines may cut us out of their chains of communication entirely, or ventriloquize us to create an illegible reality in the likeness of their images. You describe the reality they might ultimate-ly create as one in which, in your words, “you cannot understand your own eyes.” I’m curious about this last line. *



 



This is partly a reality already. You somehow find yourself exposed to a reality which is bewildering and irrational and not very obvious. In that sense I think it’s partly realized already. The world sometimes looks like a totally disjointed and incongrouous Twitter feed of a person with severe mental issues. Guess why.



 



*Aren’t computerized voices something of an inver-sion of the phenomenon of machines ventriloquizing us (here through our eyes) to talk amongst themselves. I think about the narrators in How Not To Be Seen... they are computer voices, right? *



 



These voices I use definitely are computer voices. I have somehow stopped using them now. I never asked myself why. Maybe because it’s become a template which has been used a lot, but I think also because this communication amongst machines is now happening on a level which is not available to the senses anymore at all. It is even not translated into words anymore.



 



*Did it used to be translated into words?*





        Well I think you know the let’s say... no. Definitely not. But it was represented to us as using words. But I think there has been experiments in which machines invented their own language to talk to one another which basically don’t make any sense to humans but still use human words but then you can easily imagine that human words are completely superfluous to that process.



This is what it sounds like:



 



Bob: I can i i everything else



Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

        Bob: you i everything else

        Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to meca



 



*We’re just intervening in their own networks. *



 



Yes. 



 



*What happens once machines are no longer repre-senting themselves to us? *



 



I don’t know but I think machines will also use some kind of representation to talk to one another, so in that sense it won’t disappear. The question is: what does it mean then? What kind of function does it have?



 



*You’ve previously questioned the applicability of the analyzing images as representations. What even is representation these days? *



 



I am not opposed to representation. There will always be representation. Representation is a process of alienation which is necessary for people to communicate. I love it. But there is no political automatism or social justice associated with cultural representation. There is no political effect tied to it necessarily.



 



*How so?*



 



Whether certain things or people are represented in the sphere of culture or not is not inextricably tied to any sort of political change. It can be reconfigured in completely other or different ways. 



 



*What are some of those other different ways? *



 



I think we are or have seen one of them, which is a multitude or avalanche of images of mostly everything existing without any political or economical consequence whatsoever.



 



*Flusser writes: “Technical images do isolate those who receive them in corners, but they isolate those who flee from them even further.” You’ve written ex-tensively about potential refuges from visibility, from exposure, about hiding in low resolution zones and under sheets of plastic in the drone shadow. Do you distinguish between fleeing and hiding? Moreover, where are our refuges now, now that poor images are basically defunct? *



 



I mean most people choose to engage, choose to be involuntarily represented to platforms every day. They could also choose not to. No one forces people to use smartphones day in day out. But to go completely un-represented.. that’s much more complicated. It’s prob-ably not... it’s very difficult, let’s put it like this. Many people don’t have a choice so they need to inhabit this zone. Those who do not want to be seen because for them visibility is dangerous. On the other hand invisi-bility is also a privilege for elites.



 



*What would be the consequences of choosing not to use a smartphone? *



 



I think there would be a lot less data trail, on the one hand. On the other hand it might also have an effect on your brain. For example if people stop using Google Maps or routing applications their brain changes. Orientational parts are rewired. It’s not only on the level of representation that people would slightly change. Time and space would be perceived differently without a phone, or, using the Google maps example, they would not be perceived at all.



 



*What about the video editing process? How do you think about the potential images or potential iterations of a work that never get rendered, potential iterations that exist as a possibility in AfterEffects but then never materialize? Where do they go? Is there a graveyard somewhere for hypothetical images? *



 



Interesting. Yeah, probably there is. I’m just happy that I don’t have to deal with it!



 



*Do you find the decision-making required stressful, or is it a fluid process for you? *



 



No, no. It’s horrible. Getting rid of images is the most difficult thing. I once met an archivist at Frank-furt University. He told me: people are totally naïve, they think storage and preservation define an archive. But I have to tell you that its mainly about discarding stuff and getting rid of it.



 



*I’ve been thinking a lot about a particular visual shorthand from your video How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File: the person with a pixel for a head. Do we relate, bodily, to the pixel in which we might hide? Are pixels appendages, digital phantom limbs? Can we crawl inside them? *



 



A guy once wrote a text about this experiences pro-testing on Maidan in Kiev, Ukraine. I think the text was called my life as a pixel. He would talk about how he worked tirelessly as a pixel in the TV news. If he was a pixel it means there were many people. So there was something rewarding to it - keeping in mind of course that many people were shot by snipers on Maidan, so it was very dangerous too.



 



*Do you think that pixels have insides to them? Do you think that images are spaces? *



 



I think yes. I mean let’s say more in a mathematical sense. Not in the sense that every 2D image has a 3D component to it but of course they have mathematical spaces, color spaces, probability spaces. 



 



*What is a mathematical space? *



 



In the sense that, let’s say, a picture has let’s say 12k pixels, so the mathematical space is the space that has all possible combinations of all these pixels to one an-other. Its all the potential images within this one.



 



*So that would be the graveyard of hypothetical images? *



 



Yes. A mass grave or a future potential, depending how you see it.



 



*Others have often asked you how your reconcile your writing with your visual work. You’ve said how at this point writing and images are materially the same—1s and 0s—and trying to enforce the divide or difference between the two doesn’t really work anymore. Does that manifest in your process, in how you engage with each medium? *



 



To some degree, yes. To some degree. Writing, if you want to see it from that angle, is the extremely simpli-fied process of arranging data—let’s put it like that. It´s like a plumber and a winemaker both deal with liquids in different ways, so also very different crafts.



 



*Do you have advice for young artists and writers try-ing to figure out how to move through the world? *



 



It’s difficult because for basically everything the past training set does not apply in the current situation. In that sense I don’t think there is any precedent so to speak, or it would be arrogant to assume that there is a training set for this situation. Honestly speaking, I think trying to disengage with the existing structures is under the current conditions not a bad idea.



 



*What does disengagement look like?*



 



Trying to regain control over basic social infrastructure. Water, energy, health/care, education, information. On a communal cooperative level. If I was 20 now I'd try to learn a profession which could be useful in that endeavour.



 



*In a 2014 interview with Marvin Jordan, you dis-cussed how phone cameras create pictures using algo-rithms that speculate what is signal and what is noise based on past images—in other words, they disrupt the clear indexical link of representation to reality. This residue of the past in the present prescribes history as the future. You noted how Rancière concluded that, in the context of dividing political subjects from the unheard and unseen, there is no noise, only speech: what is noise to you? Where does it come from, and where—once resolved into an image or into a voice—does it go? *



 



Noise is the things that are not yet known, meaning that it is the future.



 



*Does it relate to the glitch? *



 



Yes, but maybe the glitch is after the fact. The noise is the glitch before the image. The glitch necessitates something which is...already configured to some de-gree, right? It is some kind of artifact which is added after something is supposed to have been completed, like an image or a sound. The noise is before the image or sound is constituted. Before the signal is extracted, so to speak. It is when all possibilities are still open. 

*Maggie Nelson is a poet, a scholar, and a writer of non-fiction. Her work is known for bending genres, refusing to sequester academic rigor from lived experiences of intimacy. She is perhaps best known for her 2015 book of memoir and analysis, *The Argonauts*, as well as *Bluets*, a 2009 prose meditation on loss and the color blue. She has a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, CUNY and is currently a Professor of English at USC. Harvard Advocate President and staff writer Lily Scherlis corresponded with Nelson by email over the course of a month. *



 



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*Let's start on a style note. You've described your ideal prose as hot, as writing that "puts the needle right into the vein." What does good prose feel like, for you? How about bad? Is it easy to tell the difference? How do you calibrate your mental prose-barometer?*



 



You mean, my own prose, or that of others? Other people’s writing is infinitely easier to judge, because while reading it I’m not struggling to get any thoughts out. As for my writing, I generally ignore questions of style while I’m writing, & go back in with an eye to sound later. Poetry is a little different, as there I’m not trying to get at an idea that could be separated from its inaugural sound.



 



*In *Bluets *and elsewhere you talk about how your writing is often comported towards a "you." Your work often makes me think of Lauren Berlant's discussion of apostrophe, which builds off Barbara Johnson's ideas. She talks about how in writing we conjure up other subjectivities, phantasmagoric spectres who are really parts of our selves that have broken off so that we have someone to talk to, to address. Elsewhere Berlant writes:**"To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures... but intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others."*



*Here I think she's getting at the same tension you address when you talk about wanting "the you no one else can see, the you so close the third person need never apply." Do you feel like writing about intimacy while, as you've put it, serving two gods––the "you" that you love, and the deity on the page––is like writing a letter that's meant to be intercepted? Or is it the work of translating private shorthand into plaintext?*



 



This is lovely—I will look up the exchange of ideas between Berlant and Johnson, both of whom are important to me. I have often used the need to address someone in language as a spur to write, but the more I write of a given project, the more it’s quite clear that I’m not actually addressing that person any more, even though I might have been in the moment of composition. In that sense I never really think, by the time of publication, that I’m writing an intimate letter, or that there’s any doubling of purpose—I’ve been around the block too many times to delude myself on that account. I mean, it can feel great to be addressed in someone’s poem, to be the beloved memorialized in print, to sit in the audience feeling important, but even then both parties know that it’s one-sided literature and not the full relation, so that can feel lousy and cause pain. Exulting in being someone’s muse and feeling used are closely related, always have been. It’s a pharmakon.



 



*Reading your review of Fred Moten's new book, *Black and Blur*, I was admiring how conscientiously you commit to writing plainly about language you describe as "a field defined by incessant motion, escape." For me, the sheer firepower of Moten's prose together with his tendency to defer satisfying our desire to "figure out" what's being said makes the inability to cleanly parse his sentences is a pleasurable kind of pain. I'm curious how you would situate yourself on the imaginary spectrum between writers religiously dedicated to transparency and those inclined towards more viscous or opaque prose. What do you think these different modes have to offer, especially in the context of the project of consenting not to be a single being?*



 



That’s well put, about parsing sentences being a pleasurable kind of pain. I relate to that, re: some of my favorite writers. Moten himself has said some very smart things about plainness, & about precision. I won’t try to reproduce what he’s said here but I will say that the conversation has been fruitful to me, challenging, important. Generally speaking I kind of doubt that writers really choose their idiom—I think people have a way of thinking and talking and addressing, and then usually find an explanation, political or spiritual or what have you, after the fact, that gives their approach a certain kind of meaning. Which is fine, you just have to watch out that you’re not valorizing what you do as a privileged aesthetic just because that’s the way you happen to express yourself. I mean, even if I wanted to write in a very viscous or opaque way, I likely just don’t have it in me (which is why it kind of delights me when someone thinks I’ve been unclear or baroque, even if they’re saying it as an insult). I don’t think writing should be any one way or another, or that any one style is better suited to the project of consenting not to be a single being. Really the opposite—we need everything, everybody, all sounds. Because part of that consent, so far as I understand it, is endlessly recognizing our difference, while also understanding that difference as part of the world as a plenum, as da Silva has put it. If there were only one way forward, then only one single being would make it.



 



*You wrote about your mentor Christina Crosby in *The Argonauts*. You've also written poetry about visiting her in the hospital in *Something Bright, Then Holes*. Reciprocally, she wrote about these poems and your relationship more broadly in her book, *A Body, Undone*. How do you feel about relationships of mutual literary use, mutual museship? Do they offer new possibilities for intimacy, or are they doubly precarious? *



 



Each situation is distinct, and demands its own negotiation, comes with its own set of possibilities and challenges. In the case of Christina, our enmeshment in person and on the page has brought me much happiness & satisfaction, probably more than any other instance of writing about someone/ being written about that I’ve had. In my experience, being written about doesn’t usually bring the subject very much pleasure. So the fact that Christina valued my being there to bear witness, in writing, some of her most difficult, indeed catastrophic moments, and that she said so in her own book – that meant a lot to me. A LOT.



 



*In an interview with The Creative Independent, you said:*



*People often say they feel like they know me, but I know they don’t—they’re just responding to an effect created by artifice. Which isn’t to say there isn’t real intimacy created—there is. It just means that they’re responding to a sort of “use artifice to strip artifice of artifice” loop.*



*What has it been like to meet your own page-dwelling mentors, your "many-gendered mothers of the heart"? Do these encounters change their work for you? Do you feel like matching up voices with real embodied people is anticlimactic, or conducive to more meaningful relationships on or off the page? *



* *



I think I’ve been around long enough to no longer ever feel “disappointed” or some such by meeting anyone I admire in person. I usually feel just fascinated and grateful. I’ve noticed that my students often report feelings of anticlimax on this account, maybe because they still expect a certain one-to-one relation between the written word / art practice and the human being. I don’t expect that. I can remember a whole class of poetry students being so disappointed after we read John Ashbery and then I took them to an Ashbery reading – they were like, “he’s not a good reader of his own work!” I was like, there is no good or bad reading of his own work; this isn’t a theater audition. It’s JOHN ASHBERY!!



 



*You told* Poetry Foundation* that you're (understandably) getting tired of the phrase "personal writing." Any thoughts on how we could recontextualize or change how we talk about the genre it refers to?*



 



Not really. I don’t think personal writing refers to a genre. I’d like it if people gave up this fetish of “she seems to be speaking just for herself, but the miracle is that it ends up a universal truth!” – on the one hand, good writing always does that, and on the other, trying to get to some universal transcendent shared experience or feeling is part of the problem anyway.



 



*As a college lit mag, much of what we publish is juvenilia our writers may eventually disown. How much of yourself do you recognize in work from, say, your early twenties? Do you feel a sense of contiguity with your younger voice? Or is the "I" in those pieces a discrete individual, distinct from your present "I"? *



 



O I recognize all of it. My ‘I’ has always been the same ‘I.’ Mostly I’m amazed that I had the chutzpah to think that my innermost musings and language experiments were worth publishing as soon as I’d written them. But I’m glad I did – because without that kind of chutzpah, you probably won’t go very far as a writer.



 



*Can young writers (or older writers!) have too much chutzpah? Moreover, I have the sense that eventually we all start to develop grumpy language-foreclosing super-egos. Do you have one? If so, how do you negotiate with it? *



 



I’m not concerned about too much chutzpah. If you’re a self-important jerk or your politics are rotten, all that will come out in your writing and personhood eventually, so if you care about that, you should engage in some good old-fashioned self-examination and transformation. And you’ve got to do your work – just because you wrote some cute tweets doesn’t mean you should or will sail into a fat book contract. But chutzpah is necessary for writing, and I don’t worry too much about grumpy language-foreclosing super egos. Just make sure you give yourself the time and space somewhere to express yourself without fear of what readers will think. You can worry about that later.