Hito Steyerl

What is a "thing language"? A thing conversation consists of showing the other person who you’re talking to the thing you’re talking about, as it is.

What are some of the "things" that make up the transnational language of documentary? Commerce, general communication, “standard narratives” that are “independent of national or cultural difference”.

How does the "language of documentary" actually make differentiating between real and not real more complicated to figure out? Because now, documentary is able to “conjure up the most spectacular aspects of the language of things and amplifies their power.” They are able to exaggerate one type of event while undermining the rest of the facts. Documentaries today are able to be altered in a way that the past events are conjoined with the present in order to create that visual “thing” language, past and present superimposed over one another to create a new, altered form of visualized documentation. The flow of events in documentaries, mashup of the chain of events timeline, and manipulation of visualized photos, videos, and graphics all make it harder to decipher. “The more extraordinary, catastrophic and eccentric things behave within them, the more everything can stay the same”.

How does the language or tropes of documentary orientate us and isolate us at the same time? “Stereotypical assumptions about so-called cultures can catalyse dangerous social dynamics and align reality step by step to it’s caricatures”. In times of “presumed” conflicts between people, cultures, and countries, documentary is able to play an active role in determining the output, the general face, of the subject in it’s documentary. By pinning the subject of a documentary with it’s conflict, the documentarist is already setting the two subjects at a rift. While it helps to see the rift and understand the events leading up to it, setting this type of material barrier in videos, pictures, words, and recollections can marginalize the subject topic into something basic and lacking of better understanding (because it is so concentrated on the “rift”).

What do you understand a non public public sphere to be? I would consider a non public public sphere to be somewhere that you have your own jurisdiction in within a larger jurisdiction that you have to answer to, perhaps your own office space in a larger space of offices, a doctors office, a closed-classroom, a voting area, etc.

What is a private public sphere? What technologies made a private public sphere possible? Give an example of a private public sphere. A private public sphere is something that is public but is only made available to only certain groups of the public. Technologies that make a private public sphere possible (like a gated community) is financed security systems, safe housing infrastructures, cable channels with privatized shows and movies, subscriptions to media outputs, etc.

What are the different ways that documentaries as distributed to the public in the present day? Documentaries are distributed through many things today. They can be shown in forms of new media and technologies, showcased through exhibitions in museums, or displayed in a chosen public scenery. They can be published through certain online channels, through cable networks, on public/private television or radio. They are sometimes made available online through public sites such as Youtube and Vimeo. Some are distributed through institutions such as school or certain workplaces.

How does privatization lead to commercialism? (Think about: Compare PBS now to when you were a kid.) Privatization, while perhaps gets a better sourcing for finances, is also a controlling force in the sourcing of commercialism. In the case of PBS, which is a publically-funded broadcast that garners support from their audiences, is heading towards a direction of privatization in the form of commercials. Some commercials that i’ve seen in the form of sponsors has been Boeing, an aircraft manufacturer company. I can imagine if companies would begin to take stocks in PBS, that the broadcasting would change dramatically. Since the station would be no longer funded by the public, the channel would need to make money through commercial advertisements. This would change uninterrupted showtimes, and possibly even cut programs to make room for the advertisements.

Do a Google search on Hito Steyerl. Look at at least 3 videos so you can get a idea of what she does.

What connections did you see between her work online and what you just read? Please be specific when referring to one of her artworks.

I watched three of Hito’s works. They were called “Hito Steyerl about Red Alert”, “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV file”, and “November, 2004”.

In “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV file”, there were many connections to what she said in the article. She sprung the notions of public and private, of being visible and invisible. In this she was demonstrating how easy it is for a subject or information to be cut from a scenario, using effects such as green paint to merge herself with the green screen, or dictating through narration that she was going “off-screen”, to which she shows herself physically next to the green screen, after which she evaporates from the side of it. She also used a video within the project that demonstrated a prototype for a developmental secured community, with gates and shopping malls and escalators and everything. She talked about how you can become “invisible” by living in one of these protected environments, perhaps alluding to the fact that security and omission of the outside world makes people comfortable living in their own bubbles and not having to question what is what. After she gives that example of how to become visible, she makes other comedic allusions to what this might mean, like “being a woman over the age of 50” with a very monotone, robotic voice. Through her alteration and exposure of what the audience was made to see versus what was happening off-screen, the irony was not lost. This further upheld the article by stating that documentary is something that can be very real or not real, or something in between that’s alluding to the sublime but has tangible pieces of evidence to point to it’s infinite possibilities. But nonetheless, it made me think of how little people understand what actually makes a documentary, the whole piece of evidence, instead of what is just in-front of the screen.

The other one I watched was called November. It was about many things, but mainly started on Hito’s friend Andrea Wolf, who became a martyr symbol for the Kurdish people of Turkey when she was executed by the Turkish government. It was very moving, definitely one of my favorite pieces ever.