What is the function of art in the era of digital globalization? In Duty Free Art, filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl wonders how we can appreciate, or even make art in the present age. What can we do when arms manufacturers sponsor museums and some of the world’s most valuable artworks are used as a fictional currency in a global futures market that has nothing to do with the works themselves? Can we distinguish between creativity and the digital white noise that bombards our everyday lives? Exploring artifacts as diverse as video games, Wikileaks files, the proliferation of spam, and political actions, she exposes the paradoxes within globalization, political economies, visual culture, and the status of art production.
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Hito Steyerl. Duty Free Art
Duty Free Art
Contents
1. A Tank on a Pedestal
2. How to Kill People: A Problem of Design
3. The Terror of Total Dasein: Economies of Presence in the Art Field
4. Proxy Politics: Signal and Noise
5. A Sea of Data: Apophenia and Pattern (Mis-)Recognition
6. Medya: Autonomy of Images
7. Duty Free Art
8. Digital Debris
9. Her Name Was Esperanza
10. International Disco Latin
11. Is the Internet Dead?
12. Why Games, Or, Can Art Workers Think?
13. Let’s Talk about Fascism
14. If You Don’t Have Bread, Eat Art! Contemporary Art and Derivative Fascisms
15. Ripping Reality: Blind Spots and Wrecked Data in 3D
Acknowledgments
Notes
Отрывок из книги
Hito Steyerl
2.How to Kill People: A Problem of Design
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The answer is no. Let’s come back to Edge of Tomorrow to see how it solves the problem of the loop. It offers an unexpected solution to the problem of stasis, to escaping from history-as-repetition. The movie is based on the novel All You Need Is Kill by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, which built a narrative out of the experience of hitting the reset button on a video-game console. So it is no coincidence that the movie narrates the impasse of a gamer being stuck, unable to complete a given level. But gamers are used to this: it is their mission to get to the next level. A gamer is not a reenactor. She doesn’t derive pleasure from having to play the same level over and over again or endlessly reenacting historical models. She will go online and look up a forum to figure out how to beat the level and move on. In gaming (most games at least) there is an exit for each level, each repeated sequence, each loop. Most likely there is a weapon or a tool hidden in some cupboard, and this can be used to vanquish whatever enemy and complete the level. Edge of Tomorrow not only maintains that there is a tomorrow, but that we are positioned at its edge, that it is possible to complete the level and to break free from the loop. Gaming can evolve into playing. And here, the ambiguity of “play” is helpful. On the one hand, play is about rules, which must be mastered if one is to proceed. On the other, play is also about the improvised creation of new, common rules. So reenactment is scrapped in favor of gaming moving towards play, which may or may not be another form of acting.
What does all this mean for the museum? First of all, one could say that history only exists if there is a tomorrow—if tanks remain locked up within historical collections and time moves on. The future only happens if history doesn’t occupy and invade the present. The museum must render the tank useless upon entry, the way old cannons are filled with cement before being displayed in parks. Otherwise, the museum becomes an instrument for prolonging stasis by preserving the tyranny of a partial, partisan history, which also turns out to be a great business opportunity.
