Hito Steyerl (born 1966 in Munich) is a German filmmaker, visual artist and writer based in Berlin. She works through video essays, immersive installations, lectures, digital environments and critical writing. Her research examines how images circulate within systems of technology, finance, surveillance and military power. For Steyerl, an image never remains a simple representation. It participates in the reality that it appears to document.
Her influential 2009 essay In Defense of the Poor Image examined low-resolution copies that travel rapidly across digital networks. How Not to Be Seen uses satire to connect image resolution, invisibility and automated surveillance. Factory of the Sun combines gaming, forced labour and financial control inside a glowing fictional world. Across these projects, images become tools that can reveal, entertain, monitor, exploit or erase.
This archive gathers articles, exhibitions and critical views on Steyerl’s art and writing. Her work connects visual culture with war, migration, artificial intelligence, institutional power and the global art market. She shows that greater visibility does not automatically create knowledge, freedom or political agency. Images can expose violence while also turning it into content for endless consumption. Steyerl asks how we might resist the systems that produce our reality while shaping the images through which we understand it.
Immersion and interaction: the 1990s helped define digital art as an experiential space. Post-Internet Art: When the Internet Stopped Being Somewhere Else Post-Internet Art sounds like a historical contradiction because we are clearly
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