Sufferers on the screen

The Wretched of the Screen

🖥 A leading artist of the digital age, a female artist who topped the art power list, has had her representative work translated into Chinese for the first time🖥 With sharp insight, she pierces the black hole of contemporary fragmented images. "Weak images are the victims of our contemporary screens, the dregs of audiovisual production, the garbage washed ashore on the shores of the digital economy. Their existence testifies to the violent dislocation, displacement, and substitution of images—the accelerated production and circulation of images in the vicious cycle of audiovisual capitalism. Weak images are dragged across the globe as commodities or their crude simulacra, as gifts or as bounties. They spread joy or death threats, conspiracy theories or contraband, resistance or repression. Weak images can show the rare, the obvious, the unimaginable—assuming we can still decipher the image content."
In the second decade of the 21st century, post-bourgeois decay finally materialized in the form of an economic black hole. A drainage pump began to devour and destroy the products of two centuries of hard work and collective wisdom, transforming the concrete realities of social civilization into abstractions—numbers, algorithms, precise brutality, and the accumulation of nothingness. History has been replaced by an endless, fluid recombination of fragmented images. However, a new form of research is emerging, as artists seek a common starting point for understanding these changes.

Hito Steyerl is undoubtedly one of the most representative artists and writers of this trend. This book is a representative collection of Steyerl's research papers, focusing on the powerful image politics that the author has steadily advanced in his art and writing. It includes many of his landmark articles published in recent years, including the masterpieces "Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective," "In Defense of Weak Images," and "Are Museums Factories?" These unique and insightful texts reflect the author's thoughts on digital imaging, museums, cinema, and even spam, as well as his exploration and questioning of social issues and human predicaments, constantly pushing the boundaries of traditional art criticism.
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Steyerl’s art is incredibly rich, meticulous, and deeply instructive… In Steyerl’s work, you can never tell fact from fiction, where the joke ends and the serious begins, what is real and what is a lie.
—The Guardian
The highest duty of theory and art is to grasp and illuminate their own times. In our own time, Steyerl is unrivalled. Her explorations of the fate of images and words in an age of global circulation are always focused and precise, yet also adventurous, unexpected, and captivating.
—Boris Groys (philosopher and art critic)
Steyerl refuses to be wedded to a single philosophy or insist on her own opinions. Instead, the art we see—her videos—is an ongoing act of moral reflection.
—The New York Times

2024-03-30

上海人民出版社

New Thinking

225

9787208187467