It would be wrong to claim that I first met the German artist Hito Steyerl on such-and-such day, in such-and-such city, where the weather was bright or blustery, and that she arrived suitably dressed for this season or the next. It is more accurate to say that she simply appeared while I was waiting in the atrium of the Communist Party court, under a spectacular red banner from which the faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin bore down on me. One minute I was alone, and the next she was there—all yellow and smooth, except for the thick black cubes of her hands and her large, impassive face. Four black cats trailed her, in place of her shadow. “I spawned a lot of them, so they have multiplied,” she murmured. Suddenly, a kitten wobbled out from between her legs. “I made a baby!” she cried. When I tried to balance a puffer fish on my own blocky hand to feed the kitten, I pressed the wrong button, and kicked it instead.
Kicking kittens is, I believe, usually discouraged, but in Minecraft, the sandbox video game in which players extract raw materials—water, wood, sugarcane, coal ore, gold, lapis lazuli—and use them to craft three-dimensional Legolands, the stakes of violence seem lower. The game is “a very good metaphor for how platforms really work,” Steyerl told me. Platforms seduce their users into performing the unpaid work of content creation—uploading the texts, photographs, videos, and music that are the raw material of the digital world—while mining their metadata to create new markets for corporate and military surveillance. “Many of the other platforms are quite devious,” she said. “We don’t really know whether your face is being used to train facial-recognition algorithms or something like that.” In the digital economy, free labor tenders a self-replenishing vein of gold for capital’s pickaxe.
At fifty-six, Steyerl, who is of German and Japanese descent, has become one of the most revered figures in the mercurial world of contemporary art, with solo exhibitions at the Armory, in New York City, the Serpentine Galleries, in London, and the Academy of Arts, in Berlin. Her work is animated by an anti-capitalist, anti-surveillance sensibility cut by a measured and mischievous sense of humor. Among her best-known pieces is “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File,” in which, across five satirical lessons, she hides behind placards, places boxes over her head, and smears a green goo on her face that allows her to blend in with the satellite-resolution targets shown on the green screen behind her. Her silent physical comedy is counterpoised by a creaking animatronic voice that announces, “Today, most important things want to remain invisible. Love is invisible. War is invisible. Capital is invisible.” And although people can make themselves invisible for laughs, as Steyerl does, they can also be made invisible by the state and by capital—“annihilated, eliminated, eradicated, deleted, dispensed with, filtered, processed, selected, separated, wiped out,” the voice observes, while the camera moves through an architectural rendering of a pristine, unpeopled luxury living space.
In 2017, Steyerl became the first woman to top the ArtReview Power 100 list, for her “political statement-making and formal experimentation.” It is easy to imagine how squeamish she must have felt upon receiving this honor. In the past decade, she has created several large-scale installations, such as “Is the Museum a Battlefield?” and “Drill,” that stage savage, if also playful, critiques of the museums, galleries, banks, universities, and governments that have transformed contemporary art into “a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality.” In September, when the German government attempted to award her the Federal Cross of Merit, she declined, denouncing the country’s failure to support the arts during lockdown. Steyerl harbors no romantic illusions about her work. “I never got into being an artist,” she proclaimed, a rare hint of pride in her voice. “For me, it’s always more research, storytelling, maybe technological experimental. It’s more like a laboratory setting.”
The pandemic was her latest laboratory. One of the biggest shows of her career, a retrospective titled “Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive,” opened at the K21 museum, in Düsseldorf, in September, 2020, but quickly pivoted online when Germany lurched into its second lockdown. So did Steyerl’s teaching at the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin, where she has held a distinguished professorship since 2010. Turning to Minecraft and Zoom during the pandemic was “like being stuck between a rock and a hard place,” she said with a sigh. She and her graduate assistant Matthias Planitzer started to create different worlds—or “builds,” in gamespeak—to stage performances and host exhibitions. It was Planitzer whom Steyerl dispatched to her studio to teach me how to move my Minecraft avatar while we talked over Zoom. Her background displayed a hailstorm of cats with rainbow coats, who, as they fell, streaked the screen like the iridescent tails of a thousand comets.
The Communist Party court, where our avatars first encountered each other, was built for a class production of Bertolt Brecht’s controversial 1930 play “The Decision,” a Lehrstücke (teaching play). The play follows four Communist agitators on their return to Moscow from China, where they have tried to start a revolution, donning masks and assuming covert identities to organize workers illegally. Before a central committee, they confess to having killed a Young Comrade—a revolutionary so overwhelmed with pity and compassion for the workers that he tore off his mask and declared his allegiance to the Communist Party. The Agitators shoot him and throw him into a lime pit, where his face is burned beyond recognition. In the play’s chilling final scene, the central committee exonerates the Agitators for the murder, as their commitment to help “disseminate the ABC of Communism” excuses their actions.
Steyerl’s class’s staging of “The Decision” in Minecraft doubles down on the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung, or estrangement: the literary technique of removing an event or character from its familiar context to jar the viewer into a new alertness about the political conditions under which art is made. The estrangement Brecht produced with masks and tableaux is amplified in a virtual setting, where the actors are crude craft-block figures and their voices have been dialled in through Zoom. The idea of burning the Young Comrade’s face is laughable; his avatar has no distinctive face. The idea of killing him is nonsense; the avatar was never alive in the first place. At the end of the class’s Lehrstücke, when the Agitators await their verdict, we arrive at the classic Brechtian twist of a shocking realization: Are any of us truly alive in the digital world? Can you consider yourself alive when your actions, your emotions, and your language are shaped by vast corporate entities whose only function is to generate capital?
Yet replacing an actor with an avatar struck me as oddly charming, just as the worlds our avatars moved in were enchanting—beautiful, even. I followed Steyerl and her cats to the build’s central teleportation station, a gray platform surrounded by delicately latticed columns and low-hanging white slabs, as if God had sculpted his densest clouds into Tetris pieces. Nearby was a replica of the World Clock, which has towered over Alexanderplatz since 1969. In the sky, a screen played the Rickroll meme. Steyerl led me to a concrete wall with five wooden levers. Each lever would teleport us to a different world: a forest sanctuary, a dream garden, a castle in the sky, an Andalusian farm—“You can ride the pigs,” Planitzer promised me—and the UdK campus.
We teleported first to the castle in the sky, where I promptly fell off—Steyerl taught me how to fly by pressing the space bar repeatedly—then to the forest sanctuary, where we arrived on the edge of a dark-blue river, and each boarded our own wooden rowboat. Steyerl’s got stuck in the current. “Can I try to get into your boat?” she asked. She leapt and fell in the water. “I’ll just fly,” she assured me. She had not been here for weeks, and seemed truly astonished by how the sanctuary now teemed with life: pink parrots, giant squid. She darted through the cherry trees crowding the banks—“Oh, the cherries are blossoming! That’s very nice!”—and began her slow ascent, past the weeping willows and the camphor laurels, to the top of a Japanese pagoda that slowly entered the frame the higher she soared above it. My fingers had forgotten how to fly, so I entered the pagoda and stumbled up one ladder after another to reach her. From there, the view of the lush, unconquered forest was so majestic that one could almost ignore the pixelation of the horizon.
