Factory of the Sun - Hito Steyerl
In Factory of the Sun, German multimedia artist and digital theorist Hito Steyerl blends a kaleidoscopic array of green-screened actors, architectural renderings, videogame tutorials, fan-made computer animation, and more castoffs from the online realms into a vast mediation on agency, identity, and place in the digital era. Even the physical situation of the installation calls into question our expectations of technology, since the movie is projected on a screen hanging in a lounge chair strewn recreation of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s holodeck (perhaps a nod and critique of the famous “Hamlet On the Holodeck” by Janet Murray). One of the interesting aspects of the work, which at first seems really manically heterogeneous, is as it unfolding, it does an amazing job showing how this slurry of memes, social media, online celebrity, fandom, and digital advertising worlds are all related, and in fact are logical, if weird, outgrowths of a globalized pop-culture economy and data-driven surveillance states.
Creator: Hito Steyerl
Link: https://www.moca.org/exhibition/hito-steyerl-factory-of-the-sun
Connections:
Merce Cunningham - Rainforest
Game Studies Study Buddies - Episode 3 “Hamlet on the Holodeck”
Shoshana Zuboff - The Age of Surveillance Capitalism