Hito Steyerl on why NFTs and AI image generators are really just “onboarding tools” for tech conglomerates

I understand that you do not readily describe yourself as an artist. Why?

There is no real reason to do so. I don’t mind if someone wants to call me an artist, but this wouldn’t be the first description that comes to mind when it comes to what I do.

“Filmmaker” is obviously more appropriate – documentary is a basic genre for you. Can you tell us a little about your relationship with filmmaking?

That is my basic practice and it has never completely disappeared. This is where I start, from an intimate relationship with film history. I just don’t have the same relationship to art history.

How is it then that your work ended up in the art world?

The documentary film industry had mainly turned to travelogues and food porn. IIf you wanted to do content-based documentary or even socially minded documentary, that was just the industry was not there. So somehow—I think this was more or less post-Documenta 10 with Catherine David—there was a certain renewed interest in documentary forms in the art field, and I kind of slipped in with that.

What is your relationship with ideas of evidence and truth when you also work with elements of poetry, surrealism and sci-fi in your films? I’m curious about your thoughts on how truth works in a documentary context in 2023 – in a world where there’s so much flattening of any sense of a single truth about anything.

I don’t think truth is something that can be fully captured by any kind of media. Hannah Arendt once said that you could capture the “moment of truth”. So this is more or less what I hope to weave in with other elements. But the full truth is never available for any documentary rendering, because it simply does not have enough dimensions and perspectives.

There is also the “fake news” angle, which says that nothing at all is true, or that all things are equally untrue, which are also not facts. You have things that are closer to reality or things that have happened historically, and you have things that have nothing to do with [reality] anyway, and there is a big difference.

Your exhibit “This is the Future” opened at the Portland Art Museum last week. Alongside a work of the same name, there is also a video installation called Power plant. In terms of truth, both works are speculative, presenting technologies that do not yet exist. I saw them in Berlin in 2019 after they were presented at the Venice Biennale, a pre-pandemic moment that feels long ago. It’s interesting that they’re showing up again because there’s something eerie about the AI ​​you present in these technologies, especially given that in the last six months we’ve seen five different AI bots emerge, from Midjourney to ChatGPT. I wonder how you are re-reading your work right now given this development.

I’m mainly re-reading it through the lens of the earthquake and Turkey and Syria, because the story I’m telling is partly set in a Turkish prison, and everyone who worked on that film has been massively affected by the earthquake right now.

On the other hand, there may be a reason why the work is still displayed even though the technology is outdated. This particular algorithm, which is a next-frame prediction algorithm, was so difficult to work with and such a pain that no one really used it. There, there are not many images in the art field that used this specific visual effect. It’s not as ubiquitous as, say, the DALL-E aesthetic or certain types of StyleGAN aesthetics, which were very widely used – in the case of DALL-E to the point of nausea. I think it’s a style it is already ruled out for artists almost because it’s just completely overused.

I think what’s also quite interesting about OpenAI is the sudden public panic that has occurred since it went mainstream. I know artists like yourself have been thinking about these technologies for a long time. It really seems like it all became a mainstream concern in the last two months. I wonder what you mean about the anxiety.

IIt’s a great PR move from the big companies. The more people talk and obsess about it, the more the companies make. To me, these renderings – I call them “statistical renderings” – they’re the 2022 NFTs, right?

In 2021 we had NFTs. In 2022 we have statistical renderings. [These companies] on board people into new technological environments; with NFTs, people learned to use crypto wallets, ledgers, and metamasks, and learn all this jargon. Wwith the renderings we have largely the same phenomenon.

They’re integrating tools into these huge cloud infrastructures that companies like Microsoft are now rolling out, backed by these large-scale computing facilities like Azure, for example. Ccompanies try to establish a kind of quasi-monopoly over these services and try to draw people to buy into their services or become addicted to them. That is the stage we are at. The renderings are basically the icing on the cake technological dependence.

It operates with this myth that it is participatory. I can just log into ChatGPT and feel like I have agency in this technological moment. But one wonders how futile this will quickly become when they close the doors again, and it becomes obviously hegemonic, and content is just dictated to us. I know you’ve talked about this in other cases, about the idea of ​​a changing audience in the face of these emerging machines.

Tthe public is captured. Again, it was already trapped in Web 2.0 in these app silos, on social media. And web3, which is now being realized through all these machine learning applications, will basically create different silos, which are more software-based. So you won’t be able to get any edition of the Adobe suite, let’s say, without integrated machine learning services for which you have to pay extra rent. Basically, you will be forced to subscribe to many different services, which you don’t really need, but you have to pay for—I think that’s the business model more or less.

Have you explored them for your own work?

I played with them, but then I started asking myself, “Wow, what the hell am I doing here? Do I really want these renderings?” Most of them look pretty miserable. So what I actually do is think about them a lot and try to describe the images themselves. And thinking of the beginnings of statistics as rooted in eugenics and obsession with breeding and survival of the fittest.

I wonder how images as such will change when it becomes thoroughly statistical instead of representational, when you don’t need more external input. You just need pretty much all of your data, which is somehow organized in a statistical, latent space. So how does the relationship with reality change? How does the relationship to truth change? How are these tools also linked to a huge infrastructure, which produces a lot of carbon emissions and actively warms the climate? All these are questions I am trying to think through now.

It is interesting to think of a point where there is no longer an external world that needs to be entered. To go back to something you said earlier, when I was talking about the earthquake, it made me think of something you said in a recent interview about obesity in the cybersphere. The fact is that online is not a given, it is not going to be everyone’s reality. Can you expand?

Related to the earlier part of your question – no, these renderings are not related to reality. They relate to the totality of crap on the web. So that’s basically their field of reference, right? Just scrap everything online and that’s your new reality. And that is the field of reference for these statistical renderings.

And so, in recent months, I have seen the reality of power outages in many different places. We cannot take energy supply for granted, nor can we take the internet for granted. There are many different situations where these technologies fail or are blocked, such as by autocracies, in riots, or by the fact that there is destruction of some kind.

ONE the reality where the internet is not available is already here. You know, even in fairly mundane situations, you can’t imagine how many times conversations with people in the US have failed because there had been a weather event and the internet had gone down. There are so many reasons why the digital environment we’ve all been trained to take for granted, as our immediate reality is suddenly no longer available.

To enjoy the rest of this interview, tune in to Art Angle.

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