This review by Alexander Hartley has now been published in Critical AI at this link https://doi.org/10.1215/2834703X-12347672; an extract is pasted in below. If your institution lacks access to Critical AI please encourage them to subscribe. If you are an independent scholar please write to criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
EXTRACT:
For two decades the artist and critic Hito Steyerl has—in a voice alternately sly and reproving, ironic and excoriating—informed us about the digitally mediated futures that we are daily being sold. Her 2013 film How Not to Be Seen probed the culture and technology of surveillance images, presenting “resolution targets” both in a green-screen studio (to calibrate cameras) and a US Air Force base on the West Coast (to calibrate bombers). In 2017 came the collection Duty Free Art, whose essays considered the complicity of art markets and institutions in warfighting, tax evasion, and battlefield plunder. But it is an earlier very short film, STRIKE, that capsulized Steyerl’s preoccupations with labor, image-making, and digital culture as they have now manifested in Medium Hot. In STRIKE, from 2010, Steyerl places a chisel against a Samsung television, gives it a brisk tap with a hammer, and walks off,…