Hacking the Operating System of Art: New Forms of Resistance to Labor in Hito Steyerl’s Strike (2010)
Abstract
The following essay focuses on the digital realm to discuss labor in the New Economy, investigating how subjectivity is simultaneously shaped and exploited through technology and its surveillance mechanisms. To do so, I reconsider Hito Steyerl’s work Strike (2010) as a call to subvert the biopolitical power of information technologies. My analysis of Steyerl’s piece seeks to reveal the social and material implications of technology, the unpaid labor that underpins the Internet, and the system of domination exercised by surveillance capitalism, which profits from data traffic and behavior modification. Against this, I suggest that Strike (2010) proposes a reappropriation of the machine as a form of resistance. Steyerl’s video serves as a starting point to trace interventionist artistic practices that, through tactical means and hacking, have been able to reverse the surveillance mechanisms of the network, revealing their potential as gestures of dissidence within an increasingly computerized art world.
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