In the annual Power 100 of the international art magazine Art Review, Hito Steyerl is number 1. She is named one of the most influential artists of the moment. In Robot Love, the first artwork after Enter Aliveness, the magic door of Adams Ponnis (see blog of July 13) is Hell Yeah We Fuck Die by Hito Steyerl. That is an unambiguous arrival at Robot Love. Those five words turn out to be the five most used English words in songs titles. The videos that are shown around these five words show images of high-tech companies that test robots for their balance and endurance. That, as we can see in Robot Love, is not always as desired or planned. The art work confronts us with anthropomorphism, our ability to attribute human characteristics to animals and in this case to robots, with which we make them more human than they actually are.
Hito Steyerl. Hell Yeah We Fuck Die
In the Robots Today video, as part of this work, we see images of the Kurdish ghost town of Cizre on the border with Syria. This city has often been the battlefield during tensions between the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish government. It is also the birthplace of the scholar Ismail al-Jazari who already wrote an extensive reference work in the 13th century on mechanical devices and the innovations of that time. During the fragments, questions are raised to Siri, Apple’s chatbot, about the role that computer technology plays in contemporary wars. In her Benno Premsela Lecture How To Kill People at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam in 2016, Steyerl referred to designer George Nelson who, in his 1963 film with the same title, claims that killing is a matter of design, next to fashion and homemaking. Nelson states that design is crucial in improving both form and function of weapons. It deploys aesthetics to improve lethal technology. A distopic image next to that of robots that are clumsy and apparently not up to par. In short, not really a promising future. Steyerl takes it a step further by using the words Hell Yeah We Fuck Die as light beacons and brings us back to human reality with a smack in the face. Above all, we should not think that we can reverse our trivial human behaviour and the inevitable end of life through the use of robots and AI. So that you know…
