Hito Steyerl is considered one of the most pivotal artists working today, known for turning video, data, and digital culture into sharp, poetic critiques of power.
Her artworks reveal what’s hiding underneath our skin.
Surveillance systems, global inequalities, militarised technologies, and the invisible architectures that shape our daily lives.
What makes Hito Steyerl symbolism so distinctive is her use of symbolism. Her films, installations, and essays operate like layered metaphors, each frame containing signals about how information, bodies, and realities are controlled. To understand Steyerl is to understand how symbols behave in the age of algorithms.
The Broken Image: Pixelation as Truth-Telling
One of Steyerl’s most iconic symbols is the low-resolution or degraded image, which functions as a layered commentary on truth, power, and digital circulation. Blurry, pixelated visuals disrupt the assumption that clarity equals authenticity, revealing how certainty collapses when images lose definition.
Their compressed, censored, or distorted forms reflect information under pressure, echoing geopolitical forces that shape what we are allowed to see. Steyerl’s notion of the “poor image” captures how cultural ideas circulate when stripped of value by capitalism, relegated to the bottom of the data hierarchy. In her work, the glitch is never accidental but a deliberate political gesture, exposing the hidden structures that degrade not just images, but the realities they represent.
The collapse of certainty: Blurry and pixelated images challenge the idea that clarity equals truth. Compression, censorship, loss, and distortion reflect geopolitical realities. Life at the bottom of the data hierarchy: Steyerl’s concept of “the poor image” symbolises how ideas circulate when stripped of value by capitalism.
Screens and Surveillance: Seeing and Being Seen
Screens are never neutral in Hito Steyerl’s work—they’re potent symbols of power, invisibly shaping the way we exist. In her seminal 2013 video essay How Not to Be Seen: A F**king Didactic Educational .MOV File, and later in her 2015 installation Factory of the Sun, she uses screens to embody surveillance as an ambient force: cameras and digital devices proliferate until their gaze becomes the new natural environment. In these works, she also reveals how war zones and consumer zones have collapsed into one another, as military-grade targeting systems are repurposed into the surveillance architectures of everyday life. Through screens, Steyerl suggests, our experience of reality is never direct and our perceptions are mediated, filtered, and often manipulated.
Crucially, her installations don’t just show this tension; they make us complicit, merging the roles of observer and observed, and reminding us that power doesn’t just watch.
“Art is ratherpowerless…on the levelof what it shows. It ismore powerful on thelevel of how it shows.”
Hito Steyerl
Humor, Absurdity, and the Slapstick of Capitalism
Steyerl often weaves humor and absurdity into her work, using them as unexpected symbolic tools within otherwise heavy explorations of surveillance, capitalism, and technological control. This humor critiques systems so vast and convoluted that satire becomes the only language capable of addressing them.
By laughing at the very machines that monitor us, she exposes the surreal conditions of digital capitalism, where the line between the ridiculous and the oppressive becomes increasingly thin. In this context, humor becomes a method of survival, a way to remain human in a world growing ever more automated and algorithmic.
Alongside this comedic edge, Steyerl frequently employs imagery of flight, falling, and vertical movement, most notably in works like How Not to Be Seen and Factory of the Sun. Verticality in her visual language symbolises power looking down from above, through drones, satellites, and skyscrapers, while falling bodies represent individuals slipping through the cracks of unstable economic and political systems.
Yet within this movement lies the possibility of resistance; escaping gravity becomes a metaphor for pushing against structural constraints. In Steyerl’s symbolic landscape, “up” and “down” are no longer simple directions but deeply political orientations that reflect who holds power and who is subject to its pull.
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Kaikai Kiki: Pop Culture Meets Personal Mythology
Murakami’s characters Kaikai and Kiki blend myth, pop culture, and personal experience in a way that captures complex human and cultural themes. Kaikai represents energy, optimism, and consumer culture, while Kiki is often mischievous, reflecting chaos and unpredictability.
Together, they embody the interplay of innocence and corruption, a recurring motif in Murakami’s work. These figures highlight his skill in symbolic storytelling, transforming commercial motifs into reflections of human psychology and incisive cultural commentary.
Why Symbolism Matters in Contemporary Art
Symbolism plays a crucial role in contemporary art, especially in a world where images circulate faster than ever and meanings are constantly layered, distorted, or contested. Today’s artists use symbolism not simply as decoration or metaphor, but as a strategic tool to navigate the complexities of modern visual culture. Symbols help reveal the invisible forces, technological, political, economic, that shape our daily lives, giving viewers a way to decode the hidden systems that operate behind every screen, platform, and algorithm.
In political and digital art, symbolism becomes even more essential. Artists use symbolic structures to expose power dynamics embedded in surveillance systems, social media platforms, big data, and global networks.
A glitch can symbolise the collapse of truth; a falling body can represent economic precarity; a pixelated screen can stand in for information under pressure. Through these symbolic languages, contemporary art critiques the infrastructures that govern modern life, inviting viewers to see beyond surface-level imagery.
Artist Talk: Hito Steyerl (2019)
Further Reading & Resources
“In Defense of the Poor Image” – Steyerl’s seminal essay on low-resolution images, circulation, and cultural value.
“The Wretched of the Screen” – A collection of her most influential writings on digital culture, representation, and power.
- Hito Steyerl: Power Plants (2019) – Catalog focusing on predictive algorithms, environmental symbolism, and data-driven futures.
Claire Bishop – Radical Museology
Discusses how museums and media environments generate symbolic meaning.
Is Hito Steyerl Controversial?
Some critics argue that Steyerl’s art is intellectually dense and conceptually elite, but maybe they are missing the point. Works like How Not to Be Seen or Liquidity Inc. rely heavily on references to media theory, post-internet art, and complex political economies, which is forever changing.
Can digital installations and glitch aesthetics genuinely influence social change, or do they risk aestheticising suffering and systemic problems? For instance, her exploration of drone surveillance and “the poor image” provokes discussion about whether artistic representation can shift real-world power dynamics, or whether it mainly circulates within the art world itself.
