This is the future: Hito Steyerl

In September 2019 a nearly 50-year-old man collapsed on the floor of the Amazon warehouse where he worked, just outside Columbus, OH. The Guardian reported that he lay there for 20 minutes in cardiac arrest before receiving medical attention. Other employees were instructed to continue working as usual, methodically placing items in boxes as timers counted down the minutes at each station.

In Hito Steyerl’s installation (2016), part of her Art Gallery of Ontario survey , a robot is shaky on its legs, and quickly seems to suffer some misalignment, eventually collapsing on the floor. Another is pelted with boxes while walking. They (1985), she refers to the uneasy boundary between organism and machine as a “border war.” Here, Steyerl places the cyborg in this war zone, showing us how readily these military technologies manifest themselves in our workplaces, homes, and playgrounds. The entire installation is constructed as a kind of parkour terrain for viewers, set to hypnotic electronic music. Embedded in it is (2016), a one-channel video set in southeastern Turkey in the city of Diyarbakir, a focal site in the struggle for Kurdish independence. In the video, we learn that Diyarbakir was also the home of 12th-century polymath Ismail al-Jazari, who developed foundations of robotics engineering. Today, we know that some robots kill (or are at least trained to). Steyerl’s video shows footage of men dancing in the ruins of the city, which was mostly destroyed by the Turkish military in 2016. The accompanying narration consists of dialogue with Siri, the friendly virtual assistant that Apple has planted in its mobile phones.