Hito Steyerl's How Not to be Seen

[blake 3:17]

I'm not at all familiar with this artist's work but am now very curious.

Hito Steyerl's 'How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File'
MICHAEL CONNOR | Fri May 31st, 2013 10:45 a.m.

How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File is the title of Hito Steyerl's new work, included in the Venice Biennale exhibition Il Palazzo Enciclopedico. (It is installed at the far back corner of the Giardino delle Vergini behind the Arsenale; to reach it, Steyerl joked, one must swim two canals and climb a wall).

The video is partly inspired by the photo calibration targets in the California desert, which look like giant pixels in the ground. As described by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, these targets were used in the age of analog aerial photography to test the resolution of airborne cameras, like a kind of optometrist's chart for the ancestors of drones.

Partly shot on location at one of these disused targets, How Not to be Seen begins as an instructional video informing viewers how to remain invisible in an age of image proliferation. Various possible strategies are outlined. One suggestion is to camouflage oneself (to demonstrate, Steyerl smears green paint on her face and is chroma-keyed into invisibility). Another suggested tactic is to be smaller than the size of a pixel. For this demonstration, several people appear on camera wearing pixel-like boxes on their heads. Wearing a box on one's head may seem unpleasant, but in Steyerl's video it seems quite fun, imbued with some of the techno-human spirit of Bauhaus theater costumes.

Full article with pictures!: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2013/may/31/hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen/

[blake 3:17]

Ann Elias

Camouflage and Surrealism

Camouflage in the Twenty-first century is a subject and practice of
military science, biological science, culture and society. All are contexts
in which concealment and deception—the conceptual underpinnings
of camouflage—find physical, visual and psychological expression. Camouflage’s
ever-increasing associations today with war, nature, and everyday life are apparent
in the global escalation of national military patterns, in intensifying interest in the
chemistry and physics of animal behaviours and colours, in expanding cooption of
military aesthetics for street fashion, and in the growing popularity of camouflage
as a conceptual tool for cultural analysis.1
The word itself gradually spread from
French into all languages after the First World War (WWI) when France, the
first nation in military history, established a formal section de camouflage.
2
By
1925, ‘camouflage’ was increasingly used to identify animal concealment and
deception, science’s terminology having become enmeshed with military lingo.
Before the war, however, common biological terms were ‘mimicry’ and ‘concealing
coloration’, indeed the very terms and natural phenomena that were brought to
military attention by naturalists and scientists, including Abbott H. Thayer, for
the development of camouflage in WWI.3

http://wlajournal.com/24_1/pdf/Elias.pdf