The 9th Biannual Surveillance Studies Network Conference

Description

Conference presentation: A Sense of Ambient Entrapment in Hito Steyerl's Factory of the Sun

This paper investigates how artworks may reflect, react to, and produce the way we see and feel surveillance now in ways comparable to what Raymond Williams once termed ‘structures of feeling’. Through a reading of Hito Steyerl’s immersive video installation environment Factory of the Sun (2015), the paper proposes that the artwork generates an affective experience of surveillance which can be identified as a sense of ambient entrapment. Inside the dark installation space, visitors are immersed in a blue LED grid environment and encouraged to recline in beach chairs facing a large screen. What is perceptible as time passes inside Factory of the Sun, the paper argues, is a vague, yet pervasive feeling of a controlled environment saturated by surveillance and exploitation, where machine perception and algorithmic processes are hard at work. The sense of ambient entrapment produced by the artwork is a vague sense of something working and conditioning in the background, of technologies extracting and exploiting personal data, while we at the same time desire and feel the lure of the said technologies and devices. The paper concludes that we should turn to contemporary art as sites of knowledge of the affective experience of surveillance of the present moment.

Period	2022 Jun 2
Event type	Conference
Location	Rotterdam, NetherlandsShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International