>Hito Steyerl and the Art of the Essay

Hito Steyerl and the Art of the Essay

Niamh Corcoran
Trinity College Dublin
Department of History of Art and Architecture
2016
BA

Subject: Video, Performance art, digital technology
Country: Germany
Century: 21st Century

10,000 words

Over the course of three chapters this dissertation will examine the use and acaptability of the essay form in Hito Steyerl’s work. She has a fluid, often contradictory investigative voice. This manifests itself in her lectures and videos as means of focusing on issues of knowledge production, personal and collective memory, imaging making and digital technology, It is hoped to demonstrate that these processes feed into the term-coined by Steyerl -’circulationism’ which is in turn indicative of Steyerl’s whole working method. In doing so it is hoped to argue that the format of the essay is not an objective entity which obeys a linear logic of continuity ending in a definitive conclusion, but rather that the order in which the arguments and thoughts are presented in an essay are self consciously contingent.

Irish Georgian Society

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Hito Steyerl and the Art of the Essay