“They are after-images, burnt into screens and retinas long after their source has been erased. They perform a psychoanalysis without either psyche or analysis for an age of automation in which production is augmented by wholesale fabrication. Mean images are social dreams without sleep, processing society’s irrational functions to their logical conclusions. They are documentary expressions of society’s views of itself, seized through the chaotic capture and large-scale kidnapping of data. And they rely on vast infrastructures of polluting hardware and menial and disenfranchised labour, exploiting political conflict as a resource.”
Hito Steyerl @hito on “mean images” in New Left Review: https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii140/articles/hito-steyerl-mean-images
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