The Identity Factory

Filmmaker and writer Hito Steyerl has studied philosophy and documentary filmmaking, written journalism, trained as a camera person, and spent her formative days as a stuntwoman and bouncer. At seventeen she cast close friend Andrea Wolf in her first film—a feminist remake of Russ Meyer’s 1965 action adventure Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, only enacting the fighting scenes with a gang of three vigilante women. Steyerl later used footage from the film for November (2004) and Lovely Andrea (2007) to traverse the real-life tragedy of Wolf’s death in Kurdistan, where she had joined the women’s army of the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party). When Wolf died, Steyerl envisioned her original action film with Wolf as a form of documentary—albeit contrived—about women fighting for justice. The artist’s recirculation of images from the original fiction, interwoven with images of the Turkish government’s repression of the Kurdish struggle for independence, complicates the relationship between fact and fiction.

Photo by Trevor Paglen.

Hito Steyerl’s futuristic films are based on the strangeness of contemporary life: “Real biographies are so much more interesting than anything I can imagine,” says the artist, who studied documentary filmmaking. Screened in an immersive grid of glowing blue LED lights—a kind of Star Trekkian “holodeck” able to materialize a different world in three dimensions—Factory of the Sun (2015) tells the story of workers whose forced dance moves in a motion-capture studio are turned into artificial sunshine. The surreal story is loosely based on an actual YouTube phenomenon— homemade dance videos made by Steyerl’s studio assistant’s brother went viral and were then used as a model for Japanese anime characters—and a news story about an experiment at CERN nuclear research facility in Geneva that claimed to have measured a particle traveling faster than the speed of light. On screen, Steyerl rendered such a reality through “images and avatars” using a montage of YouTube dance videos, drone surveillance footage, video game characters, fictitious news, and real documentation of recent international student uprisings. Modern warfare, corporate culture, and anti-capitalist resistance movements are played out by disembodied characters—avatars, bots, or proxies for human viewers who watch the video from the vantage of reclining beach chairs.

Welcome. This is not a game. Unfortunately it is real. Please go to Zone 1 and begin work. Roll the die in each zone to operate our proprietary Chance Algorithms. Your work will make them better. Complete all three zones and head outside to submit your work for review.

You are the owner of your own destiny. Your decisions matter. Our machines are made of pure sunlight. In our factory everyone dances and the sun is always shining. Please select a dancer which authentically represents you, and move on to Zone 2 for your next assignment.

Our sponsors are some of the most prestigious intelligence services, defense contractors, investment banks, and sovereign wealth funds on the planet. They generously provided some of their products to us for this exercise. Select your favorite object and continue to our replica NSA listening station.

Our factory (powered by enterprise artificial intelligence solutions) learns by forming associations. Please match your dancer to an environment. Your work is valuable to us. When you are finished, proceed along the yellow safety line to the simulated basement to begin your final task for the day.

Thank you for providing us with your valuable data. Your identity has been recorded in our logs and forwarded to our sponsors for analyses. Your work is valuable to us. Please take a screenshot of your work and submit it for review.

Welcome. This is not a game. Unfortunately it is real. 
Please go to Zone 1 and begin work. Roll the die in each zone to operate our proprietary Chance Algorithms. Your work will make them better. Complete all three zones and head outside to submit your work for review.

You are the owner of your own destiny. Your decisions matter. Our machines are made of pure sunlight. In our factory everyone dances and the sun is always shining. Please select a dancer which authentically represents you, and move on to Zone 2 for your next assignment. 

Factory of the Sun will be installed at San José Museum of Art from August 6 2021 to Fall 2022.