Becoming Invisible/ Against Visibility: Hito Steyerl’s How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File

This thesis examines German filmmaker and theorist Hito Steyerl's short film How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational. MOV File (2013) through its lessons on invisibility. Steyerl's film sets up invisibility as a political and social method to escape the hypervisualization and hyper-representation of people as mediated through surveillance technologies. I argue that subverting one's image can be considered a political act against capture technologies. Such an act allows for potentialities to emerge, enabling individuals to understand how visibility operates in this technological realm. Steyerl's film shows how the conditions of electronic surveillance continue to metamorphosize into more elusive and harder to distinguish forms, and invisibility can become a political strategy in which to respond and protect oneself. Becoming invisible means manipulating visibility through tactics of resolution, pixelation, camouflage, and disguise, altering how image-capture technologies read an image. Infiltrating and subverting the systems of surveillance is a model of political action that is necessary to combat the everchanging conditions of digital surveillance.