wretched_read

1. Cut! Reproduction and Recombination
pp 176-190

2. In Defense of the Poor Image
pp 31-45

3. The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation
pp 160-175

4. A Thing Like You and Me
pp 46-59

6. The Articulation of Protest
pp 77-91

5. Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy
pp 92-101

7. Is a Museum a Factory?
pp 60-76

8. Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life
pp 102-120

9. In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective
pp 12-30

10. Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries
pp 121-137

11. Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy
pp 138-159

The Wretched of the Screen
// Hito Steyerl

*in the order of my reading (summarised + seen via tiktoks)

- 1977 brings the end of the New Left (refers to RAF’s descent into political sectarianism) + the Strangers declare that “heroism is over”
- 1977 also brings David Bowie’s “heroes” = packaged Bowie’s post-gender that is no longer an icon just an image (nothing but an image)
- the hero’s immortality = ability to be xeroxed, recycled
- mario perniola: to give oneself as a thing that feels and to take a thing that feels is the contemporary experience…things and senses are no longer in conflict but have become allies causing the most detached abstraction and the most unrestrained excitement to become indistinguishable
- the image is without expression; it is yet another thing like you and me - a fragment of the real world
- viewing forensics as the torture of objects; things condense power and violence
- participation in the image is a participation in its abuse (via its manipulation, transfer, reduction, etc)
- walter benjamin’s idea of participation involve abject objects are hieroglyphs containing congealed/fragmented social relations
- things understood not as simple objects but as condensation of social forces is a classic materialist take
- recognising things as equals releases its potential energy, agency
- (referring to benjamin’s notion of history as a pile of rubble as seen from the pov of an angel): we are not the angel, we are the rubble
- “Because they (actors) love the pixel, not the hero. The hero is dead. Long live the thing.”

- articulation of protest has 2 levels: 1 = verbalisation, vocalisation, visualisation of the protest = symbols +
2 = shaping the internal organisation of the movement = political forces
- concatenation = a series of interconnected things
- applying the theory of montage to political movements/protests (how are they edited and what significance do those edits hold?)
- films referred to: 1. Showdown in Seattle (1999) and 2. Ici et ailleurs (1975) - both dealing with trans/inter-national occurrences of political articulation - Steyerl focuses on the self-reflection in these films regarding their own forms of articulation
- by standardising the language of form, Showdown in Seattle portrays different statements into a chain of formal equivalence - using conventional methods of media montage
- in contrast, ici et ailleurs chains material sourced from around the world, then mixed in a wild manner - creating the impression that the images attain their significance through this act of chaining/montage
- the voice of the people simultaneously organises the principle of concatenation and suppression
- reactionary (if not outright fascist) movements involve tremendous dynamic in their elements only to leave everything as it was before

- politics of art = viewing the field of art as a place of work
- contemporary art is about function as much as it is about beauty
- production of art today presents the post-democratic ways in which hypercapitalism is the new dominant political paradigm
- strike work flourishes on exploitation = the art industry sustains itself on unpaid interns and self-exploiting actors on almost every level
- opportunism + competition are part of the inherent structure of artistic labour; which allows no automatically available route to resistance/organisation
- the politics of art is missing from political art
- what makes art intrinsically political = a site of contradictions of capital + extremely entertaining, often devastating misunderstandings between local and global
- the art field is full of contradictions = a place of power-mongering, financial engineering, massive manipulations + a place of commonality, movement, energy and desire
- art is not outside politics but politics resides within its production, distribution and reception
- if we embrace its inherent politics, we might surpass the plane of the politics of representation

- transition of factory —> museum = disappearance of traditional fordist factories + mass production, commercialisation of cinema
- the white cube is the real = the blank horror, emptiness of the bourgeoisie
- galleries today are flagship storefronts of cultural industries staffed with eager, wage-less interns
- social factory = a-factory, which produces affect as effect
- cinema today spreads the factory as it travels + cinema now turns museums —> factories
- refers to Harun Farocki’s Workers Leaving the Factory: level of content = archaeology of non representation of labour + level of form = indicates the spillover of factory into art spaces
- “they left only the factory to reemerge as a spectacle inside it”
- workers leaving the factory = spectators leaving the cinema = both regulated, both spaces of confinement
- museum crowds seen as immersed, atomised, struggling between passivity and overstimulation —> inadvertently doing the labour of consumption
- difference between mass and multitude seen on the line between confinement and dispersion ≈ cinema space and museum installation space

- work = means to an end/wage/reward vs occupation = is the end itself, it is a process, it holds its own gratification
- an occupation doesn't center the worker/producer - but anybody who seeks distraction/engagement
- occupation indicates the transition from an economy based on production to an economy fueled by waste ~ from spaces with clear divisions to entangled, complex spaces
- makes a point here that not all occupations are the same of course but via the use of this term, the differences are overcome and met with the possibility to compare/correlate across otherwise segregated scenarios
- art as an occupation has produced more processual/performative works as opposed to traditional works
- there are now occupational schemes under the guise of art education = fewer “works” + more processes + forms of knowledge + ever-more educators, mediators, guides, guards = whose occupations are again processual (ill/un-paid)
- art occupation as a means of killing time intersects with military spatial control in the form of guards
- art occupation as its own gratification produces the position of "interns" = a position that exists within the system but outside remuneration
- art occupation works on both sides = excluding + including / managing the flow of access
- in poorer parts of the world = art assists in the structuring, up/down-grading of space; in organizing, wasting, or simply consuming time through vague distraction or committed pursuit of largely unpaid para-productive activity
- in the past, there was hope to absorb art into life but today art occupies it - and this incorporation of life within art is now an aesthetic project, and it coincides with an overall aestheticization of politics

- peter bürger: art now has a special status within the bourgeois capitalist system because artists somehow refused to follow the specialization required by other professions
- the rise of multitasking masks the reversal of the division of labour: the artist as the creative polymath legitimises the universalisation of professional incompetence and overexertion
- the transition of work to occupation is based on the artist today as a role model who refuses the division of labor and leads an unalienated lifestyle
- "The realms of art remain mostly adjacent to the incongruent territories that stitch up and articulate the incoherent accumulation of times and spaces by which we are occupied." = art spaces are mostly adjacent to spaces that render the accumulation of moments and spaces by which we ourselves are occupied ?
- our phones function as purveyors in the territories of occupation - manipulating, reflecting, altering, recording, interrupting/invading, commanding = "Your life condenses into an object in the palm of your hand, ready to be slammed into a wall and still grinning at you, shattered, dictating deadlines, recording, interrupting."
- the territory of occupation is where time and space collide by sudden bursts of "capital, despair and desire running wild"
- "Both temporal and spatial occupation intersect to produce individualized timelines, intensified by fragmented circuits of production and augmented military realities." these realities are not passive/subjective - instead they create individuals via occupation

- museums create one-way surveillance: "the exploiter doesn't show the exploitation to the exploited"
- if the work seems too long, spectators will just leave it and move on to the next one: these behaviour turns them into traitors of the cinematic duration but has become normalised behaviour in spatial installations and this has created cocurators out of the spectators as they create montaged experiences of the works
- cinema in the museum are taken under protective custody: a state of temporal suspension of legality
- “cinema in the museum renders overview, review and survey impossible”
- cinema today is post-representational = produces crowds without educating it, replaces the bourgeoise gaze with the incomplete, overwhelmed spectator-as-labourer
- refers to the example of documenta 11 "which was said to contain more cinematic material than could be seen by a single person in the 100 days that the exhibition was open to the public"
- the solution^^ = guards and spectators work together in shifts x allowing for a meeting of spectators and museum workers to understand the work they are consuming/guarding
- by displaying absence and lack of subject, museums simultaneously activate a desire for it
- in order to escape the relentless productivity of museums-as-social-factories, political cinema might create whats missing - an exit

- many contemporary philosophers point out that we are living in a constant state of groundlessness ~ if this is the case, we must be in a permanent or intermittent state of free fall
- falling disorients our perception of horizon
- traditional ideas of visibility call for a linear perspective and hence stability of the viewer
- while the use of the horizon to calculate one’s position enabled colonialism and the global capitalist market, it became the central optical paradigm of modernist thoughts on visibility - mainly linear perspective
- LP is based on the negation of 1. earth’s curvature + 2. the existence of non- one-eyed, immobile viewers ~ hence it’s based on abstraction and doesn’t correspond to subjective perception
- literal meaning of perspective (latin) = “see through” // next temporal meaning = a view into the calculable future
- the viewer is central to the linear perspective and therefore it is subjected to its ”objective” laws of representation
- on the other hand, it carried the seed of its own downfall - as its objectivist attitude established a claim for universal representation and a link to accuracy undermined subjective worldviews
- in reference to “The Slave Ship” (1840) by JWM Turner: At the sight of the effects of colonialism and slavery, linear perspective..is abandoned and starts tumbling and tilting, taking with it the idea of space and time as systematic constructions.

- 20th century developments in cinema, sciences, media and warfare brought accelerated changes in our visual perceptions; visual culture recently has been saturated by military and entertainment images’ views from above
- draws parallels between vertical world building in virtual, 3D worlds with real-world geopolitical power distribution which is no longer simply seen horizontally, on-ground but also vertically, above-ground
- as opposed to LP, the perspective from above establishes a stable ground and floating/imaginary viewer
- this new visual normality folds into surveillance tech and screen-based distraction
- this displacement of perspective additionally creates disembodied gazes outsourced to machines
- as cinematic space began to twist due to the incorporation of graphic design, drawing, collage practices, it began to learn representational freedom of painting, experimental film
- none of these spaces expect a single, unified horizon; many call for a multiple spectator, who must be created and recreated by ever-new articulations of the crowd
- falling = ruin, demise + love, abandon + passion, surrender + decline, catastrophe + corruption, liberation + a condition that turns people into things and vice versa
- "the perspective of free fall teaches us to consider a social and political dreamscape of radicalized class war from above, one that throws jaw-dropping social inequalities into sharp focus"
- falling promises no community, but a shifting formation!!

- george michael’s freedom characterised freedom by its absence, lack of property, absence/destruction of all props (pointing at the singer’s public persona) - negative freedoms
- current economic/political situation presents the freedom to pursue one’s own interests at the expense of others’ as the only form of universal freedom
- contemporary protest movements express the conditions of negative freedom as they have no positive focal point
- NF reshapes the character of the opposition by diverting discussions that focus on creating an “Other” and instead creates space to claim more NF - like from exploitation, cynicism and oppression
- freelance comes from “free lance” - medieval term for soldier who is not attached to one master >> connects modern day labour to historical forms of feudalist labour
- modern day mercenaries in the form of private soldiers - privatisation of warfare is a symptom of the weakening of the structure of the nation state as it undermines laws and most often lacks accountability
- both freelancers and mercenaries engage in free floating allegiances - traditional political institutions only give them NF
- rise of “global city” (reference to Saskia Sassen and Thomas Elsaesser) connected to existence of freelancers and mercenaries/ thinking of the world in terms of networks >> these cities have reach and reference greater than single nations >> suggesting trans/post-nationality

- traditional modes of democratic representation are in danger / brought on by the system of political representation itself which 1/ undermined the power of nation states by reducing economic regulations + 2/ inflated the power of nation-states via emergency legislations and digital surveillance
- reappropriation of guy fawkes’ abstract likeness by Anonymous shows interesting+unconscious reinterpretation of the role of the mercenary
- the copyright to the guy fawkes mask is owned by time warner leading to anti corporate protesters by using 1000copies made in china for protests instead of using official TW masks
- the fawkes mask is an overdetermined object that represents the freedom to not be represented // for people (freelancers or mercenaries) who feel they can only be represented by objects because they themselves are free-floating commodities
- mercenary—>guerrilla / guerrilla often reorganise themselves often taking up negative freedom and trying to break free from dependency
- george michael’s freedom: he never appears himself but is represented by supercommodities and supermodels + his stage insignia are blown up in explosions = there is nothing left ~ only anonymity, alienation, commodification.
- only acceptance of no return from NF will open up new freedoms / without the exclusion of solidarity
- “the new freedom: you’ve got to give what you take”

- quantum theory on Schrödinger’s cat: there were in fact two cats - one alive, one dead — locked in a state of copresence + material entanglement
- observation as an active procedure - in the case of the cats: causes one’s state to change when the box is opened
- missing persons are locked in a similar state of entanglement - dead or alive until found/observed
- spanish prosecutor, Baltasar Garzón, challenged the impunity given to bury the many violence committed by the Franco regime —> asserted that those who disappeared should be considered alive = the crime is ongoing = investigations could proceed
- contextualising Schrödinger’s thought experiment in the time he lived - a time when genocide/racism reigned making a superposition of life and death a standard feature of various forms of govt
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz & perpetual living mirrors of the universe: the world is made of monads (an ultimate unity of existence) - each containing the structure of the universe itself - each feeling the effect of all that takes place in the universe
- each monad captures a specific relation to the universe - not unlike an image - objects that contain realities
- Schrödinger’s box when applied to political systems revealed the superposition of death upon death + immense multiplication of victims
- “The idea of a state, nation, or race incorporated within a single body was radically denied by thousands of mass graves — the fosses communes, which were deemed necessary to violently manufacture a “perfect” and homogenous body politic.”
- the unidentified’s indeterminacy is part of their silence and their silence is part of their indeterminacy
- the unidentified missing teach us that they remain things, refusing to become identifiable, thus beyond the realms of civil identity, property, human rights

- Hüsnü Yıldız went on a hunger strike in 2011 to force the recovery of his brother’s remains (who disappeared while fighting as a leftist guerrilla) — 15 sets of remains were recovered and Yıldız doesn’t know if any are from his brother due to lack of DNA tests — he declared all the missing were his brothers and sisters = the indeterminacy of remains brings people together beyond family relations
- pictorial evidence taken on burial sites of PKK fighters in Turkey - the invisibility of evidence is politically constructed and maintained by known violence — these can be seen as poor images of the conditions that brought them into being — as low-resolution monads ~ their poverty is not a lack but an additional layer of information centred on form rather than content
- positivism is another name for the epistemic (conscious) privilege — it denies the existence of limbos in the rule of law + shields itself from the unsettling thought that probability cannot reign in possibility
- "she (justice) carefully runs her fingers over the edges, gaps, and rifts of rugged and glossy images, of low-resolution monads left in fractional space, registering their tectonic profile, feeling their bruises, fully confident that the impossible can and indeed will happen."

- cuts as seen in filmmaking and economic discourse
- bodies carry the memory of guilt and debt
- editing in cinema works temporally as well as spatially
- framing is done according to a chosen narrative
- editing as a tool for economic efficiency
- recombination, re-articulation of bodies by removing their identities
- removal of identity rids bodies of memory/debt
- today, postproduction IS the production
- some spaces are created through postproduction/ not production
- collective postproduction via the internet produces composite works
- disassembling existing films and videos to conform to alternative, artificial political bodies
- moments created by editing, in editing
- physical intimacy is seen by her as a condenser of this notion of reproduction: redistributing affects, desire and creating bodies via movement and love

- the poor image is copy that deteriorates as it accelerates into circulation/motion
- the poor image transforms quality into accessibility
- the poor image defies copyright and mocks the claims of digital technology
- the poor image is met with refusal to be shown by conservative artists + making room for audiences to image what they must look like
- the poor image allows for the revival of resistant/non-conformist visual matter which disappeared due to the commercialisation of cinema + marginalisation of indie filmmaking
- the poor image has seen a rise in circulation due to rampant privatisation of intellectual property = piracy + appropriation
- the poor image jeopardises the elitism held by filmmakers by making authorship available to more people ~ blurring the lines between author/audience
- the poor image belongs to combating ideologies and politics thus making space for hate speech, spam, and other trash
- the poor image is the popular image; as seen through the formatting/reformatting done by countless people who cared "enough"
- the poor image is caught in a capitalistic tension = resistance against the fetish value of high-resolution x being perfectly integrated into information capitalism due to its compressed attention spans
- the poor image constructs global networks of translations or mistranslations along with new publics and debates
- the poor image creates saturation and confusion along with moments of thought and affect
- the poor image is no longer about the original or the real; it is about reality

- a reserve army of digitally enhanced creatures who resemble the minor demons and angels of mystic speculation, luring, pushing, and blackmailing people into the profane rapture of consumption
- image spam is an accurate portrayal of what humanity is actually not - a negative image
- within a fully immersive media landscape, pictorial representation feels more like a threat
- what would happen if we withdrew from representation?
- dieting is the metonymic equivalent to an economic recession mixed with intellectual regression caused by mainstream media has allowed intelligence to vanish from mainstream representation
- social media + phone cameras = mutual mass surveillance
- hegemony is increasingly internalised + pressure to perform, conform + to represent + be represented
- cameras are at present tools of disappearance ≈ more people are represented = less is left of them in reality
- if photography is a civil contract bet the photographer and subject, the current withdrawal is breaking that contract (which promised participation but delivered gossip, surveillance, narcissism and occasional uprisings)
- image spam is a representation that remains invisible
- people might happen by jointly making the image and not by being represented in one
- image spam people are double agents; they are continuously smiling but not saying anything !!!

I found Steyerl's writing style to be incredibly dynamic and engaging. The language is easy to follow and yet I found myself often rereading and pausing to think about specific sentences. The topics she writes about are very close to my own interests in media and art. Her entry point in these essays is through film theory and film history. I chose a different way to enter my reading practice here with an active assessment of social media content.
I decided to do this with TikTok — because it has been a curiosity for me ever since I joined it 3 years ago. For every essay I read, I wrote down a summary in bullet points and using one or more of these pointers I looked for appropriate videos to go along with the essay. This action was a way for me to actively consume content on this app that often fights active consumption.

TikTok’s ecosystem

During an interview on The Art Angle, Steyerl briefly mentions her apprehensions towards TikTok. Her comments are based on privacy and security issues. Although I wouldn’t dismiss her criticism of it, I am more intrigued by the content I’m exposed to on this platform. Critics of it often gloss over the fact that since the platform heavily assesses the user’s activity and utilises this data to produce the next recommendation, it thus provides a sort of reflection of the user. This type of invasive algorithmic monitoring should terrify me as well but I have reached a pseudo-nihilistic perception of social media. It rarely surprises me anymore when it “reads my mind”. “In the video, D’Amelio is asked if she believes China will steal her data. She responds dryly, “I mean if they’re stealing all my TikTok drafts it’s not that big of a deal . . . I don’t think anyone cares about data.” Her indifference may be characteristic of her age, but it may also reflect the generational expectation that our data has long been spoken for” (Granados, 2020).

So, what we see on TikTok is most often a reflection of our own activity on it. This includes the occasional, radically out-of-pocket content that is completely out of one’s areas of interest. Of all the mainstream platforms that exist today, it consists of the most mainstream content while also giving space to some of the most distinctively untypical or even completely mundane content. But how do we define mainstream?

The colloquially understood definition differs based on who’s answering the question. From a socio-economic perspective, as TikTok has grown in popularity around the world along with an increase in internet access, it has given creative grounds to underprivileged communities. As a witness of this community in India, I would say that this growth has exposed me to the minds of people I am often not exposed to otherwise. We are divided on the grounds of religion, gender, class, caste, etc. This divide isn’t always consciously practised by the people, it persists systematically and historically. Most of us go our whole lives without learning about the “other”. TikTok is just one of the more recent ways to bridge this gap. It has brought in a more diverse range of content to the platform based on less-exhibited sociocultural values. It produces representation through creation. “And as people are increasingly makers of images...they are perhaps also increasingly aware that the people might happen by jointly making an image and not by being represented in one” (Steyerl, 2012). In the case of India, eventually in 2020 TikTok was banned due to political reasons based on security concerns owing to Chinese military actions.

People vs the “clock app”

While political powers censor TikTok, the platform itself censors its users over issues of gender, race and sexuality to name a few. “...the very nature of TikTok’s targeted global censorship isn’t apolitical; in fact, it makes the app a politically powerful actor” (Ryan et al., 2020). This is of course deeply problematic and reflective of the unstable moralities of the platform. Like other platforms, TikTok also complies to the rules of local governments in order to continue operating in that specific region. “In the past year Tiktok has attempted to distance themselves from the Chinese government, though it still falls under its strict policies and regulations. From country to country, censorship on the video app can range from LGBTQ+ discrimination to the blocking of social justice messages” (Granados, 2020).

Users, creators who are aware of this, actively work against it by using specific language and symbols to beat the algorithm. Calling the platform “the clock app” is an example of getting around the algorithm to deliver content that reflects on the platform. The use of such language (or “algospeak) as a collective action displays a kind of collective cognisance. If we were to treat the endless scrolling experience as a montage maker, it is also a space for chaining false equivalencies as not everyone is aware of every trend but is just as eager to participate. “For what this populist chain of equivalencies mainly displays at this point is the void that it is structured around, the empty inclusivist AND that just keeps blindly adding and adding outside the realm of all political criteria” (Steyerl, 2002). 

Wretched of all our Screens

So, yes, TikTok is constantly in flux and its internal functioning must be questioned. We should also recognise that it is overflowing with content that is endemic, euphemistic and reflective of the world around it. While all the videos I selected don’t seem like they’re directly related to Steyerl’s essays at first glance — they are also reflections of the TikTok ecosystem. Each provides a contextual reference to the essay in question while simultaneously producing an image of the platform itself.

1. Cut! Reproduction and Recombination (pp 176-190): The fandom of Hannibal (TV serial from 2013-15) has been insistent on a non-canonical romance between the leading male characters — referred to as Hannigram. Through reproduction and recombination of clips, here we can see a comparison between the heterosexual and homosexual relationships as explored on the show — neither being explicit expressions, both “redistributing affects, desire and creating bodies via movement and love”.  

2. In Defense of the Poor Image (pp 31-45): This video belongs to the “btscore” subtrend which belongs to a larger trend where “core” refers to an aesthetic. As a group that is famous across the world, BTS is an example of the tension between capitalistic desires and resistance against high-resolution. Their fans represent a very current audience, whose mostly *unpaid work of translation and dissemination are leading factors in their popularity crossing all bounds of languages and geographical borders. [*unpaid = in monetary terms but still seen valuable in affect] 

3. The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation (pp 160-175): Using collage, this video presents a critical image of the platform itself which hosts content that would count as “spam” in Steyerl’s definition. It displays an intrinsic part of TikTok i.e. “hegemony is increasingly internalised + pressure to perform, conform + to represent + be represented”. 

4. A Thing Like You and Me (pp 46-59): Here we see the platform’s absurdity and intensity as the creator violates an object, in the image of Bugs Bunny, as they attach affect to it. Clearly “things condense power and violence”. It’s not that this kind of absurdity is completely unseen before, its our easy access and proximity to it that is reliant on TikTok’s prevalence. 

5. Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy (pp 92-101): The artist/creator here reflects on and mocks the sheer amount of work, time consumed by contemporary artists to remain visible by existing on social media platforms like TikTok. “Production of art today presents the post-democratic ways in which hypercapitalism is the new dominant political paradigm.” 

6. The Articulation of Protest (pp 77-91): This shows the reality of how political protests are depicted today. While there is glory, harm and anger, there is also humour. As Steyerl wrote about the levels of articulation, here we see visualisation through a dance routine. 

7. Is a Museum a Factory? (pp 60-76): A common display of how art galleries are often consumed — via social media as they are processed through the creator’s self- commodifying actions, often with disdain for the contents in the space. “Museum crowds seen as immersed, atomised, struggling between passivity and overstimulation —> inadvertently doing the labour of consumption.”  

8. Art as Occupation: Claims for an Autonomy of Life (pp 102-120): This video is created by an intern about their own life in this private gallery. According to the comments, this is an unpaid position. They narrate the daily cycle of their occupation as a series of various roles they play under the title of “intern”. “The rise of multitasking masks the reversal of the division of labour: the artist as the creative polymath legitimises the universalisation of professional incompetence and overexertion.” 

9. In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective (pp 12-30): A split screen phenomena of content called “sludge content” can be seen here. It reflects the contemporary tendencies of visual manipulation which is based in vertical perspective and the changes in cinematic spaces as they incorporate other visual forms. “This new visual normality folds into surveillance tech and screen-based distraction”. 

10. Freedom from Everything: Freelancers and Mercenaries (pp 121-137): Here we see a creator whose entire account consists of them wearing the Guy Fawkes mask and performing TikTok dances. “The Fawkes mask is an overdetermined object that represents the freedom to not be represented”. I chose it because it depicts the desire to hide while simultaneously wanting to be seen behind an object.  

11.Missing People: Entanglement, Superposition, and Exhumation as Sites of Indeterminacy (pp 138-159): I have two reasons for choosing this video: 1. my desire to visualise an essay that covers mostly dark topics with a superficially light image + 2. it represents the notion that TikTok and it’s users are “locked in a state of copresence + material entanglement” — neither can materialise without the other, neither can be observed without the other.

References:
Granados, M. (2020) I turn my camera on, The Baffler. Available at: https://thebaffler.com/
salvos/i-turn-my-camera-on-granados (Accessed: 10 June 2023).
Ryan, F., Fritz, A. and Impiombato, D. (2020) TikTok censorship from TikTok and WeChat: Curating and controlling global information flows, JSTOR. Available at: https:// www.jstor.org/stable/resrep26120.5 (Accessed: 10 June 2023).
Mouriquand, D. (2023) What does ‘mascara’ mean on TikTok?, euronews. Available at: https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/02/03/what-is-the-mascaratrend-and-is-it-an- adequate-tool-for-free-speech-on-tiktok (Accessed: 10 June 2023).
Thorpe, G. (2023) TikTokers are speaking in code to get around censorship, The New Daily. Available at: https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/2023/02/26/tiktok-mascara-trend/ (Accessed: 10 June 2023).
Steyerl, H. (2012) The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation, e-flux Journal. Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/32/68260/the-spam-of-the-earth-withdrawal- from-representation (Accessed: 10 June 2023).
Steyerl, H., trans. Derieg, A. (2002) The Articulation of Protest, Transversal. Available at: https://transversal.at/transversal/0303/steyerl/en (Accessed: 10 June 2023).

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