Hito Steyerl Mechanical Kurds, 2025

Hito Steyerl’s video installation Mechanical Kurds consists of a single-channel HD video and spatial installation elements. The title references the "Mechanical Turk" and its dual significance. The original Mechanical Turk was an 18th-century fraudulent automaton—a chess-playing machine that appeared to operate independently, but in reality, concealed a human operator inside who controlled its movements. In the early 2000s, Amazon adopted the name for its crowdsourcing platform, which enables businesses to outsource various, often repetitive or menial tasks to an online workforce.