Hito Steyerl The Island, 2025

Hito Steyerl’s The Island is a video work combining found footage, AI generated videos, quantum noise holograms, archaeological projection spheres, and self-directed clips.

Over the course of 26 minutes, the viewer witnesses continuous leaps between different locations, times, and story lines. The film’s four narrative strings are connected, yet they do not fuse into a linear story. The overlapping and interspersed narratives are “Lucciole,” “The Artificial Island,” “The Birth of Science Fiction,” and “Flash!”.

In The Island, Steyerl employs a contemporary pop cultural aesthetic influenced by social media feeds, vlogs, AI slops, DIY experiments, recorded video calls, vacation snapshots, comic books, kitsch, science-fiction cinema, nature documentaries, alongside historical footage of science symposiums and the bombing of Nagasaki. Blended into a feverish, fast-paced video, the contrasting film aesthetics exploited by the artist fashion experimental cinema in terms of mainstream entertainment.