Simon Denny + Hito Steyerl

Simon Denny: Frankly, I haven't really speculated about blackouts that much before…

Hito Steyerl: Me neither. My thoughts have primarily been about electricity cuts. In early 2022, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I began to wonder whether blackouts might occur. In the end, there weren't any here, but the dependency on fossil fuels became very palpable, as did the very real possibility of blackouts. Until then, I had only experienced them in places like Beirut, where they were a scheduled, almost mandatory part of daily life. Since then, however, the prospect of blackouts has become a tangible reality for me.

SD: Yeah, I think this reading of blackouts suggests a kind of material definition for how we might think about infrastructural systems, and maybe that's where our interests connect.
I once presented an exhibition at MONA - Museum of Old and New Art, the private museum established by David Walsh, a gambling mathematician. Walsh made his fortune by identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in gambling systems worldwide. He lives on a peninsula in Tasmania, above the Museum he has excavated into the ground, like a bunker, its architecture still bearing the raw traces of that process. The exhibition I made there, Mine, brought together different scales of extraction, modelling them through games and AR. It was about making visible parts of systems that usually remain hidden, challenging the supposed ephemerality or virtuality of networks as they're often framed. In this sense, a blackout becomes a kind of proof of the materiality of networks, with limits and complexity.

HS: Yeah, it's a kind of system failure. It made me think of something I saw in Australia too, in this remote place called Coober Pedy. There was wild opal mining going on there, where people were digging their own holes, handling dynamite, just blowing up the silt.