ExtraSpaceCraft

If hidden bugs were the tools of old-fashioned espionage up through the Cold War, drones are the icons of our current condition of low-intensity war. Steyerl’s Extra Space Craft (2016) is a docu-fiction video set in northern Iraq, where a national observatory is maneuvering drones over Iraqi Kurdistan. The control tower becomes the set of a space agency, which the artist skillfully adopts as her subject to evoke the virtual dimension superimposed on the realities of state-controlled territories and zones under anti-terrorist control.

Riccardo Conti, Mousse Magazine, 2018-06-13 · read the full text

Steyerl lässt sich von einem kurdischen Drohnenpiloten die Technologie erklären. Er sei der Schäfer der Drohnen, sagt der Pilot, und diese seien wie Schafe, eigensinnig und stur. Gruselig klingt dieser pastorale Vergleich, der zeigt, wie kulturelle Muster sich in neue Formen gießen – in diesem Fall das Unheimliche einer eigenständigen Technologie in ein Bild von sanfter Kontrollierbarkeit. In der Überlagerung verschiedenartig generierten Filmmaterials, von Aufnahmen der Handkamera über die der Drohnen bis zum Computer, wird wie so oft in Steyerls Arbeiten die wechselseitige Durchdringung unterschiedlichster Wahrnehmungs- und Wirklichkeitsebenen sichtbar.

trans.Steyerl has a Kurdish drone pilot explain the technology to her. He is the shepherd of the drones, the pilot says, and they are like sheep, wilful and stubborn. There is something creepy about this pastoral comparison, which shows how cultural patterns are recast in new forms — in this case the uncanniness of an autonomous technology into an image of gentle controllability. In the layering of differently generated footage, from handheld camera shots to those of the drones to the computer, what becomes visible, as so often in Steyerl’s work, is the mutual interpenetration of the most disparate levels of perception and reality.

Beate Söntgen, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 25 July 2018 · in German · read the full text