Robots Today

Robots Today includes documentary footage of the Kurdish towns of Diyarbakir and Cizre in the aftermath of street fighting. There are empty streets, battered buildings and cats crawling over debris. Steyerl juxtaposes this material with an account of Ismail al-Jazari, a medieval artist and inventor famous for his handbook for creating programmable automata, and largely unanswered questions to Siri about robots and destruction. Floating between these modes, Steyerl’s film is suggestive rather than insistent, encouraging the viewer to make their own connections between Al-Jazari’s proto-robots and the weapons used in present-day suppression and war.

Joe Lloyd, Studio International, 2026-02-12 · read the full text

„Robots Today“ in Ein-Kanal-HD. Wieder in einem Land, das den Nahen Osten vermuten lässt. Eine Kinderstimme fragt Siri nach Robotern. Es erklingt Skepsis. Auf welcher Seite stehen sie wohl? Die Akteure im Film beschreiben die Gewalt, die in ihre Stadt kam. Das Rathaus wird plötzlich nur noch als der Turm gesehen, von dem die Schüsse kamen. Der Krieg hat den Blick der Menschen auf ihre Heimat verändert.

trans.'Robots Today', in single-channel HD. Again in a country one takes to be in the Middle East. A child's voice asks Siri about robots. Scepticism sounds. Whose side are they on? The figures in the film describe the violence that came to their city. The town hall is suddenly seen only as the tower the shots came from. The war has changed the way people look at their home.

Lynn Kühl, gallerytalk.net, 2019-03-01 · in German · read the full text