Sun, Light, Transparency, Control.

On Hito Steyerls Factory of the Sun

Roberto Corona-Copado

[] The light of the sun can be described not only as a basic source of all
terrestrial life forms, but also as a visceral sensation. Later in human
history, light also became a man-made agent of illumination, in the form
of fire or electric light. [] light has very recently also become essential
as a medium in more mundane technological and economic respects. The
technological sublime of super-fast phenomena, like those of highfrequency or algorithmic trading within the latest types of financial and
cognitive capitalism, clearly demonstrate the expansive and generative
nature of both light and capital. []
Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015

In Factory of the Sun, the videoinstallation prepared by Hito Steyerl for the
German Pavilion at La Biennale di Venezia 2015, we can see how the gift of
light can turn into deadly transparency, as a post-disciplinary mechanism of
control, that transgresses bodies and wills, displaying in its naked appearance
to the whole.
Steyerl uses empathic notions of sunlight to show the same aporias of
Enlightenment regime, the set of laws and institutions, practices and
characters who organize and preserve freedom through its own control and
perversion under the aegis of the paradigm of security.
Guiding us through a critical and playful story, Factory of the Sun takes the
form of a computer game, in the fashion of Second Life (plus steroids) that,
rather than confused with reality, it adds it, makes it more complex, rich and
dynamic.
Light (the luminous display of flows of digital information) gives voice to
freedom of action, characterized by the rhythmic and dance movement of the
young characters, but in turn exerts a pernicious light reflex that turns against
oneself in the form of powerful economic and political interests and wrenching
social and cultural distortions.
The virtual domain of Internet shows this "deadly transparency." Such
transparency, starting with the figure of the glass box as the illustrious promise
and the discourse of total access, this luminous immateriality that transmits
bodies and values, melts them into a photonic tangle, which is the raw material
of any control device in all contemporary surveillance societies.
The Enlightenment regime of transparency and control, thanks to an algorithm,
not by a hand that moves the commands, goes beyond the governmental

sphere and moves to other areas of human life, being the intimate space its
last and most dramatic.
In The Transparency Society, the philosopher Byun-Chul Han denounced the
claim of transparency as the dominant discourse in society, to the point of
turning it into fetish and the answer to everything, changing the way society
processes public (and private) issues, inserting society without resistance in
the smooth stream of capital, communication and information.
Transparency, far from referring to freedom of information, is shown as a
systemic coercion that grips all social events and undergoes a profound
change: the imposition of transparency (the factory of the sun) levels man to
turn him into a functional element of the system, exerts violence that cancels
any possibility of secrecy, otherness and distance, ie, a totalization of life that
outrages any possibility to keep alive a significant relationship with the other.
The permanent, reciprocal (not symmetrical), and total (penetrating)
surveillance in a transparency society as ours is precisely a control society that
dismantles the arcane sphere of power: with a certain bitter irony, Steyerl
weighs the utopian potential of the Internet against their deadly transparency.
It is necessary to give voice to what remains of freedom of action in every
individual and political subject, given the inextricable intertwining of digital
streams of information, communication and capital. This computer game in
which we participate at different levels of reality (speaking of Factory of the
Sun, but maybe something larger), is nothing but a computer programming
exercise, which as such provides outputs, faults, hints and winks to resist the
supremacy of the invisible opponents, so called the system, the algorithm.
Dancing, like the poor or spam images as Steyerl points out in The Wretched of
the Screen, acts as the engine in a steady stream of changing images. The
dance act represents the most playful and lucid way (we go back to light, but
even better, to a proper use of light) to fight the paradigm of transparency and
full access, offering a translucent veil, leaving behind the defects of the
representation of the collective in order to make way for the presentation of the
multitude and the possibility of an erotic relationship that may enrich the
domains affected by the bare pornography of a transparency society, that may
lead the relational aspect between power and information.
May the possibility of having the door open, half-open or closed, must not
depend on a logic of maximizing the value of exposure, but the ability of the
subjects involved in the relationship. We need to focus in opening the factory of
the sun to the dancing and shining bodies, because light exceeds any control or
discipline. The light is within oneself.

Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun, 2015. Video installation: One-channel video, 23 min.,
HD video pro rez.MOV file. Motion-capture studio, blue, illuminated grid in the
space. Free-standing projection architecture, sunloungers, and beach chairs.

Additional references:
Byun-Chul Han, La sociedad de la transparencia, translated from German by Ral
Gabas, Barcelona: Herder, 2013 [English edition: The Transparency Society,
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015].
Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen, e-flux journal, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012.