A Sense of Ambient Entrapment in Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun

Abstract

This article proposes the notion of ambient entrapment to conceptualize the affective experience of surveillance in the current age of ubiquitous computing and smart technologies. A sense of ambient entrapment is identified as a vague, yet pervasive feeling of a controlled environment saturated by surveillance and exploitation, where machine perception and algorithmic processes are hard at work. Arguing that artworks are particularly adept at expressing affective experiences and emerging cultural feelings of surveillance, the article offers a reading of German artist Hito Steyerl’s immersive video installation environment Factory of the Sun (2015) to further explore the theoretical argument. Inside the dark installation space, visitors are immersed in a blue LED grid environment and encouraged to recline in beach chairs facing a large screen. What is perceptible as time passes inside Factory of the Sun, the paper argues, is an indefinable yet all-encompassing sense of something working and conditioning in the background, of technologies extracting and exploiting personal data while we, at the same time, desire and feel the lure of said technologies and devices. The article concludes that artworks can make us aware of the often invisible and barely perceptible forces at work in our environments and everyday life and suggests we should turn to contemporary art as sites of knowledge of the affective experience of ambient surveillance.