Berlin-based artist Hito Steyerl’s short film, How Not to Be Seen. A fucking didactic educational .MOV file (2013), takes the form of an educational video divided into five “lessons” on how to avoid surveillance. Defamiliarizing the vernacular form of an instructional video, How Not to Be Seen presents a situation in which, faced with omnipresent state-sponsored surveillance and violence, people are instructed in how to find relief from surveillance by shrinking themselves to become smaller than pixels—and in the process, becoming invisible.In his genre-defining Theatre of the Absurd (2004 [1961]), Martin Esslin framed the Theatre of the Absurd as a contemporary aesthetic response to post–World War II disillusionment with social institutions, nations, and religion and as a response to ubiquitous violence. I propose that Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen can be taken as a prime example of a contemporary absurdist aesthetic response that both reveals and responds to present conditions of precarity, particularly personal and political precarity related to the global circulation of images and advances in digital surveillance. In How Not to Be Seen, Steyerl uses the didactic format of the instructional video to explain how people are surveilled by the state and then eliminated; the film’s narrative explicitly links advancements in resolutions of digital-image-capturing technologies to the attenuation of life through surveillance. In this way How Not to Be Seen calls attention to the moving image as a current idiom of globalization and transnational power and, in doing so, creates a contemporary absurdist aesthetic response that underscores the precarity of the present.Steyerl’s short film posits absurdist solutions to contemporary conditions of precarity: if life and agency are attenuated through surveillance, the absurdist solution suggested in How Not to Be Seen is to diminish oneself until one is smaller than a pixel and therefore undetectable. In suggesting such an absurd (and physically impossible) solution, Steyerl’s short film makes the problem of surveillance itself visible. For Esslin, absurdist dramas derive their power in great part from their ability to unveil the absurdity of contemporary life to the spectator, who “by being made to see that the world has become absurd, in acknowledging that fact takes the first step in coming to terms with reality” (2004 [1961], 413). Steyerl’s short film confronts viewers with the absurd power and violent potential of surveillance technologies and in doing so directs attention to the precarity that such surveillance technologies engender.Writers across disciplines describe contemporary precarity in various registers. In her ontologically focused ecological writing, Anna Tsing describes precarity as occurring in the wake of the failure of the promise of industrialization to usher in an era of prosperous stability; precarity, for Tsing, fundamentally translates as being perpetually vulnerable: “Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us, we are not in control, even of ourselves. . . . We can’t rely on the status quo; everything is in flux, including our ability to survive” (2015, 20). Tsing’s notion that “we are not in control, even of ourselves,” is key here, and relates to the forms of diminished agency—and of self-attenuation as a response to the diminishment of agency—that Lauren Berlant articulates. For Berlant, precarity is informed by the ways in which the fantasy of the so-called good life becomes ever more unattainable for people across the globe as prospects for economic stability and personal fulfillment dwindle. Elaborating on her idea of lateral agency, Berlant looks toward “the relation between the reproduction of life and the attenuation of life lived in scenes of capitalist activity” (2012, 200; italics mine). It is this attenuation of life that How Not to Be Seen reveals: in Steyerl’s short film, the characters strive to become invisible as a response to the surveillance that attenuates their lives. Berlant asks the question: “What does it mean to propose that a spreading precarity pervades the dominant structure and experience of the present moment, cutting across class and localities?” (201). For many, precarity as a dominant structure might feel, in a word, absurd, or as Esslin puts it, a feeling of being out of harmony, of experiencing “metaphysical anguish at the absurdity of the human condition” (2004 [1961], 23). Much of Berlant’s work in answering the question of what it means to live in precarity involves responses and affective states that both reproduce and intervene in precariat conditions; Steyerl’s short film can usefully expand a discussion of lateral agency as it both reproduces and intervenes in precariat conditions.Steyerl has stated that in the age of mass video surveillance it is indeed a luxury to be invisible, and, rather than fame, what many contemporary people crave is invisibility (Tarrersall 2018). How Not to Be Seen, which can be viewed on Artforum’s website in full and has shown in venues across the globe, instructs viewers in how to achieve invisibility. The characters in How Not to Be Seen (including Steyerl and several actors clad in skintight green-screen bodysuits that cover the face and obscure all individuating features) seem to do just this—willfully diminish themselves to the point of invisibility to evade being tracked and potentially eliminated by a menacing, unspecified government.The first of the film’s five lessons gestures toward the global use of imaging technology through a succession of images of resolution targets: black squares patterned with barcode-like arrangements of horizontal and vertical white bars in sizes ranging from handheld, poster-sized targets to aerial surveillance targets painted on airstrips. These visibility-determining targets appear throughout the film and serve as a visual that organizes the narratives in How Not to Be Seen. In lesson 3 recent exponential increases in surveillance resolutions are described using a pixel-based aerial surveillance target: picture three squares, two white and one black, painted on an L-shaped, grey-surfaced concrete field the size of a parking lot, surrounded by desert and filmed from above. A male, digitally inflected voice explains that since 1996, the resolution for aerial surveillance has increased from twelve meters per pixel to one foot per pixel. The voice then explains how to avoid surveillance: “To become invisible one has to become smaller than or equal to one pixel.” The black and white squares in the desert that make up the resolution target are then overlaid with video of three actors in black outfits, edited into the shot using green-screen compositing. Each actor wears either a black or a white box that covers the face completely—they are comical figures with absurd, pixel-like cubes for heads. The actors, or “pixels,” perform a series of somewhat ridiculous movements, hopping sideways and turning in circles; an actor wrapped in a green cloak carries one of the pixel people offscreen to a disjointed but playful electronic music soundtrack—clearly, what we are encountering is pure absurdity! The fantastic equation of people to pixels is absurd, but perhaps not any more absurd than the reality of global ariel surveillance at a resolution of one pixel per foot.In lesson 4, “How to Be Invisible by Disappearing,” the viewer is taken through what appears to be a video tour—like those used by real estate marketing campaigns—of computer renderings of a luxury gated community. The community is populated with the stand-in figures often used in architectural schemas to demonstrate spatial scale: translucent, grey silhouettes of unidentified people stroll through the gated community’s various spaces. The pixel people from the previous lesson as well as green-screen actors, some wearing only skintight green-screen suits that obscure their faces and some shrouded in burqa-like, green chroma-key cloaks, move among the phantom-like forms of the gated community’s inhabitants in locations that include luxury shopping, expansive courtyards with elevated walkways, and slick, rectilinear condominiums with private pools. Steyerl’s choice to present the green-screen actors in burqa-like shrouds calls attention to the irony that this particular clothing renders the wearer both invisible, at least as far as obscuring the wearer’s individual features, and also hypervisibile, especially to surveillance projects in Western countries. There is a sense of satirical humor at work here: while both the instructional video form, usually used for mundane purposes, and the computer-rendered “tour” of the gated community are familiar digital image genres, the content of the video is pushed to absurd extremes. As the male narrator lists ways to become invisible, the captions for the gated community’s various areas gesture toward the marketing phrases used to conjure images of a carefree, affluent lifestyle: “The Island Sundeck,” and “An address that invites you to resort-like living,” and “Your Own Personal Club” all underscore how desires for a life of comfort are leveraged by such video marketing campaigns. It would seem that Steyerl is poking fun at the ways in which digital images are employed to instruct viewers in how to live the good life and attain the luxuries available in a capitalist world. The mash-up quality created by Steyerl’s insertion of the three-dimensional, human forms of the pixel people and the green-screen actors into the slick, hyperdigital world of the computer-rendered gated community generates further aesthetic friction and seems to highlight the fictionality of the affluent lifestyle marketed by the video tour.With its bricolage aesthetic, How Not to Be Seen might at first glance seem innocuous, even frivolous—however the tone of the film becomes more threatening in lesson 4 as the male voice instructs viewers in the “Thirteen Ways to Become Invisible by Disappearing,” possibly a reference to the iconoclastic poem by Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917). As the electronic soundtrack becomes disjointed, these ways to disappear move from benign, “being fitted with an invisibility cloak,” to ironic, “being female and over fifty,” to sinister, “being a dead pixel / being a WiFi signal moving through human bodies / being undocumented or poor / being a disappeared person as an enemy of the state / eliminated / liquidated and then dissimulated” (00:07:30–00:09:00). This explicit threat of not only surveillance but also of disappearance is even more clearly articulated by a female narrator whose voice is also digitally inflected: “In the decades of the digital revolution 170,00 people disappear / disappeared people are annihilated / eliminated / eradicated / deleted / dispensed with / filtered / processed / selected / separated / wiped out” (00:09:00–00:09:30). Surely, this situation of omnipresent surveillance in the extreme amounts to what Berlant would see as an “attenuation of agency,” and what Esslin would view as an absurdist recreation of the surveillance state. The viewer, “cast” as the audience for such an instructional video, might well see themselves as implicated in real-life versions of such surveillance, if to a less threatening degree than in the scenarios suggested in How Not to Be Seen. The meshing of art and violence are a leitmotif in Steyerl’s practice. As Sarah Lucie has observed in her writing about Steyerl’s work shown at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2019: “While technology is used for violence, it can also be used for aesthetic and political provocation, and Steyerl’s work suggests that these means are not necessarily in constant opposition” (2020, 56). Indeed, much of Steyerl’s work seems to ask if art, technology, and violence can ever be separated.1One might wonder if there is a way to intervene in such a precarious, eminently violent situation as the one posed by Steyerl’s narrators in How Not to Be Seen. Fortunately, through the power of imagination, Steyerl proposes a solution: to avoid being disappeared, one can intentionally become invisible. A shift in the music from dire to uplifting helps mark this transition, as the female voice intones: “Invisible people retreat into 3-D animations / they hold the vectors of the mesh and keep the pictures together / they reemerge as pixels / they merge into a world made of images” (00:09:30–00:10:00). This sequence’s narrative emphasis on the “retreat” of invisible people seeking relief from surveillance is continued in the concluding sequence of the film, lesson 5. The final sequence depicts the green-screen actors escaping the “rendered” space of the gated community and entering the “real” space of a decommissioned resolution target in the California desert: picture a rectangular, airstrip-sized slab of cracked, grey concrete patterned with white lines. The male computerized voice explains that this particular target was decommissioned in 2006 “as analogue photography lost its importance.” The chroma-key draped actors, edited into the scene so that they appear translucent, spin in place on the resolution target. The male voice explains that “rogue pixels hide in the cracks of old standards of resolution / they throw off the cloak or representation,” and the camera pushes in and down, focusing on the massive cracks in the concrete target itself that reveal the desert below. The implied narrative is that by becoming small enough to evade capture by digital surveillance, the “rogue pixels” can escape into the gaps left behind by advances in digital surveillance technology—they can hide in the low-resolution spaces that are no longer of use.Here the soundtrack changes from a spare digital accompaniment to a version of the upbeat R&B hit “When Will I See You Again” by The Three Degrees (1974), and the shot changes to what appears to be a low-resolution image of a green-screen set up on the resolution target. The words, “Happiness! Life full of hope! Full of contentment!” float on the screen. The image transitions to a high-resolution shot of the physical green-screen set up in the desert, showing footage of The Three Degrees performing “When Will I See You Again” composited into a green open space in the gated community from lesson 4. The shrouded actors throw off their cloaks, and now clad only in their green-screen suits, they watch The Three Degrees perform as elements of the video on the green-screen, including the translucent inhabitants of the gated community, miraculously double and cross over into the physical space of the resolution target in the desert. As the upbeat track of “When Will I See You Again” continues, text narrates the escaped pixels’ adventures, concluding with “happy pixels hop off into low resolution, gif loop!” It would seem that the green-screen actors, although their agency is attenuated through surveillance, have found lateral means to avoid capture and to survive by diminishing themselves to become undetectable and to attain freedom, if only temporarily.Writing about the intentional diminishment of the self in order to evade surveillance in How Not to Be Seen, Sebastian Althoff describes the paradoxical nature of the green-screen actors’ seepage into the gaps left by outmoded surveillance technology so: “Imitating pixels, Steyerl and the performers do not become the content of the picture but part of its material; the components of surveillance become the means for the avoidance of surveillance” (2019, 96). Put another way, Steyerl’s intervention in digital image surveillance technology makes use of the language of images that is the stock and trade of global digital surveillance technology. Here the reproduced digital image is meaningfully tied up in the ways that transnational control is administered, and, absurdly, in the ways in which such control is evaded. Althoff also points out that the escape of the inhabitants from the gated community is significant, and I agree: this escape, along with that of the green-screen actors, is an imaginative leap that finds opportunity within precarity, or as Tsing would say, it is an act of “resurgence,” which for Tsing means to find ways to survive in the very gaps and ruins created by progress (2015, 179–81).Tsing’s conception of survival in the gaps of capitalist ruins can be contrasted with Berlant’s somewhat less optimistic conception of lateral agency as action that creates intermissions, not permanent solutions, in the depleting pressures of contemporary life. Berlant describes lateral agency as a mode in which subjects take episodic breaks from the type of decision-making and life-building that one might normally associate with the term “agency” itself: [Lateral agency is] not synonymous with agency in the tactical or effectual sense dedicated to self-negation or self-extension, but self-suspension . . . the body and a life are not only projects but also sites of episodic intermission from personality, of inhabiting agency differently in small vacations from the will itself, which is so often spent from the pressures of coordinating one’s pacing with the pace of the working day. . . . These pleasures can be seen as interrupting the liberal and capitalist subject called to consciousness, intentionality, and effective will. (2012, 116) These lateral “vacations” might take the form of binge eating or tuning out temporarily, or in Steyerl’s film, of shrinking oneself to become smaller than a pixel, in short experiencing an intermission of sorts from answering the call to be productive, to build a life, or to be seen. This is the kind of agency that subjects might experience or choose to employ when their options for advancement or participation in the idea of the good life are thwarted and attenuated by the systemic inequality and exploitative working conditions of late capitalism, or when subjected to omnipresent state surveillance projects.Considered in light of the episodic nature of lateral maneuvers, the lyrics to “When Will I See You Again” by The Three Degrees that Steyerl selects for lesson 5 underscore the temporary quality of the intervention of becoming a pixel to evade surveillance: “When will I see you again? / When will we share precious moments? / Will I have to wait forever? / Will I have to suffer / And cry the whole night through?” (00:12:45–00:13:15). Here, the language gestures to the episodic: the speaker is anticipating reconnecting with a person (or an affective state) that the speaker has encountered before, then did not encounter, and now anticipates encountering again. The imagery in the video here, at the moment when the vocalist asks, “Will I have to wait forever,” is worth considering: one of the green-screen actors, standing in the physical space of the desert and watching The Three Degrees “perform” on the green-screen set up on the decommissioned airstrip, shrugs slightly and places hands on hips as if waiting. An identical image of the same actor performing the same gesture is then composited into the shot, just as the first actor is faded out—for a brief moment, there are two identical figures inhabiting the same frame, each in differing states of transparency. This invocation of the episodic also gestures toward a slipperiness of self and subjectivity. The vacations from self that Berlant describes as lateral agency, operationalized here in Steyerl’s short film, complicate the idea of the self as an immutable whole and of life as a project lived continuously.Lateral agency often involves decision making that is decidedly not about the so-called long haul—some lateral maneuvers such as overeating are in fact detrimental to a person’s flourishing. For Berlant this raises questions about the project of living itself: “the activity of riding a different wave of spreading out or shifting in the everyday also reveals confusions about what it means to have a life. Is it to have health? To love, to have been loved? To have felt sovereign? To achieve a state or a sense of worked-toward enjoyment?” (2012, 117). Or, as Steyerl’s short film would seem to ask, what happens to the self that episodically dissipates in response to the life-attenuating pressures of the absurd and precarious present? What is the nature of the self that is revealed when one “throws off the cloak of representation” in a vacation from the call be seen, and what does it mean, in political terms, for a subject to resist being called to effective will?I would suggest that in How Not to Be Seen temporary refusals to comply with the call to be a subject function as a form of absurdist resistance to life-attenuating circumstances. On a surface level, the episodic nature of the interventions suggested in Steyerl’s short film might seem to gesture toward an escapist, rather than resistive, mode of action. However, I would propose that in their ability to pause exploitive conditions, offer relief, and allow space to conceive of different modes of being these lateral “vacations from the will itself” are resistive in nature. In “Emergent Precarities and Lateral Aesthetics: An Introduction,” Elizabeth Adan and Benjamin Bateman (2015) explore political potentials of lateral agency. In addition to creating temporary reprieves from the pressures of working life in late capitalism, lateral breaks from self and agency may, by relieving pressure and allowing the subject to become refreshed, in turn allow the subject to return to productivity after the lateral intermission. Adan and Bateman recognize that, as Berlant has pointed out, to some degree these episodic vacations from life-building may in fact perpetuate the exploitative conditions that they respond to. However, Adan and Bateman do not necessarily see this as making lateral agency devoid of political potential or complicit with exploitative labor practices. Speaking of these episodic and lateral intermissions from the call to agency, Adan and Bateman propose that “they insert—or better, insinuate—into their conditions and surroundings pauses that, no matter how subtle, deflationary, or provisional, call forth different, and at times quite radical, capacities of and for existence” (109). Steyerl’s proposition in How Not to Be See Seen, that one might resist surveillance through episodic self-suspension, suggests an absurd alternative to capitulating to the call to be seen.This discussion of the political potential of lateral agency can be seen as in dialogue with Esslin’s claims about the power of absurdity to both comment on and interrupt the violence of contemporary life. For Esslin the Theatre of the Absurd offers an intervention that disrupts the status quo in a way that enables spectators to both realize the absurdity of the present and to imagine other possible narratives: “by confronting the audience with a picture of disintegration, it sets in motion an active process of integrative forces in the mind of each individual spectator” (2004 [1961], 412). While the responses to life-attenuating forces in How Not to Be Seen are absurd and provisional, they nonetheless present “radical capacities of and for existence” in the face of the stress of a surveilled life. What ideas, potentialities, or, as Esslin would have it, “integrative forces” might be set in motion for viewers of How Not to Be Seen?Certainly, the narratives of being surveilled, disappeared, becoming invisible, and being barred from the dream of the good life in How Not to Be Seen raise important questions about relationships between the circulation of digital images and power structures. How Not to Be Seen engages the ways in which images are used to gather data on individuals presumed to be enemies of the state, but also engages how images are used to market the idea of luxury lifestyles. Steyerl’s short film conveys deep disillusionment with contemporary conditions of precarious, attenuated life. How Not to Be Seen highlights the absurdity of a world in which people are distracted by images of luxury lifestyles that are likely unattainable while, at the same time, people are surveilled and disappeared. In this sense, How Not to Be Seen expands upon Esslin’s assertion that disillusionment is a key characteristic of the contemporary attitude engaged in absurdist drama: “The hallmark of this attitude is its sense that the certitudes and unshakable assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting” (2004 [1961], 23). Steyerl’s short film brings together Esslin’s conception of absurdist aesthetics as a challenge to the status quo that unveils its violence and absurdity with Berlant’s conception of lateral agency as an affective state that responds to contemporary conditions of precarity. Berlant’s writing on lateral agency is enriched by viewing Steyerl’s short film in which the lateral maneuver—in this case, throwing off the cloak of representation to evade surveillance—functions as a temporary act of refusal to answer the call to be seen. In How Not to Be Seen, the absurd choice of self-diminishment becomes a resistive response that strangely makes sense a world that is, as Esslin would put it, absurd.