Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat Book Review

In Medium Hot, Hito Steyerl offers a nuanced view of art, artificial intelligence, and social justice. She explores topics such as surveillance, climate change, and labour erasure through eleven creative, critical, and speculative essays. Steyerl takes an international approach, critiquing so called AI ‘art’, and data-driven digital networks that serve to reinforce political instability and social segregation. She introduces ‘medium hot’ to describe our current digital media sphere as chaotic and catastrophic to our social and natural world. We are overheating not only physically, but also through digital overstimulation. Her use of a thermodynamic framework is particularly alluring, especially in the way labour is likened to heat. It is consumed like energy, without careful thought of its origin or direction. Digital workers are compared to noise particles, working in the background, exploited and burnt-out making AI run seemingly smoothly and inconsequentially. This book poses questions that are foreseeably unanswerable. How do these digital systems see humans? What happens when our judgements are automated? There are no easy answers, only more pressing questions. She leaves us, hauntingly, with a sense of urgency and unease. What is the future of creativity in our increasingly AI- driven world? Are we willing to sit back and continue to let our digital pursuits heat up the planet and our politics? 

Reviewed by Lily Beaulne