Medium Hot

Images in the Age of Heat

Hito Steyerl

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781804298046
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Politics

Hito Steyerl is one of the most celebrated artists of our time. Her work, both as an artist and a writer, has consistently challenged the political boundaries between art and technol?ogy. In this new collection of groundbreaking essays, she explores how AI, the use of large language models and the algorithmic creation of imagery transform our understanding of the world. She argues that such practices cannot be divorced from the economic and political conditions of the times.

Medium Hot is a collection of scintillating meditations on the limits of art and technol?ogy: the essential handbook for the present conjuncture. The pieces here probe the man?ufacture and distribution of images in the age of AI and climate change. She asks whether art can be made not only by machines but for machines. She argues against the production of images that heat up the planet, disfranchise workers and fuel the arms trade, and questions whether such creations can even be called art.

In an era of such rapid change, Steyerl does vital work investigating whether machine learning will infiltrate every aspect of our lives and what that means for the future.

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: ‘The Hardest Part’: Statistical Image-Making and War Economies
• Chapter 2: Burnt-Out Images: A Thermodynamical Turn
• Chapter 3: Medium Hot: The Political Economy of Entropy
• Chapter 4: Knuckleporn or Phocomelia: GenAI’s Dialectics of Enlightenment
• Chapter 5: Mean Images
• Chapter 6: The Digital Rift: From Poor Images to Power Images
• Chapter 7: We Didn’t Start the Fire: Physical and Digital Pipelines with Gago Gagoshidze and Miloš Trakilović
• Chapter 8: Who Does the World Belong To? AI, Art and Common Sense
• Chapter 9: Walk the Walk: Beyond Blockchain Orientalism
• Chapter 10: Roko’s Basilisk: Artificial Stupidities and Existential Risk
• Chapter 11: Twenty-One Art Worlds: A Game Map with Department of Decentralization and GPT-3
• Acknowledgements
• Notes