How Not To Be Seen
" How Not to Be Seen " is a popular sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. The sketch purports to be a British government public information film in which a disembodied narrator, voiced by John Cleese, instructs viewers on "how not to be seen." In this satirical take on instructional films, Steyerl demonstrates several tongue-in-cheek strategies for remaining "unseen" in a world subject to new, sophisticated means of surveillancepointing to the ways in which our technologies encroach on physical experience.
"How Not To Be Seen" is a popular sketch from Monty Python's Flying Circus. It was first aired as a the 11th episode of the 2nd series of the show. The artwork presents a still image from a video, featuring a woman against a background resembling a color test pattern.
The woman applies brightly colored green paint to her face, emphasizing elements of visibility and concealment. Hito Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, 2013 from Artforum on Vimeo By Hito Steyerl.
I take no credit for this. I am unsure why previous uploads of this video have been taken down. I don't know shit about contemporary art, bu...
How Not to Be Seen is a sketch that appears in " How Not to Be Seen," the twenty-fourth episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. It also appears in And Now for Something Completely Different. This filmed sketch purports to be a British government film (No.
42, PARA. 6.) presented for public service. How Not to be Seen is a deadpan and technist demonstration and deconstruction of the magic of visual illusion in contemporary media; for example, how a camera crew disappears after invisible rays emanate from an iPhone.
Steyerls intention is to show how seeing and being seen control our lives. In the digital age, governments and big companies track us with satellites, phones, and social media. In an interview Steyerl explains in the case of How Not to Be Seen, it started with a real story that I was told about how rebels avoid being detected by drones.
