Medium Hot: Images in The Age of Heat

by Hito Steyerl

The highly acclaimed video artist and author of Duty Free Art What is the future of the image in the age of climate change and artificial technology?

Hito Steyerl was named #2 most influential person in the art world in Artforum. Her work has consistently challenged the relationship between art and technology in an age of climate change.

In this new collection of ground breaking essays, she explores how ChatGPT, the use of Large Language Models and the algorithmic creation of imagery impacts on our understanding of the world.

Steyerl argues that such practises can not be divorced from the economic and political conditions of the every image is a degraded version, the product of layers of exploitation, depleting ever more limited resources of energy. How should we look at such images and what would an image of liberation actually look like?

Genres: Art, Essays, Nonfiction, Theory, Technology

192 pages, Hardcover

Published June 10, 2025

About the author

Hito Steyerl (sometimes spelled Štajerl) is a German filmmaker, visual artist, and author in the field of essayist documentary video. Her principal topics of interest are media, technology, and the global circulation of images. Steyerl holds a Ph.D in Philosophy from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a professor of New Media Art at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Reviews

[Hannah]

I sometimes wonder what it’s all meant, all this effort over the years, all these books I’ve read, thoughts I’ve thunk, I mean it may not need to coalesce ever but it’s an understandable yearning, I think, for some evidence of wisdom earned.

So one proof of that effort might be making a book like this accessible. The mere fact that I can understand what she’s saying won’t pay off my student loans, but it is delicious to make sense of a project like this, and it would be totally inscrutable had I not spent the last 25 years reading all the time.

[Pia Sutherland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a strange read. I'm kind of in the middle ground of knowing-things / not-knowing-things about AI and other digital buzz topics so some of it went over my head (or felt dubious, but I didn't have enough info to argue why). When I was at a point of struggle-incomprehension I just pretended this book was a weird poem. I think these ideas will probably come back to me in the future though!

Steyerl goes into a little more detail about topics that have been heavily discussed already, like AI and cloud infrastructure's impact on electricity and water flows. It was interesting seeing direct examples of how this impacts local populations, like in Kosovo. Horrifying hearing about how ML training tasks/microwork are offloaded to displaced persons, and how some AI companies are faking their ML to just use these workers on the user-facing end.

I liked the discussion of how and why images are produced using AI. I can see how creative industries might be used to sort of humanize this tech, or distract from its primarily military applications. Steyerl also talked about how censorship impacts image-generation output, and how AI's artistic literacy might be seen as a stepping stone towards AGI (through "common aesthetic sense"). That last part gagged me a little I cannot lie. IS art something that does that for humans? Actually, I think language does, and art is just a more arcane and socially-loaded language... Much to consider above my level of judgement. What the hell.

I did not care about the NFT discourse or crypto discourse, and Steyerl was sometimes really unfunny and nonsensical to me, but I think that is a problem with tech/art people and millennials generally hahah. I did enjoy this book a lot.


EDIT: She also mentioned some philosopher's very insane idea of Capital as a higher-level entity - something about the large amt.s of energy collection/transformation thru capital - VERY crazy but let me ponder this hmm

[Mili · Rating 5 out of 5]

Me convertí en una atenta lectora de Hito Steyerl. En Medium Hot logra un buen balance entre lo técnico, lo especulativo, el humor ácido, y el arte. Para mí, sus libros son actuales, fáciles de abordar y necesarios.

Este libro toma como aspecto central de qué manera el auge de la inteligencia artificial, los datos y los sistemas automatizados están reconfigurando no solo la producción cultural, sino también el trabajo y hasta la noción de sentido común. Las imágenes ya no representan: extraen, dañan, acumulan y se autocompletan. Para ella, en este contexto el arte funciona como laboratorio, pantalla de humo y campo de batalla. Todo al mismo tiempo.

Uno de los puntos más fuertes está en el capítulo final, una suerte de fábula sobre futuros posibles del mundo del arte, que combina sátira, ciencia ficción, tests de la revista Cosmopolitan y una fuerte crítica institucional. Es un cierre brillante con una tremenda potencia conceptual.

Creo que este libro logra ser muchas cosas a la vez: ensayo político, manifiesto cultural, diario. Es para aprender, subrayar y aprender mucho. Ideal para intentar entender nuestro presente digital y algorítmico.

[Ploni Almoni · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jeg har i løbet af de sidste par måneder forsøgt aktivt at forholde mig til, hvad såkalt GAI’s indtog på verdensscenen betyder for vores kommunikation, vores videnskabelse og ikke mindst for kunst og billeddannelse…. Det har ført til øjeblikke af skiftevis fuldstændig afmagt og apati (tekst-er-dødt-følelser), vrede, forvirring og afsky…

Hito Steyerl forsøger som en af de første at sætte, jeg har læst at sige noget reelt intelligent om fremkomsten af GAI. Om overgangen fra kausalitetsbetonet Newtoniask fotodannelse til det propabilitetstermodynamiske shitshow, der er AI-generede billeder… om overgangen til det gennemsnitlige, om den infrastruktur af mikroarbejdere i det globale syd (og ikke mindst i konfliktzoner, hvor elregningen ikke skal betales) som kapløbet mod AI-entropi baserer sig på.., om forbindelsen mellem det hybris-prometheus neo-fascistiske fundament som tech-giganterne bygger på og den fortsatte opvarmning af kloden.

Det gør den tyske verdenskunstner klogt. Bogen leverer et foreløbigt omend ufærdigt bud på et sprog, som vi kan benytte til at tale tale om GAI uden bare at gentage OpenAI’s egne reklamefloskler om en superfed post-arbejde (men ekstremt ulige) fremtid, hvor du aldrig overbooker din kalender!

[pabliterario · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Las organizaciones mediáticas más poderosas del siglo XXI serán térmicas. La circulación de imágenes, sonidos, videos y textos dependerá de un régimen masivo de calentamiento y enfriamiento. Los datos y las redes, al igual que las personas que estos conectan, serán cada vez más frágiles.

Si hay demasiado calor o demasiado frío, las plataformas colapsarán. Las infraestructuras digitales -centros de datos, intercambios de red y cables de fibra óptica- drenarán la energía del planeta para crear un entorno térmico estable, no para las personas, sino para la información.”

el mundo adaptándose a la IA, el basilisco de Roko, los intereses militares detrás de todo esto… Ahora más que nunca la inteligencia artificial está más presente que nunca (quién no conoce a alguien que utilice ChatGPT, por ejemplo); Hito Steyerl nos plantea varios escenarios relacionados con la misma, dejando varias preguntas y reflexiones muy interesantes sobre cuál es el rumbo de estos propósitos en la cultura, el arte y las guerras.

[Tracy]

Reading this in 2025, the essays themselves still seem for the most part pertinent (and sometimes prescient), though some of the sample images no longer represent the capabilities of generative AI image diffusion models. (I skipped the final essay, which was an extensive conversation with an LLM, as well as the Blockchain chapter.)

I appreciated Steyerl's focus on labor and impacts of the technology, as well as the more philosophical explorations. Some of the essays felt a bit disjointed, jumping around unexpectedly -- she's making a lot of cross-connections so some work better than others.

I liked the idea of "data populism" as encoded social bias (in Mean Images). That her prompt of "protest" produced images with the focus on riot police was not surprising, but revealing.

[Casey Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The other day I thought “huh, haven’t heard anything about Hito in a while” and wouldn’t you know it, she just published a new book.

A welcome collection of essays that bring Steyerl back into an immediate relevance (as the essays in Wretched of the Screen and Duty Free Art have understandably become somewhat dated already). If you are looking for some compelling, and at times peculiar, insights into life among AI, this is worth checking out.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

Stopped reading when I saw in the footnotes that the author – and the editors at Verso, apparently – genuinely believe "AI" is synonymous with linear regression. Embarrassing.

[Iona · Rating 3 out of 5]

Coocoo crazy bananas. My brain: 💥

(I would’ve give more stars but it was a tad too heavy on big words for this dyslexic)