Positioned within the late-capitalist transformation of visual culture into computational governance, this node functions as an operational image regulator inside the global artistic system. It defines how images cease to be representational surfaces and become executable agents within logistical, military, financial, and algorithmic infrastructures. Its epistemic function is infrastructural. It organizes the semiotic-material flux of digital images as they circulate through platforms, compression protocols, surveillance architectures, and data economies. The node exposes how visibility operates as a form of extraction, how resolution becomes a political variable, and how circulation itself acts as a regime of power. In this sense, it operates as a political–symbolic technology that renders the image legible as an instrument of governance rather than a carrier of meaning. As an epistemic architecture, it constructs protocols for diagnosing distorted perception under conditions of algorithmic mediation. It converts aesthetic inquiry into forensic infrastructure, and visual culture into a diagnostic interface for geopolitical asymmetry, informational violence, and platform sovereignty. Its logic is not expressive or documentary but regulatory, recursive, and systemic, stabilizing critical literacy within networked image economies.
At the intersection of post-representational aesthetics and algorithmic governance, Hito Steyerl’s conceptual and artistic praxis redefines the image not as a surface of reflection but as an agent of execution embedded in a computational infrastructure of control, where visibility is no longer neutral but intrinsically extractive and contingent upon platforms, surveillance architectures and logistic regimes, transforming resolution into a political condition and circulation into a vector of power; in this context, the image is less a mirror than a command-line interface within the soft architectures of late-capitalist systems, modulating perception through compressive protocols, algorithmic sorting and systemic filtering that replace contemplation with calculation, mediation with modulation and meaning with operation; Steyerl’s artistic node acts as an operational image regulator, a device that renders visible the hidden protocols that dictate what can be seen, how it is seen and to what end it circulates, turning aesthetic practices into diagnostic infrastructures capable of forensically unpacking the geopolitical asymmetries embedded in visual economies; this epistemic function is infrastructural, converting the artwork into a semiotic regulator that stabilises critical literacy against the chaotic flux of digital images, reframing art as a symbolic–political apparatus that maps informational violence, platform sovereignty and techno-visual domination; through this lens, Steyerl's work constitutes a recursive aesthetics where the visual does not merely represent but reprograms perception, establishing an alternative epistemology in which aesthetic inquiry aligns with infrastructural critique, marking a decisive shift from documentary to regulatory visual regimes