As artificial intelligence inveigles itself more deeply into all our lives, Steyerl’s longstanding prognosticating about its dangers feels increasingly farsighted, and it remains at the centre of her work. The artist/theorist/professor’s current solo exhibition at Fondazione Prada, The Island, ties together AI, politics and climate change under the iconography of flooding; dealing with tech and political realities from another angle, her simultaneous show at the MAK in Vienna – titled, with a nod to aphorist Karl Kraus, Humanity Had the Bullet Go In Through One Ear and Out Through the Other – includes the mordant Mechanical Kurds (2025), a new videowork in which precariously situated Kurdish refugees in Iraq must train the facial-recognition capacities of an AI. Elsewhere, Steyerl published another book of essays on art and tech, Medium Hot: Images in the Age of Heat (2025), in which she questions whether images made by AI ‘can even be called art’, and she received this year’s Erich Fromm Prize for ‘masterfully [combining] the aesthetic penetration of visual mass culture with an act of mediating theory and practice’. Can’t argue with that.