Hito Steyerl (b. 1966, Munich), through her video-works, essays and performance lectures, articulates the contemporary status of citizenship, and the changing idea of the civic, in the digital age. Central to her practice is the notion that global communication technologies, and the mediation of the world through circulating images, have had a dramatic impact on our conception of culture, economics and of subjectivity itself. Through the Internet and an all-pervasive semiotic flux, communicative capitalism is actively redefining subjectivity and our relationship to reality. Within this electronic space of flows, Steyerl’s filmmaking and writing occupies a critical position between the fields of art, philosophy and politics, enacting a deep exploration of accelerated ‘cognitive’ capitalism’s social, cultural and financial imaginaries.

Civic Centre As part of the post-war plans to rebuild the city, Plymouth's Civic Centre was designed by city architect Hector Stirling in the International modernist style and was opened by the Queen on 26 July 1962. It is a fourteen-storey concrete and glass tower block, with a 'butterfly' roof canopy and an attached two-storey block to the north. The tower housed the offices of the various municipal departments of the city council, as Plymouth’s main administrative centre. The top storey was originally the Rooftop Restaurant, which was open to the public, but closed in 1975. By the 21st century the city council felt it was too expensive to maintain though. Plans to demolish the building were scrapped when the building became Grade II Listed in June 2007. It was eventually sold to the developers Urban Splash in 2015 for one pound, who plan to refurbish the building.