The work Hito Steyerl conceived in 2007 consists of three computer screens turned vertically, continuously displaying a saturated field of red pixels. The rotation of the screens by 45 degrees, as well as the composition as a triptych on the wall, immediately disrupts the usual references for reading a digital image. Making a nod to the « last picture » of the Russian avant-garde, Red Alert questions once again the conditions of representation, both aesthetic and political, in the contemporary world. More effectively than any image derived from the indexical regime of photography, the homogeneous and unvarying repetition of an alert signal speaks of the strategies of a permanent state of emergency constructed by political powers and media infrastructures together. In an essay written the same year, « Das Reich der Sinne. Polizei-Kunst und die Krize der Repräsentation » [« The Empire of Senses: Police as Art and the Crisis of Representation »], the artist develops an analysis that takes as its starting point the French title of a film directed by Nagisa Oshima in 1976: a reversal of Roland Barthes’ The Empire of Signs into The Empire of Senses, expressing a shift away from language and into the irrational domain of pure sensation. In her view, the colors that defined attempts at political renewal at the beginning of the 21st century mark a significant change in political culture towards the empathetic realm of the sensory: the « Rose Revolution » in Georgia (2003), the « Orange Revolution » in Ukraine (2004), the « Green Revolution » or « Cedar Revolution » in Lebanon (2005), etc. The emergence of these new visual languages aligns with the fusion of power and effect that has become the dominant mode of expression for governments. For Steyerl, there is no doubt that the aesthetic monochrome, like the political monochrome, « signals both the end of politics as such (the end of history, the advent of liberal democracy) and the era of « pure sensation, » which must at all times be monitored, provoked, and controlled. They signal both the end of politics and its radical renewal occurring in the realm of perception. » [2] Her remarks on the framework of representation extend this reflection further, questioning the very principle of realism: « The constant reminders of the terrorist threat have exploded the boundaries of dangerous zones and flooded the world with the red color that signals them. [...] Fear gives a sensation of reality – unlike reality itself. » [3] This is also what Red Alert responds to. As in the past, the deceptive, flat, and unadorned nature of monochrome is a critical invitation to question the limits of representation—in other words, what cannot be made explicit within them and what, latently, constitutes their outside in the here and now. Hito Steyerl concludes: « Let’s see them as the realistic portrait of a necessary uprising against an empire of the senses that seeks to eradicate all difference through the dictatorship of affect and noise. It’s time to invent a new way of feeling. » [4]