{"id":49931,"date":"2014-11-18T11:20:14","date_gmt":"2014-11-18T11:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=49931"},"modified":"2015-05-05T21:29:30","modified_gmt":"2015-05-05T20:29:30","slug":"art-in-a-time-of-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2014\/11\/art-in-a-time-of-surveillance\/","title":{"rendered":"Art in a Time of Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Tomas-van-Houtryve-article-display-b<\/a><\/p>\n

This just happened \u2014 while trying to figure out a colorful way to begin the story you\u2019re reading, I toggled to Twitter and saw a link to a short film by two Brooklyn directors who used a drone to film actors having sex. Their project, somewhere between art and porn, hovers on the R-rated margins of a thriving cultural movement in which artists of all stripes are exploring what it means to live in a state of surveillance.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t throw a rock these days without hitting a surveillance art project, and the remarkable thing is that so much of it is so good. Some of the Snowden era\u2019s sharpest interrogations of collect-it-all tracking by corporations and the government are to be found in galleries and other art spaces. They are the opposite of the acronym-laden news stories we read: NSA, FISA, PGP, PRISM, ACLU, EFF, SIGINT, GCHQ, TOR, FOIA, HTTPS, are you still awake? They are playful, invasive and eerie, and best of all they are graphically visual. With a transgressive edge that journalism struggles to match, they creatively challenge what it means to be human in a time of data.<\/p>\n

The latest example is an exhibit called Watching You, Watching Me<\/a><\/em>, organized by the Open Society Foundations in New York City and featuring ten artists and photographers. Rather than tell us about program X or problem Y in the word-based vernacular we\u2019re numbed by, they offer new ways of seeing and understanding surveillance. The stunner in this show is an object created by Hasan Elahi that from a distance looks like a lovely tapestry draped on a wall.<\/p>\n

As Elahi has explained<\/a>, in 2002 he was stopped at the Detroit airport because his name appeared on a terrorism watchlist, and he was subsequently interrogated by FBI agents. Born in Bangladesh and raised in the United States, Elahi, an art professor at the University of Maryland, chose an unusual response to clear his name and make a statement\u2014he began a self-surveillance project in which he took pictures of nearly everything he did and sent them to the FBI. He also posted them to a website he created<\/a>. He\u2019s taken about 70,000 pictures of the buildings he\u2019s visited, the beds he\u2019s slept in, the food he\u2019s eaten, the toilets he\u2019s used, the roads he\u2019s travelled on, and he\u2019s also published receipts for the things he\u2019s bought; he even tracks his location using GPS.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy disclosing mundane details about my daily life, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life,\u201d he writes in the exhibit brochure. \u201cI am flooding the market with banal information, and questioning its inherent meaning and value for intelligence purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Artwork<\/a>

Artwork by Hasan Elahi<\/p><\/div>\n

For the exhibit, Elahi created a giant tapestry<\/a> made of tiny reproductions of 32,000 of those photos. It works on several levels. Aesthetically and from afar, it is a gorgeous, softly-colored flag, something Jasper Johns might have created with fabric. Up close, you see each photo and comprehend the audacity of Elahi\u2019s monitoring project as well as the invasive banality of surveillance (though the photos were shot by Elahi, they are the sorts of things spy agencies might collect on their targets). You can also read the photos as a visual story of a man\u2019s life in America, or more broadly as life in America, with its fast-food restaurants, its parking lots and planes and strip malls. His artwork is the analog turned digital turned material.<\/p>\n

Surveillance art \u2014 or as one academic has called it, artveillance<\/a> \u2014 fits into a creative continuum that stretches back to at least the 1930s, when the introduction of \u201cminiature\u201d cameras, such as the Leica<\/a>, made it relatively easy for photographers to secretly take pictures. Walker Evans led the way with undercover pictures<\/a> taken on the New York City subway with a Leica hidden behind his coat. State surveillance wasn\u2019t the subtext of Evans\u2019 work\u2014he<\/em> was the surveiller, after all\u2014but as the art professor Stephanie Schwartz<\/a> pointed out to me, the issue was being evoked in the creative realm at the time. One of the scenes in Modern Times<\/em> shows Charlie Chaplin\u2019s character, the tramp, going into a bathroom to get away from the factory floor, only to find a monitor from which the factory manager sees him<\/a> and orders him back to work.<\/p>\n

The latest wave of surveillance art has been evident for a number of years, especially since 9\/11, which increased the powers and budgets of intelligence agencies in the United States and elsewhere. The wave seems to have grown larger in the wake of the leaks from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, and this is fortunate. Pervasive surveillance is oddly paralyzing\u2014it is the digital equivalent of the aphorism about genocide, \u201cThe death of one man is a tragedy and the death of a million is a statistic.\u201d The more we learn of its vast scope, the more we seem dulled to it. We need to see it anew.<\/p>\n

Josh Begley, a data editor at The Intercept<\/em>, tries to bring that kind of utility to the New York Police Department\u2019s invasive surveillance of Muslims. After 9\/11, the NYPD established a secret \u201cDemographics Unit\u201d that mapped Muslim neighborhoods, dispatching plainclothes officers to collect photographs and information about Muslim businesses and gathering places. The program was revealed in a 2011 news story<\/a> by the Associated Press that also published the NYPD\u2019s surveillance photos and notes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Begley\u2019s project<\/a> in the Watching You<\/em> exhibit reassembles the original documents, arranging the NYPD photos of hundreds of Muslim-owned establishments in a jaggedly circular collage, surrounded by notes from the undercover cops involved in the surveillance (\u201cMedium sized store that sells stationary, lotto, newspapers and American party supplies\u2026Location sells live poultry\u2026A male Pakistani was working behind the counter\u201d). The project engages you far more deeply than a stack of original documents or news stories about them ever could.<\/p>\n

The exhibit offers much more\u2014photojournalist Tomas van Houtryve displays his beautiful and disturbing pictures<\/a> taken with a small drone that he flew over American settings to replicate the locations of drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan\u2014weddings, playgrounds, people praying or exercising. There is also the turn-the-tables work of Simon Menner, a German who combed through the Stasi archives for pictures the East German spy agency took of its own agents<\/a> (mainly in training situations, but also at parties).<\/p>\n

\"Code<\/a>

Code Names by Trevor Paglen<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s just a microcosm of today\u2019s vibrant surveillance art scene. Travel a few dozen blocks from the Open Society and you\u2019ll reach the latest work by Trevor Paglen, who has collected more than 4,000 code names from the archive of NSA documents leaked by Snowden. Paglen\u2019s video installation, in a darkened room at the Metro Pictures gallery, projects the code names<\/a> into slowly-rising columns of white type that crawl up the walls around you. The effect is literally destabilizing\u2014with the code names rising as you stand still, you feel as though you are falling in a shaft of infinite surveillance. Paglen materializes our political vertigo.<\/p>\n

As a writer, it\u2019s hard to say this but there\u2019s more variety and excitement in surveillance art than in surveillance writing. For instance, artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg has collected DNA samples from cigarette butts, chewing gum and stray hair, and has used these to create portraits<\/a> of whomever the DNA belongs to. It\u2019s an aggressive act\u00a0\u2014\u00a0appropriating someone\u2019s genetic property to show the ease with which our identities can be constructed and exposed. Two artists, Brian House and Kyle McDonald, even created an eavesdropping device that looks like a light bulb or lamp, and after infiltrating them into public places like a restaurant, bank lobby and library, they tweeted<\/a> snippets of overheard conversations; the project is called \u201cConversnitch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fair game? I don\u2019t know, but these projects engage us with the problems of surveillance in ways that news stories and congressional hearings do not. There\u2019s a freshness to each one, and the list lengthens every day. As I was finishing this story, I received an email from a group of 14 artists who have released a CD called \u201cNSA Listening Party<\/a>\u201d \u2014 songs against surveillance. The first track is called \u201cDossier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here are some other surveillance projects and artists we\u2019ve noticed:<\/p>\n

The Clandestine Reading Room<\/a><\/p>\n

Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics<\/a><\/p>\n

Jenny Holzer<\/a> (Doodle)<\/p>\n

PRISM: The Beacon Frame<\/a> (Julian Oliver and Danja Vasiliev)<\/p>\n

Lauren McCarthy<\/a> (Social Turkers)<\/p>\n

James Bridle<\/a> (Drone Shadows)<\/p>\n

Adam Harvey<\/a> (Privacy Gift Shop)<\/p>\n

Private (i)<\/a><\/p>\n

Omer Fast<\/a> (5,000 Feet is the Best)<\/p>\n

David Birkin<\/a> (The Shadow of a Doubt)<\/p>\n

Essam<\/a> (NYPD Drone Art)<\/p>\n

Art for Spooks<\/a><\/p>\n

ScareMail <\/a>(Ben Grosser)<\/p>\n

America\/Pardon Snowden<\/a> (Larry Ayres and Miriam Dance)<\/p>\n

Treason<\/a> (Galt Aureus)<\/p>\n

SkyWatch Spider<\/a> (Zaq Landsberg)<\/p>\n

ZXX Type<\/a> (Sang Mun)<\/p>\n

Banksy<\/a> (GCHQ mural)<\/p>\n

Post-Surveillance Art<\/a> (Suzanne Treister)<\/p>\n

PolyCopRiotNode<\/a> (CH2)<\/p>\n

The Personal Experience of Surveillance<\/a><\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Photo: Tomas van Houtryve<\/em><\/p>\n

Email the author: peter.maass@theintercept.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 firstlook.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Art Prof. Hasan Elahi has taken about 70,000 pictures of the buildings he\u2019s visited, the beds he\u2019s slept in, the food he\u2019s eaten, the toilets he\u2019s used, the roads he\u2019s travelled on. \u201cBy disclosing mundane details about my daily life, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life,\u201d he writes. \u201cI am flooding the market with banal information, and questioning its inherent meaning and value for intelligence purposes.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}