Brighenti’s point is that we should not underestimate the diversity of moods that can be conveyed through the same aesthetic of surveillance. Indeed, these moods range a lot from the dark and the gloomy, through the outraged and the sceptical, to the playful and even the enthusiastic. Thus, notably, surveillance produces not only social control but also an ideoscape and a landscape of moods. Artists of all stripes are exploring what it means to live in a state of surveillance — and building a thriving cultural movement in the process.
Hasan Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist working on issues such as surveillance, privacy, migration, citizenship, technology and border challenges. In 2002, a false notice was passed to law enforcement, which caused Elahi to be investigated by the FBI. After months of interrogation, he was finally ruled out of suspicion. After going through this painful experience, Elahi conceived "tracking transients" and opened up almost all aspects of his life to the public. The project was five years earlier than the PRISM surveillance program of the National Security Agency (NSA), so it questioned the consequences of living under continuous surveillance and continuously generated image databases to track artists and their crossing points in real time. Although originally created for his FBI agent, the public can also monitor the artist's communication records, bank transactions and shipping logs, and various intelligence and government agencies that have confirmed access to his website.
The object created by Hasan Elahi looks like a lovely tapestry hanging on the wall from a distance. This artwork participated in an exhibition entitled "Look at You, Look at Me" organized by the Open Society Foundation of New York.
Hasan Elahi Prism v2, 2016. C. Grimaldis Gallery
As Elahi explained, because his name appeared on the terrorism watch list, he was grounded at Detroit Airport in 2002, and he was subsequently questioned by FBI agents. Elahi, an art professor at the University of Maryland, was born in Bangladesh and grew up in the United States. He chose an unusual answer to clarify his name and make a statement-he started a self-surveillance project, in which he filmed almost everything he took. And sent them to the FBI. He also posted them on the website he created. He took about 70,000 photos of the buildings he visited, the beds he slept in, the food he ate, the toilets he used, the roads he walked, etc.; he also issued receipts for the purchased items; he even used GPS to track himself s position. He wrote in the exhibition manual: “By disclosing mundane details about my daily life, I am simultaneously telling everything and nothing about my life” “I am flooding the market with banal information, and questioning its inherent meaning and value for intelligence purposes.” In the exhibition, Elahi made a huge tapestry made of tiny reproductions of 32,000 photos. It can run on multiple levels. Aesthetically and from a distance, it is a gorgeous, softly colored banner, Jasper Johns may be made of fabric. Look at each photo up close and understand the daringness of Elahi's surveillance project and the banality of intrusive surveillance (although the photo was taken by Elahi, this is a target that the spy agency may collect). You can also read these photos as a visual story of a man's life in the United States, or more broadly, life in the United States, where there are fast food restaurants, parking lots, airports, and strip clubs. His work is analog to digital to material.
Reference
Brighenti, A. M. (2010). Artveillance: At the Crossroads of Art and Surveillance. Surveillance and Society, 7(2), 175–186.
Picture reserved from: https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-hasan-elahi-vs-the-fbi-the-art-of-self-surveillance
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