Apologies for any cross-posting... I wanted to announce two new works that explore the nature of communication in the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations.
With Claudia Pederson, we released a project about the cultural imaginary of the NSA/GCHQ. The project uses the texts and imagery of the NSAs internal advice columnist, “Ask Zelda", as well as other documents and images from the NSA/GCHQ released by Edward Snowden and reported on by a variety of media outlets. Entitled "Art for Spooks", it is an augmented reality book that takes a poetic angle to electronic surveillance, asking what are the ways in which employees of these agencies see the world, if all that we have to go by are the released slides and text fragments. Using an iPad to examine the images in the book, visitors can see alternative cultural imaginaries that are provoked by the NSA/GCHQ images. Visitors have the opportunity to "share" images of these augmentations, including their own portraits, on various social networking services; metadata in these images are mangled to hide scholarly texts about surveillance, coordinates of drones strikes, and recombined versions of NSA/GCHQ texts. The spread of these images is designed to add to the images and metadata collected by these surveillance agencies, thus providing "art for spooks". The project is on view at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA until December 21st. More information can be found at http://art-for-spooks.org/. Imagery from users of Art for Spooks can be found on the following social media websites: * Flickr: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/126630681@N03/ * Twitter: https://twitter.com/artforspooks * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/artforspooks * Tumblr: http://art-for-spooks.tumblr.com/ The second project, “sylloge of codes”, asks what new means of communication we might need to develop in light of the revelations by Edward Snowden. If we know that everything is being surveilled, and if we know that encryption is not a panacea, then it behooves us to develop new, more poetic forms of communication. The project is meant to be portable, and consists of a computer and projector within a box. The computer opens up a local wireless network whereby visitors to the exhibition can suggest new “codes” or means of communicating that are resistant to computational analysis. Referring to the ancient practice of creating a “sylloge”, or a collection of Greek and Roman inscriptions, “sylloge of codes” asks us to construct a new sylloge for the 21st century. sylloge of codes is on view at: * Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, "New View: 2014 Faculty Show", September 17, 2014 to December 21, 2014 * Galería Macchina, Escuela de Arte de la Universidad Católica, Santiago, Chile, "In-Transit / En tránsito", August 20, 2014 to September 23, 2014 More information is available at http://www.sylloge-of-codes.net/ Please let me know if you have any questions or comments about these projects. Best, Nick Knouf ______________________________________________ SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe Info, archive and help: http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
