Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic by Maine College of Art & Design

MONITOR SURVEILLANCE, DATA, AND THE NEW PANOPTIC

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SURVEILLANCE, DATA, AND THE NEW PANOPTIC OCT. 1 – DEC. 10, 2021

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT MAINE COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

SURVEILLANCE, DATA, AND THE NEW PANOPTIC OCT. 1 – DEC. 10, 2021

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT MAINE COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

/10 INTRODUCTION /20 SURVEILLANCE IN MAINE /38 MONITOR: SURVEILLANCE, DATA, AND THE NEW PANOPTIC /52 MONITOR: A FILM SERIES /60 EXHIBITION ARTISTS

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/10 INTRODUCTION /20 SURVEILLANCE IN MAINE /38 MONITOR: SURVEILLANCE, DATA, AND THE NEW PANOPTIC /52 MONITOR: A FILM SERIES /60 EXHIBITION ARTISTS

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MONITOR

DIGITAL GLOBALIZATION

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MONITOR

DIGITAL GLOBALIZATION

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SURVEILLANCE

DATA LEAKS

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SURVEILLANCE

DATA LEAKS

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DATA

OMNIPRESENT SYSTEMS

/p.4–9 MARGARET LAURENA KEMP + ABRAM STERN, Unburning, video, 3 hr., 59 min., 2021. Score produced in collaboration with Richard Chowenhill. /p.6–7, Cover MARGARET LAURENA KEMP + ABRAM STERN, Unburning, metadata extracted from surveillance footage, printed data, paper, 2021.

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DATA

OMNIPRESENT SYSTEMS

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INTRODUCTION JULIE POITRAS SANTOS DIRECTOR OF EXHIBITIONS, ICA AT MECA&D

PANOPTIC

The Carpeta of Providencia Pupa Trabal a co-founder of the ProIndependence Movement (MPI). She had surveillance outside her home in 8 hour shifts 24 hours a day. It turned out a person who was like her second son had been informing on her to the cops. She found out when the files were declassified.

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CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA, Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

These questions among others have inspired Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic. A topic this vast must be understood with the aid of many, and artists seem particularly well-suited to this investigation given their interest in the visual, their engagement with technology, and their penchant for thinking “otherwise.” At its root, surveillance is about who is seeing and who is being seen. I am grateful to the artists with whom I’ve worked on this project; they reveal and contest long surveillance histories as much as a surveilled present. We have been monitoring each other for a very long time; only the methods have changed. And while surveillance can be used to extend care—for example, the use of contact tracing during the pandemic—the methods

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CONTACT TRACING

Somewhere, someone has access to my exact biometrics, the cadence of my step and rhythm of my days. In her recent book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshannah Zuboff unpacks a global economic system that commodifies personal data, including basic daily activities like walking. Other writers and artists in the past decade have sounded the alarm. Laura Poitras’s film, Citizenfour (2014), presents a clear view of Edward Snowden’s disclosures, raising ethical concerns about numerous global surveillance programs and their implications. Hito Steryl’s Duty Free Art (2017) confirmed a creeping unease regarding the era of digital globalization has bloomed into full blown concern. And in Dark Matters (2018), Simone Browne reveals how surveillance follows a trajectory from the very foundations of our country to the contemporary monitoring of blackness in America. Increasingly, we hear about surveillance programs through data leaks and whistleblower actions. Independent of the rise in shocking headlines, how do we make sense of these omnipresent systems of monitoring? How do we more comprehensively understand the growing dynamic between who is watching and who is being watched? How are artists looking back at, contesting, and revealing the systems that monitor our daily lives?

INTRODUCTION JULIE POITRAS SANTOS DIRECTOR OF EXHIBITIONS, ICA AT MECA&D

PANOPTIC

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CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA, Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

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CONTACT TRACING

12 are broadly open to misuse if we are not aware of them. The artists in this exhibition ask questions about imbalances of power, racist histories, biased algorithms, and the distinct vulnerabilities and methodologies inherent to these practices of oversight.

participation of people in Maine directly impacted by the carceral system, the project includes over 50 participating organizations and institutions from across Maine. The ICA at MECA&D is honored to work alongside so many generous organizations and individuals. Further fueling the conversation, Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic is accompanied by a robust series of visiting artist talks, and a panel discussion, in addition to the film series. Using research, film, video installation, sculpture, photography, and print media, the artists and collaborators of Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic tease out the complexities of surveillance, challenging us to be active watchers in the world. In becoming more alert to the gazes that monitor our lives, we are empowered to look back at them, to question and change them. BIASED ALGORITHMS

MONITOR

Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic has been developed in conversation with Brendan McQuade, Assistant Professor of Criminology at University of Southern Maine and Sophie Hamacher, artist and Assistant Professor of Academic Studies at Maine College of Art & Design. I met Brendan over Zoom in early January of this year. His book, Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision (2019), unpacks the network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers” that were developed after 9/11, asking questions about mass incarceration and policing. As an expert in considering the complexities of surveillance as it pertains to larger society, and specifically to Maine, his collaboration has been invaluable.

Sophie Hamacher has thought deeply about surveillance through her work on a forthcoming book, Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance. In collaboration with the exhibition, she has curated an extensive and powerful film series, MONITOR, that teases out and extends numerous conceptual threads such as oversight, enclosure, and sound in relation to surveillance. Her selection of films, screened at the ICA at MECA&D, Portland Museum of Art, SPACE Gallery, and Congress Square Park, amplify and further extend our understandings of surveillance technologies and the questions we might ask of them. I am grateful to Assistant Director Nikki Rayburn and to Exhibitions Assistant Sarah Sawtelle who have worked diligently to bring the exhibition to fruition. Samantha Haedrich designed this beautiful catalog in your hands. Finally, we are grateful for the support of the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, and to Jeremy Moser and Laura Kittle who provided additional generous support. Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic is part of Freedom & Captivity, a statewide, coalition-based public humanities initiative to explore and promote abolitionist visions and organizing in Maine during fall 2021, spearheaded by Catherine Besteman, Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. Recognizing that mass incarceration is fueled by racism and profit-generating mechanisms that tear apart communities and families, Freedom & Captivity offers opportunities for public engagement about imagining prison abolition and the redirection of resources toward community investments, the repair of racial and gender injustice, intergenerational trauma, and eldercare for the aging population in Maine’s prisons. Conceived with the

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MONITOR

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OVERSIGHT

SURVEILLANCE

ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, 20 pages, offset tabloid, printed on 50lb white newsprint. 3rd edition, 2000 copies 12.5 ✗ 17 in. (each), 2018–2021.

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OVERSIGHT

SURVEILLANCE

ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, 20 pages, offset tabloid, printed on 50lb white newsprint. 3rd edition, 2000 copies 12.5 ✗ 17 in. (each), 2018–2021.

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DATA

GENERALIZED SUSPICION

ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, posters, 60 ✗ 96 in. (each), 2018. YAZAN KHALILI, Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

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DATA

GENERALIZED SUSPICION

ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, posters, 60 ✗ 96 in. (each), 2018. YAZAN KHALILI, Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

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PANOPTIC

ALTERNATIVE GEOGRAPHY

KAPWANI KIWANGA, Glow 2, wood, stucco, acrylic, steel, LED lights, 59 ✗ 23.75 ✗ 8 in., 2019. ©2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Glow 3, wood, stucco, acrylic, steel, LED lights, 69.75 ✗ 39.5 ✗ 10 in., 2019. ©2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, posters, 60 ✗ 96 in. (each), 2018.

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PANOPTIC

ALTERNATIVE GEOGRAPHY

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Brendan McQuade is an assistant professor in the criminology department at the University of Southern of Maine and author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision (University of California Press, 2019). In addition to his academic writings, he has published commentaries in The Appeal, The Bangor Daily News, Counterpunch, Jacobin, and The Portland Press Herald. He is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and on the advisory board of the Visionary Organizing Lab.

SURVEILLANCE IN MAINE BRENDAN MCQUADE

In the last twenty years since 9/11, surveillance capacities of the US government have surged, transforming the country: a proliferation of new government organizations and companies focusing on counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence; the widespread application of new technologies like automated license plates readers, facial recognition surveillance, IMSI catchers for intercepting mobile phone traffic; and new culture of generalized suspicion. The art exhibit Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic at Maine College of Art & Design’s Institute of Contemporary Art provides an aesthetic exploration of this increasingly ubiquitous surveillance. While most discussions of surveillance focus on the federal government or large cities, the impact of the post-9/11 surveillance surge extended to all corners of the country —including the mostly rural state of Maine. In 2011, investigative reporters William Arkin and Dana Priest surveyed what they called “top secret America.” They counted over one thousand government organizations and nearly two thousand private companies focusing on security and surveillance in at least 17,000 locations across the United States. Much of this sprawling security apparatus is hiding in plain sight: a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency office in the shadow of a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million, an annex of the National Security Agency near a parking garage in the Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, an “alternative geography” of official secrets hidden in plain sight. 1 The central node of “top secret America” in Maine is the Maine Information and Analysis Center (MIAC), the state’s “fusion center.” While the federal government, through the Department of Homeland Security, encouraged the creation of fusion centers, they are operated by state and local authorities. The Maine State Police are

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FUSION CENTERS

MONITOR

SURVEILLANCE IN MAINE BRENDAN MCQUADE

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FUSION CENTERS

MONITOR

The MIAC is located in a drab office park in Augusta, Maine that includes other government offices and Maine General Express Care. For the first nine years of its operation, there was no public information about its budget, staffing or exact location. Initial public scrutiny came in 2015, when then-Governor LePage made the MIAC the centerpiece of the state’s anti-drug efforts. 2 In 2020, dramatic events drew back the curtain of secrecy. In May, a former state trooper blew the whistle, alleging that the MIAC had spied on peace and environmental activists, maintained an illegal database of gun owners, and violated privacy laws concerning data retention and sharing. 3 A month later, as the wave of Black Lives Matter protests swept the nation following the police murder of George Floyd, another scandal hit: BlueLeaks. Distributed Denial of Secrets, a transparency collective, published 269 gigabytes of data hacked from Netsential, a private contractor that administered 251 police websites. The massive disclosures included 5 gigabytes of MIAC documents. The leaks confirmed the whistleblower’s allegations that the MIAC monitored environmentalists opposing the Central Maine Power Energy Corridor. It also focused attention on four “Civil Unrest Reports” on Black Lives Matter Protests in Maine. 4

SHARING NETWORKS

SURVEILLANCE

the lead agency at the MIAC but personnel from federal, state, and local agencies fill out the staff. There are now eighty fusion centers throughout the country. They are good examples of the pervasiveness of contemporary surveillance. Fusion centers are analytic nodes in information sharing networks. While managed and staffed by police, fusion centers have agreements with other entities that allow them to remotely access their records. They buy databases from private brokers. They develop new data sources from technologies like automated license plate readers. Using specialized software, intelligence analysis creates sophisticated intelligence products from massive datasets: social network analyses, various forms of mapping, and visualizations of telephony metadata. Fusion centers, then, share this information and intelligence with other government agencies and the private sector.

In terms of fusion centers, the intelligence on protests were “situational awareness reports.” They were not part of an investigation. No informants were involved. Fusion center analysts gathered open source data and intelligence reports from other agencies in order to brief law enforcement on the public safety issues presented by the protests. In practice, however, situational awareness means sharing unsupported claims. All the “Civil Unrest Reports” warn of “Possible prestaging of bricks for access during Maine-based protests” and include a document from FBI’s Boston Field office that cited a Facebook screenshot attached as source. Nathan Bernard, a reporter with the Mainer, followed this lead. He found that the Facebook page cited in the FBI document

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ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, 20 pages, offset tabloid, printed on 50lb white newsprint, 3rd edition, 2000 copies 12.5 ✗ 17 in. (each), 2018–2021.

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SHARING NETWORKS

SURVEILLANCE

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ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, 20 pages, offset tabloid, printed on 50lb white newsprint, 3rd edition, 2000 copies 12.5 ✗ 17 in. (each), 2018–2021.

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25 in the background. Fusion centers and similar surveillance and intelligence programs are the nerve system of carceral state. 6

YAZAN KHALILI, Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

is owned by an individual with connections to hate groups who refers to himself as “The Wolfman.” 5

Several of the works included in Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic explore these very issues. Kapwani Kiwanga’s Glow confronts the brutal history of racial surveillance with a meditation on the 18th century lantern laws that forced black and indigenous enslaved people to carry a lit candle after dark, if not accompanied by a white person. Works from Ann Messner and Christopher Gregory-Rivera repurpose dossiers, akin to those MIAC files published in BlueLeaks, explore the socio-political implications and psychological effects of surveillance. Both regard the FBI’s notorious COINTELPRO program that targeted every major social movement in the mid-century United States. For example, Messner repurposes FBI files on W.E.B. DuBois, renowned social scientist and black radical, and Gregory-Rivera uses the cache of 16,000 dossiers created to monitor and suppress the movement for Puerto Rican independence.

This is just the tip of the BlueLeaks iceberg, however. The disclosures flooded the public record with nearly three thousand documents. Over 1,300 were either produced by the MIAC or shared with at least some of their 4,526 registered users. Nearly 80 percent of the documents created or shared by the MIAC concern the sharing of what is called “criminal intelligence.” Individually, each document is a fragment of a larger, incomplete story: a “wanted juvenile” who left a group home run by a private, for-profit service provider for people with “mental illness and/ or intellectual disabilities;” an “Armed…Maine (ME) resident living in the woods…reportedly suffering from mental health issues;” a “couchsurfing transient” with “several mental health issues (including his own claims of being bi-polar) and is off his medication(s).” Taken together, they reveal a coherent pattern: the punitive regulation of social problems through policing and surveillance. While the United States’ unparalleled incarceration rate and shocking levels of police violence rightfully dominate public discussions of the criminal legal system, mass surveillance is humming

Other exhibits reflect on specific surveillance technologies, some of which have been subject to intense debate in Maine. Yazan Khalili’s video installation Medusa engages with practices of digital archiving in times of political unrest through a reflection on facial recognition technology. This surveillance system matches images of an individual face, captured by photo or film, against a database of known identities. What makes facial recognition particularly controversial is the potential for automated, suspicionless surveillance that could be used to track individuals wherever they go. When linked with the massive databases—the kind that fusion centers aggregate and analyze—facial recognition technology can link a person to their data double, records aggregated from the electronic traces left when you go about your normal activities. 7

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While law enforcement and other proponents claim that facial recognition holds immense potential to protect “public safety,” it also threatens to change basic dynamics

TELEPHONY METADATA

DATA

The MIAC documents and the poor souls caught in the clumsy dragnet of mass surveillance underscore an important point about surveillance. Surveillance is administration, the management of people and things through the control of information within hierarchical relationships, organizations, and societies. While shocking specifics of contemporary technologies give surveillance the appearance of novelty, the basic process is old. In 17th century Europe, rulers first began to apply the new science of statistics to the problems of government. They redefined life as information and the body as an information technology, creating the opportunity for individuals to be policed through information that institutions produced about them—usually without their consent or knowledge.

25 in the background. Fusion centers and similar surveillance and intelligence programs are the nerve system of carceral state. 6

YAZAN KHALILI, Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

is owned by an individual with connections to hate groups who refers to himself as “The Wolfman.” 5

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While law enforcement and other proponents claim that facial recognition holds immense potential to protect “public safety,” it also threatens to change basic dynamics

TELEPHONY METADATA

DATA

of social interaction. The potential abuses and impact of facial recognition technology has led to a significant push to ban the technology before it becomes widely used and Maine has been at the forefront. The Portland City Council first considered the issue in November 2019 but tabled the issue for further study. 8 In this context, the Maine chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America launched a successful campaign to get a referendum for a municipal ban on facial recognition on the November 2020 ballot. In August 2020, with the referendum on the ballot and political sentiment shifting with the Black Lives Matter protests, the city council returned to the issue and banned facial recognition surveillance, making Portland the first city outside of California or Massachusetts to ban the controversial technology. 9 In November, Portland voters passed the referendum, which strengthened the ban. 10 In June 2021, the Maine House and Senate passed the strongest statewide facial regulations in the country. Facial recognition is prohibited in all areas of government and strictly regulates law enforcement use. Under these new rules, law enforcement may request a facial recognition search from the FBI and the state’s Bureau of Motor Vehicles (BMV) if they have probable cause to believe an unidentified person in an image has committed a serious crime. 11 That same legislative session, a bill to close MIAC—a first in the nation proposal to shutter a fusion center—passed the House but failed in the Senate. 12 These legislative actions speak to a growing awareness of surveillance and ill-effects throughout the country and here in Maine. These issues will not go away, nor will the contention and controversy that surrounds them. This exhibition is an opportunity to approach surveillance from aesthetic angles and reflect upon its multiple implications.

1. Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2011),67, 86. 2. Steve Mistler, “Secretive fusion center to play key role in Maine drug crackdown.” The Portland Press Herald, September 6, 2015. https:// www.pressherald.com/2015/09/06/ secretive-fusion-center-to-playkey-role-in-maine-drug-crackdown/ (accessed September 9, 2021)

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3. Judy Harrison, “Maine State Police illegally collecting data on residents, lawsuit claims,” Bangor Daily News, May 14, 2020, https:// bangordailynews.com/2020/05/14/ news/state/state-agency-illegallycollecting-data-on-mainers-claimstrooper-in-whistleblower-suit/ (accessed September 10, 2021). 4. Megan Gray, “Hack included documents from secretive Maine police unit,” The Portland Press Herald, June 26, 2020. https://

27 www.pressherald.com/2020/06/26/hackincluded-documents-from-secretivemaine-police-unit/ (accessed September 10, 2021). 5. Nathan Bernard and Caleb Horton, “Teenager or Terrorist,” The Mainer¸ July 29, 2020. https://mainernews. com/teenager-or-terrorist/ (accessed September 20, 2021). 6. Brendan McQuade, “Police Surveillance is Criminalization and it Crushes People,” Counterpunch, October 15, 2020, https://www. counterpunch.org/2020/10/15/policesurveillance-is-criminalizationand-it-crushes-people/ (accessed September 10, 2021). 7. Kelly Gates, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York: NYU Press, 2011). 8. Randy Billings, “Portland council again delays vote on facial recognition ban,” The Portland Press Herald, January 6, 2020. https:// www.pressherald.com/2020/01/06 / portland-council-again-delays-voteon-facial-recognition-ban/ (accessed September 10, 2021). 9. Randy Billings, “Portland councilors approve ban on facial recognition technology,” The Portland Press Herald, August 3, 2020, https://www.pressherald.com/ 2020/08/03/portland-councilorsapprove-ban-on-facial-recognitiontechnology/?rel=related (accessed September 10, 2021).

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10. Nick Schroder, “Portland boosts minimum wage to $15 as it passes wave of progressive policies,” The Bangor Daily News, November 4, 2020. https://bangordailynews. com/2020/11/04/news/portland/ portland-boosts-minimum-wage-to-15as-it-passes-wave-of-progressive-pol icies/?fbclid=IwAR1ZpYSILIGo01kVJdLg F2afn59EbrYMGbPhZupQZ3uqLygiTDucnUtX 0ME (accessed September 10, 2021). 11. Dave Gershgorn, “Maine passes the strongest state facial recognition ban yet,” The Verge, June 30, 2021. https://www.theverge. com/2021/6/30/22557516/maine-facialrecognition-ban-state-law (accessed September 10, 2021). 12. Caitlin Andrews, “Bill to close Maine police intelligence-sharing center clears House, but stalls in Senate,” Bangor Daily News, June 14, 2021. https://bangordailynews. com/2021/06/14/politics/house-votesto-close-maine-police-intelligencesharing-center/ (accessed September 10, 2021).

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

PANOPTIC

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SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

PANOPTIC

MONITOR

COHERENT PATTERN

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MONITOR

COHERENT PATTERN

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SURVEILLANCE

ELECTRONIC TRACES

/p.28–31 YAZAN KHALILI, Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

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SURVEILLANCE

ELECTRONIC TRACES

/p.28–31 YAZAN KHALILI, Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

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DATA

PUBLIC SAFETY

CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA, Las Carpetas, installed wallpaper, 112.25 ✗ 90 in., 2014–. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

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DATA

PUBLIC SAFETY

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PANOPTIC

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON

The Carpeta of Juan Ángel Silén who was the founder of the Federation of Pro-Independence University Students or FUPI. CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA, Las Carpetas, installed wallpaper, 72 ✗ 90 in., 2014–.

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Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. (Detail Above) Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

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PANOPTIC

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON

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MONITOR

PREDICTIVE POLICING

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MONITOR

PREDICTIVE POLICING

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MONITOR: SURVEILLANCE, DATA, AND THE NEW PANOPTIC

Surveillance has become an inescapable part of daily life. Phones record our every movement, call, and contact; cameras record our passage along the street; online sites record our interests and habits in order to engage in “better product placement.” Collected data streams to fusion centers, and while predictive policing targets specific communities for more intensive monitoring, Siri and Alexa listen in. Through social media we surveil each other and ourselves. Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic explores the ways in which our lives are being influenced and determined by visible and invisible actions of “watching over.” The works in the exhibition reveal, challenge, upend, or complicate the power balances inherent in these dynamics of oversight. The artists take up questions raised by increasingly networked and pervasive globalized systems of monitoring in numerous ways, tracing historical trajectories as much as contemporary revelations, in order to provide us with perceptual and historical tools for assessing our current, pervasive technological supervision.

YAZAN KHALILI, Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

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Because many surveillance processes are structured to be invisible, we often find out about them retrospectively, through data breaches, investigations, or leaks. In mid-July of this year, reports from multiple national and international news media organizations revealed that tens of thousands of phone numbers globally were targeted, and in some cases hacked, by Pegasus, a spyware product of the billion-dollar Israeli surveillance company NSO Group. In a well-publicized leak in 2013, former computer intelligence consultant for the CIA and NSA, Edward Snowden, revealed numerous global surveillance programs, prompting a conversation about national security and individual

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DATA BREACHES

SURVEILLANCE

JULIE POITRAS SANTOS DIRECTOR OF EXHIBITIONS, ICA AT MECA&D

MONITOR: SURVEILLANCE, DATA, AND THE NEW PANOPTIC

YAZAN KHALILI, Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

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DATA BREACHES

SURVEILLANCE

JULIE POITRAS SANTOS DIRECTOR OF EXHIBITIONS, ICA AT MECA&D

40 privacy. No citizen is free of monitoring; recent documents published in 2020 from the Blue Leaks trove revealed the extent to which the FBI monitored protests that arose after George Floyd’s murder, collecting and recording data throughout the country.

DATA

Trevor Paglen’s photograph, National Security Agency Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, UT (2012), captures the facility under construction, revealing the critical infrastructure brightly lit like an airport at night. Long known for his work that explores the legacies of surveillance technology, Paglen has systematically made visible the national project of surveilling citizens by revealing its architecture and physicality. While one can now plainly see a daytime view of the nondescript, white-roofed buildings arranged in a row within a kidney-shaped ring road on Google Earth, Paglen’s street-level image of the anonymous buildings glowing within the shadow of the Oquirrh Mountains reminds viewers of the enormity of these collection processes and how they are so often kept out of the way, their operations occluded or fenced from our view. In contrast to this contemporary oversight, the work of Kapwani Kiwanga looks toward the very troubled beginnings of our country’s founding. Kiwanga’s abstract sculptural forms stand like distant markers pointedly in the galleries, drawing the viewer toward them. Lit from within, Glow 2 and Glow 3 seem to resist you coolly at first viewing and to withhold their meaning. In making these works, Kiwanga drew on extensive research of early “lantern laws” in the United States. As described by scholar Simone Browne, lantern laws were 18th century laws in New York City that demanded that Black, mixed-race and Indigenous enslaved people carry candle lanterns with them if they walked about the city after sunset without the company of a white person. The law prescribed various punishments for those that didn’t carry this supervisory device. 3 Browne’s work has been critical in revealing the history of these pernicious

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methods of oversight. Kiwanga follows this lineage of surveillance, positioning it in relation to blackness in America, from its roots in slavery to the role that technology performs today. The works address a history of forced visibility, as well as that of strategic concealment. 4 A few works in Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic explore the archive in ways that retell collective histories, and give the viewer greater context for contemporary surveillance activities. Through a 20-page printed tabloid, Ann Messner regards the history of library surveillance as a besieged history of free and open access to knowledge in the US. Beginning with the first public library in the country, her work reveals the history of a public library as a public space; one, she notes, that “cannot be separated from the struggles for civil and human rights, of class and labor struggles, for religious and secular intellectual freedom and the right to enquire and question.” 5 Distributed freely from the ICA and throughout the state via the Maine State Library, the tabloid travels in its readers’ hands, and amasses a collection of evidence that points toward systematic use of surveillance and censorship to exert social control and reinforce belief systems and boundaries. In presenting this history, Messner reflects on the library as a living archive, one that is subject to changes and challenges over time. Through photographic still-lives, archival appropriation, and investigation, Christopher Gregory-Rivera examines the bureaucratic residue of a 40-year-long secret surveillance program of the Puerto Rican people begun in the 1930s. Gregory-Rivera explains, “From the 1930s until 1987, the Puerto Rican Police Department in conjunction with the FBI conducted a massive secret surveillance program in Puerto Rico. Its main goal was to suppress any groups or individuals who sought independence from the United States. This program tracked around 150,000 citizens and is one of the longestcontinuous surveillance projects conducted by the U.S. Government on its own citizens.” 6 The resulting project, Las Carpetas (2014–), presents Gregory-Rivera’s extensive documentation of these archival materials—including letters, personal objects, photographs, and books. The large-scale photographs offer the viewer an immersive, even overwhelming, image. As a counterhistory to the way many understand that period of time, Las Carpetas is a political act. Rescuing, photographing, and displaying the contents of the surveillance files allows individuals to retell their histories, even as they question how we know and remember our past. In contrast to the visual volumes presented by older archives, one salient aspect of current surveillance is the sheer mass of data that contemporary collection agencies capture and store. Margaret Laurena Kemp and Abram Stern’s collaborative video project, Unburning (2021), explores the possibility of scraping metadata from volumes of FBI

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SPYWARE PRODUCT

Thirty minutes south of Salt Lake City in the desert town of Bluffdale, housed by four large concrete structures, the National Security Agency’s Utah Data Center is one place where masses of collected data are stored. While we do not know exactly what data is stored there, we know it is one of the eight largest data centers in the world; the facility uses about 65 megawatts of electricity to operate per year. 1 Many articles were written about the Data Center when construction began in 2012, but it has since faded from public attention. Created in the decade after 9/11 when increased surveillance in the United States became progressively normalized, the Data Center is designed to store and process the yottabytes of information captured in the NSA’s digital dragnet; it intercepts, deciphers, analyzes, and stores vast swaths of the world’s communications collected from satellites and passed through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. 2

DATA

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SPYWARE PRODUCT

Yazan Khalili’s video installation, Medusa (2020), crafted from six monitors suspended from the ceiling, confronts the nuances of contemporary facial recognition technology by considering a mask of Medusa in a museum. The six monitors are cracked and covered with materials that interrupt the viewing and reinforce the physicality of the screen. Khalili’s work reflects how technology itself is not an untouchable abstraction. As a human invention, it hosts our respective weaknesses. It relies on images, histories, codes, decisions, regulations and glitches that, however complex, are mired in bias and insufficient data. 7 Investigating the poetic potential of gaps and failures within this technology, Khalili offers potential forms of resistance or response to this pervasive gaze, evoking what Simone Browne has called “practices of freedom” that one might exercise under such broad and pervasive supervision. In their immersive video installation, If AI Were Cephalopod (2019), the artist collective Orphan Drift explores the boundaries of machine and human vision, asking viewers to consider radically new ways of understanding Artificial Intelligence (AI). In contrast to the poetics of Khalili’s work which interrupts the experience of the screen, Orphan Drift invites viewers into an immersive video installation, drawing viewers past the architecture of the images to inspire our speculative imagination. Considering AI from the position of a cephalopod, Orphan Drift engages with embodied cognitive science, reinforced learning models, and radical anthropology. Their multiple channel installations suggest possibilities of expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception. Motivated by concern as much as fascination, Orphan Drift writes that their “imagining into the octopus’s distributed consciousness is underpinned by a desire to resist the evolution of AI as a surveilling and predictive modelling tool; rather to embrace a plastic, opportunistic, fluid, protean otherness

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embodied by the octopus.” 8 Their recent partnership with Etic Lab in Wales allows Orphan Drift’s speculative proposal to be explored in actuality with an ocean-like mesocosm and a living cephalopod. Challenging us to be active watchers in the world, the works in Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic trace long surveillance histories and a surveilled present, reinforcing the notion that these modes of vision and power must be recognized and remembered to contest them, rendered legible in order for us to perform the basic tasks of questioning or reimaging them. In becoming more alert to the gazes that monitor our lives, we are empowered to look back at them, enacting our own practices of freedom and resistance and, in process, transforming them.

1. Mukul Taneja, “The 8 Largest Data Centers in the World in 2020.” Analytics Vidhya, September 2, 2020, https://www.analyticsvidhya. com/blog/2020/09/8-largest-datacenters-world-2020/ (accessed September 13, 2021) 2. James Bamford, “The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)” March 15, 2012, https://www.wired. com/2012/03/ff-nsadatacenter/ (accessed September 13, 2021). 3. Claudia Garcia-Rojas, “The Surveillance of Blackness: From the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to Contemporary Surveillance Technologies,” Truthout, March 3, 2016, https://truthout.org/ articles/the-surveillance-ofblackness-from-the-slave-trade-tothe-police/ (accessed August 28, 2021). 4. Kapwani Kiwanga, Kapwani Kiwanga: Safe Passage, organized by Yuri Stone, MIT List Visual

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Arts Center, https://listart.mit. edu/exhibitions/kapwani-kiwanga (accessed August 28, 2021) 5. Ann Messner, statement on the work, 2021 6. Christopher Gregory-Rivera, statement on the work, 2021 7. Yazan Khalili, Yazan Khalili: Medusa, Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto, https://moca.ca/ exhibitions/yazan-khalili-2020/ (accessed August 30, 2021). 8. Orphan Drift, https://www. orphandriftarchive.com/ (accessed September 3, 2021)

DIGITAL DRAGNET

PANOPTIC

surveillance footage taken of the 2015 Baltimore uprisings after the death of Freddie Gray. Is it possible to “unburn” this data and reinhabit the resulting gaps with agency and power? Gray died on April 19 from injuries sustained while being transported in a police van; the protests against his mistreatment and inadequate answers from law enforcement grew over the course of that April and became violent. Soldiers from the Maryland Army National Guard were called in to control the protesters, and familiar sounds of helicopters thumped overhead. Freely available online, Kemp and Stern use aerial surveillance footage of that protest in combination with video from a durational performance by Kemp at the Montalvo Center for the Arts in 2017. Inspired by her quest to perform “The Souls of Black Folk” by W.E.B. Du Bois, the durational performance was captured solely by the audience on their cellphones. Their combined work, Unburning, as a whole, asks challenging questions about endurance and the indelible mark of surveillance on real bodies and lives.

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DIGITAL DRAGNET

PANOPTIC

MONITOR

DOMESTIC NETWORKS

ORPHAN DRIFT, If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019. ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, posters, 60 ✗ 96 in. (each), 2018.

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–11/13

MONITOR

DOMESTIC NETWORKS

ORPHAN DRIFT, If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019. ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, posters, 60 ✗ 96 in. (each), 2018.

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DATA

OPEN ACCESS

/p. 46–49 ORPHAN DRIFT, If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019.

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DATA

OPEN ACCESS

/p. 46–49 ORPHAN DRIFT, If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019.

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–11/15

SURVEILLANCE

FORCED VISIBILITY

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49 48

SURVEILLANCE

FORCED VISIBILITY

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49 48

PANOPTIC

A RECEIVER

TREVOR PAGLEN, National Security Agency Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, UT, C-print, 36 ✗ 48 in., 2012. Courtesy of Colby College Museum of Art. Museum purchase from the Jetté Acquisition Fund 2013.530.

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–11/19

PANOPTIC

A RECEIVER

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As a critical studies fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program she wrote extensively on the relationship between art and document, and the unconscious or conscious witnessing of historical events through photography and film. Her book Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance is forthcoming in 2022 with Orbis Editions. She currently teaches at Maine College of Art & Design.

MONITOR: A FILM SERIES PROGRAMMED BY SOPHIE HAMACHER

Seeking to update and renew the conventional “image” of surveillance, the film series MONITOR revisits surveillance in relation to its actors and techniques of observation and control. This surveillance is not limited to oppressive and authoritarian settings; instead, the films and videos included here underscore the ambiguous and contradictory nature of the surveillance we experience, as well as the indeterminate relationships it fosters. The artists and filmmakers navigate and negotiate these relationships while exploring issues of authenticity, discrimination, privacy, and depictions of power and identity. The eighteen films and videos in the series respond to being surrounded, meditating on the ways in which our lives are shaped and regulated by watching and being watched. As a noun, “monitor” references an instrument or device—a receiver—used for observation; as a verb, it addresses the proliferation and normalization of surveillance technologies. The series includes four short programs (Oversight Machines, Modes of Enclosure, Sentenced by Sound, and Cross Examinations) and one feature length film that offer a wide spectrum of filmic approaches—from the distanced ocular perspective of a military drone to intimate interrogations of online socializing and digital anonymity —each questioning, in their own way, the systems of power entangled with the visual. The history of the moving image is closely tied to the history of policing. One of the first instances of a camera’s use as a policing device dates back to the year 1935. 1 In Chesterfield, England police recorded a crime with a hidden 16mm camera. In the trial that followed, 14 men were convicted because of what that camera captured. Seven years later during World War II, military research yielded the first closed circuit television

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INTIMATE INTERROGATIONS

MONITOR

Sophie Hamacher is a filmmaker and teacher who has directed, edited and produced projects ranging in genres from full-length documentary to art videos and experimental films. She received her BA from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, holds a Meisterschüler degree in Film, Video, New Media (MFA) and an MAT in Art Education from the University of Arts in Berlin.

MONITOR: A FILM SERIES PROGRAMMED BY SOPHIE HAMACHER

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INTIMATE INTERROGATIONS

MONITOR

55 (CCTV) cameras. 2 As film theorist Catherine Zimmer has pointed out, “the imagery that we have come to associate with surveillance has been with film from the beginning.” 3

Find, Fix, Finish by Sylvain Cruiziat & Mila Zhluktenko, 2017.

MONITOR showcases a range of documentary approaches, as well as staged and performative works. Complicating the idea that there is one simple, top-down way to think about surveillance, the artists and filmmakers presented in the five parts of the series are not neutral. Instead, they present divergent perspectives, using historically specific technologies.

ALGO Rhythm by Manu Luksch, 2019.

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PART ONE: OVERSIGHT MACHINES OCTOBER 8, CONGRESS SQUARE PARK

This program’s title, borrowed from a work of Abram Stern in which he painstakingly censors surveillance footage, highlights the apparatuses of visibility and control that shape our experience of the world. These mechanisms are depicted in Sylvain Cruiziat and Mila Zhluktenko’s Find, Fix, Finish (2017), Chris Kennedy’s Watching the Detectives (2017), and Manu Luksch’s ALGO Rhythm (2019). Each of these question authority and representation in various ways: from aerial perspectives, through the removal of metadata, or simply by drawing our

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attention to the embrace of machine intelligence and our vulnerability to manipulation through data control. Find, Fix, Finish by Sylvain Cruiziat & Mila Zhluktenko, 2017, 19 min. Watching the Detectives by Chris Kennedy, 2017, 33 min. (silent) ALGO Rhythm by Manu Luksch, 2019, 14 min.

TOTAL OVER-VISIBILITY

SURVEILLANCE

Throughout the process of putting MONITOR together, three works that are not included in the program have served as a guide: Michael Klier’s film Der Riese (The Giant) (1982/3), the first city symphony put together entirely out of surveillance footage, Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File 4 (2013), a satirical instructional video demonstrating strategies for remaining “unseen” in an age of “total over-visibility”; and Terror Contagion (2021–ongoing), a film in which Laura Poitras documents Forensic Architecture’s investigation into the Israeli cyber-weapons manufacturer called NSO Group. Each of these films take a fundamentally different approach to portraying, criticizing, or encapsulating surveillance.

55 (CCTV) cameras. 2 As film theorist Catherine Zimmer has pointed out, “the imagery that we have come to associate with surveillance has been with film from the beginning.” 3

Find, Fix, Finish by Sylvain Cruiziat & Mila Zhluktenko, 2017.

ALGO Rhythm by Manu Luksch, 2019.

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PART ONE: OVERSIGHT MACHINES OCTOBER 8, CONGRESS SQUARE PARK

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TOTAL OVER-VISIBILITY

SURVEILLANCE

Two siblings walk through the hallways of the Metropolitan Museum of Art looking at artifacts. The body of one is dislocated, manufactured and projected. In California, grids and prison lines are drawn. Numbers are dislodged from an administrative building in Berlin, exploding and dissipating in the air; the same city was the theater to eavesdropping and codenames a few decades earlier. Google Earth excavates pixels, blurring borders and cementing the algorithmic management of daily life with its stories of visibility and its inverse. In Dakar, Los Angeles, Boston, and Baltimore, we are confronted with complications of the seen, the known, the heard and the detectable.

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As the only feature film in the program, Theo Anthony’s All Light, Everywhere (2021) attentively explores the associations between vision, cameras, and power. Questioning the idea of objective visual evidence, this film confronts images and information weaponized by US law enforcement.

All Light, Everywhere by Theo Anthony, 2021, 1hr. 49 min.

PART THREE: MODES OF ENCLOSURE OCTOBER 28, SPACE GALLERY Sondra Perry’s It’s the Game ‘17 (2018), Sarah Christman’s Dear Bill Gates (2006), Sara Zia Ebrahimi and Lindsey Martin’s The FBI Blew Up My Ice Skates (2016), Manu Luksch’s Mapping CCTV (2008), Alexander Johnston’s Evidence of the Evidence (2017), and Margaret Rorison’s One Document for Hope (2015) reflect on the role that images and their ownership play in the production of history and memory. From questions around simulations and visibility to playful interventions in the criminalization of communities of color, the films in this program examine the ways in which bodies and their representations are tracked, archived, manufactured, and ultimately enclosed.

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It’s the Game ‘17 by Sondra Perry, 2018, 16 min. Dear Bill Gates by Sarah Christman, 2006, 17 min. The FBI Blew up my Ice Skates by Sara Zia Ebrahimi and Lindsey Martin, 2016, 7 min. Mapping CCTV by Manu Luksch, 2008, 3 min. Evidence of the Evidence by Alexander Johnston, 2017, 22 min. One Document for Hope by Margaret Rorison, 2015, 7 min.

MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

DATA

PART TWO: ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE OCTOBER 14, PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART

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All Light, Everywhere by Theo Anthony, 2021, 1hr. 49 min.

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MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

DATA

PART TWO: ALL LIGHT, EVERYWHERE OCTOBER 14, PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART

Hacked Circuit by Deborah Stratman, 2014 courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

PART FOUR: CROSS EXAMINATIONS NOVEMBER 11, SPACE GALLERY

Harun Farocki’s Prison Images (2000) is composed of images from and about prisons. The screen itself becomes a walled-in area—a rectangle similar perhaps to the walls of a cell. In Cauleen Smith’s The Grid (2011) two figures mark out a symmetrical grid around a tree with forensic tape, referencing early experiments by Robert Smithson. These geometric forms— rectangles and squares — suggest rigid systems similar to the control technologies and law enforcement in Farocki’s work. Smith’s film hints at a different, more subtle form of surveillance:

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the observation of the land, the earth, and the work that is put into making a grid and taking it apart again, building and breaking a framework, a network, and calling the system’s rigidity into question. Prison Images by Harun Farocki, 2000, 60 min. The Grid by Cauleen Smith, 2011, 15 min.

Deborah Stratman’s Hacked Circuit (2014), Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Walled/Unwalled (2018), Josh Begley’s Best of Luck with the Wall (2016), Peggy Ahwesh’s Border Control (2019), Marc Thümmler’s Radfahrer (Cyclist) (2008), and Kamal Aljafari’s It's a Long Way from Amphioxus (2019) use sound to draw attention to the camera's mechanisms of observation. In each film, we are confronted with walls and how to navigate them in a pervasive climate of government and corporate surveillance. Some films offer ways of escaping while others document how information is mined and how bureaucratic mazes are blurred, reconsidered, and uncovered.

1.Chris Williams/James Patterson/ James Taylor, “Police Filming English Streets in 1935: The Limits of Mediated Identification,” Surveillance & Society 6 (2009), p.3–9 2.The Siemens corporation installed the first CCTV system in 1942 in Peenemünde—Nazi Germany—for observing the launch of the first ballistic missiles. Lawrence Cappello, None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 171.

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Hacked Circuit by Deborah Stratman, 2014, 15 min. Walled/Unwalled by Lawrence Abu Hamdan,2018, 21 min. Best of Luck with the Wall by Josh Begley, 2016 7 min. Border Control by Peggy Ahwesh, 2019, 4 min. Radfahrer (Cyclist) by Marc Thümmler, 2008, 28 min. It's a Long Way from Amphioxus by Kamal Aljafari, 2019, 16 min.

3. Catherine Zimmer, Surveillance Cinema: Narrative between Technology and Politics, Surveillance & Society Volume 8 No 4 (April 19, 2011): 428 4. https://www.artforum.com/video/ hito-steyerl-how-not-to-be-seen-afucking-didactic-educational-movfile-2013-51651

A FRAMEWORK

PANOPTIC

PART FIVE: SENTENCED BY SOUND DECEMBER 9, ICA AT MAINE COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

Hacked Circuit by Deborah Stratman, 2014 courtesy of Video Data Bank at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

PART FOUR: CROSS EXAMINATIONS NOVEMBER 11, SPACE GALLERY

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A FRAMEWORK

PANOPTIC

PART FIVE: SENTENCED BY SOUND DECEMBER 9, ICA AT MAINE COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN

EXHIBITION ARTISTS

Confiscated letters written to Heriberto Marín in prison. He served time for participating in the Jayuya Revolt when he was just a teenager.

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CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA, Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

Ann Messner is a NY-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work has examined fault lines between the individual and the larger social body as encountered within public realm discourse, investigating the incongruities between notions of private life/space and public/ civic engagement and experience. Her 1970's performative work, interventionist in strategy, took place 'unofficially' within the context of the urban street, and survives as super 8 film and 35mm photos. Messner's first solo exhibition, an ongoing public performance (Franklin Furnace 1978), utilized a crudely over-amplified typewriter with outside speakers projecting the pounding of keys well beyond the parameters of the interior building space. Later, in 1995, these early performances were critically considered together in the exhibition 'subway stories and other shorts, Ann Messner: photographs and film 1976–1980' (Nina Felshin, Dorsky Curatorial Projects).

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Messner’s recent work continues a commitment to civic engagement: 'The Real Estate Show and Other Histories', presented at Creative Time's Summit 2013: Art, Place, and Dislocation in the 21st-Century City; 'the underground potato' (in collaboration with activist/ artist Laurie Arbeiter), a food vending media cart, installed in the Essex Street Market Cuchifritos Gallery in conjunction with 'The Real Estate Show: Was Then: 1980; What Next 2014?'; and 'DuBois_the FBI files', commissioned for Du Bois in Our Time, University Museum of Contemporary Art, UMASS, Amherst. Ann is recipient of numerous fellowships: a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, the NEA, 3 NYFA Awards, and a Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship. She was a fellow at Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2000) and Princeton University Council on the Humanities (2001). She is currently full professor MFA Integrated Practices Fine Arts at Pratt Institute.

PRIVATE LIFE

MONITOR

ANN MESSNER

EXHIBITION ARTISTS

Confiscated letters written to Heriberto Marín in prison. He served time for participating in the Jayuya Revolt when he was just a teenager.

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CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA, Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

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PRIVATE LIFE

MONITOR

ANN MESSNER

62 the free library and other histories, posters, 60 ✗ 96 in. (each), 2018. the free library and other histories, 20 pages, offset tabloid, printed on 50lb white newsprint. 3rd edition, 2000 copies, 12.5 ✗ 17 in. (each), 2018–2021.

Christopher Gregory Rivera is a Puerto Rican photographer based in New York City. His work is particularly interested in rescuing historic narratives through documentary, still life and archival research to promote a better understanding of the present. He has lectured at the International Center of Photography in New York and his work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. He has been shown in the United States, Puerto Rico, and the Netherlands. He is a founding member of Blackbox, a visual cooperative that merges the creative processes of photography and design to build immersive stories and in 2019 he was selected for the World Press Photo Foundation Joop Swart Masterclass. Las Carpetas, installed wallpaper, 112.25 ✗ 90 in., 2014–. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

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Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, photographic wallpaper, 72 ✗ 90 in. 2014–. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014. Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

KAPWANI KIWANGA Kapwani Kiwanga (b. Hamilton, Canada) lives and works in Paris. Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religion at McGill University in Montreal and Art at l’école des Beaux-Arts de Paris. In 2020, Kiwanga received the Prix Marcel Duchamp (FR). She was also the winner of the Frieze Artist Award (USA) and the annual Sobey Art Award (CA) in 2018. Kiwanga’s Solo exhibitions include Haus der Kunst, Munich (DE); Kunstinstituut Melly – Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (NLD); Kunsthaus Pasquart, Biel/Bienne (CHE); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (USA); Albertinum museum, Dresden (DE); Artpace, San Antonio (USA); Esker Foundation, Calgary (CA); Tramway, Glasgow International (UK); Power Plant, Toronto (CA); Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago (USA); South London Gallery, London (UK); and Jeu de Paume, Paris (FR) among others. Selected group exhibitions

include Whitechapel Gallery, London (UK); Serpentine Galleries, London (UK); Yuz Museum, Shanghai (CHN); MOT – Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (JPN); Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (DE); Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden – MACAAL, Marrakech (MAR); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (CA); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston (USA); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (USA); Centre Pompidou, Paris (FR); Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal (CA); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aarhus (DK) and MACBA, Barcelona (ESP). Glow 2, wood, stucco, acrylic, steel, LED lights, 59 ✗ 23.75 ✗ 8 in., 2019. ©2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Glow 3, wood, stucco, acrylic, steel, LED lights, 69.75 ✗ 39.5 ✗ 10 in., 2019. ©2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. Works courtesy of Galerie Poggi, Paris.

MARGARET LAURENA KEMP + ABRAM STERN Margaret Laurena Kemp is an actor, a multidisciplinary performing artist, writer, director and teaching artist, whose research explores authorship and spatial politics through performance. She has performed at Arena Stage, Mark

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Taper Forum, Yale Repertory, South Coast Repertory, La Mama Theatre (Melbourne, Australia), Theatre of Changes (Athens, Greece), Red Pear Theatre (Antibes, France), and The Magnet Theatre (Cape Town, South Africa). In the winter 2021 release, Ten-Cent Daisy, she plays a mermaid who visits dry land to seek redemption. Additional film credits include the award-winning Children of God, Shangri-La Cafe and the supernatural film thriller Blood Bound. Her experimental performance films and durational performances have been installed at Women Made Gallery, Chicago (2020), Elaine Jacobs Gallery Detroit (2019). She is a Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, Davis. Abram Stern is an artist and scholar whose practice engages techniques of opacity and intelligibility within collections of government-produced media and metadata related to surveillance, militarized policing, carceral systems, and their oversight. This work analyzes media through which public bureaucracies address their citizens, subjects, and targets, while implicating and foregrounding the apparatuses of sense-making that make this analysis possible. His artworks and collaborations have been exhibited at New Langton Arts, The Beall Center for Art + Technology, Real Art Ways, and Museum Schnöggersburg. Abram is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Santa Cruz.

METADATA

SURVEILLANCE

CHRISTOPER GREGORY-RIVERA

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METADATA

SURVEILLANCE

CHRISTOPER GREGORY-RIVERA

65 Richard Chowenhill is an award-winning composer, guitarist, and audio engineer whose music has been performed the world over. Drawing influence from his experiences performing in rock and metal bands, chamber ensembles, orchestras, jazz groups, an early music ensemble, many theatre productions, and a Hindustani vocal ensemble, his compositions frequently reflect his diverse musical background.

DATA

Unburning, metadata extracted from surveillance footage, printed data, paper, 2021.

ORPHAN DRIFT

ORPHAN DRIFT, If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019.

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0rphan Drift has explored the boundaries of machine and human vision, since its inception in London in 1994. The collective as avatar has taken diverse forms through the course of its career, sometimes changing personnel and artistic strategies in accordance with the changing exigencies of the time. In its latest manifestation, 0rphan Drift considers Artificial Intelligence through the somatic tendencies of the octopus—as a distributed, manyminded consciousness. Inspired by embodied cognitive science and radical anthropology, their

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If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019. Video Production, Sequencing & Animations: Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts

BOUNDARIES

Unburning, video, 3 hr. 59 min., 2021. Score produced in collaboration with Richard Chowenhill.

multiple channel installations suggest possibilities in expanding and inhabiting other systems of perception and proprioception. They combine video, animation and text with newer tools such as LIDAR scanning to suggest new spatio-temporal formations and ask what kind of bodies might be possible with these new coordinates. 0rphan Drift works have been included recently in the exhibitions May the Other Live in Me, Laboratoria Art & Science, Moscow, The Archive To Come at Telematic Gallery San Francisco; This Is A Not-Me at iMT Gallery London; 0rphan Drift and Friends, Public Records TV NYC; Still I Rise: Gender, Feminisms and Resistance at Nottingham Contemporary, De La Warr Pavilion and Arnolfini, UK; Matter Fictions at the Berardo Museum Lisbon; Speculative Frictions at PDX Contemporary Portland Or; Eat Code and Die at Lomex Gallery NY and in the book “Fictioning, The Myth-Functions of Contemporary Art and Philosophy”, by David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan, Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Solo exhibitions include If AI were Cephalopod at Telematic Gallery San Francisco and Unruly City at Dold Projects, Sankt Georgen Germany.

DATA

Unburning, metadata extracted from surveillance footage, printed data, paper, 2021.

ORPHAN DRIFT

ORPHAN DRIFT, If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019.

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If AI Were Cephalopod, 4 channel video installation, 11 min., 2019. Video Production, Sequencing & Animations: Ranu Mukherjee and Maggie Roberts

BOUNDARIES

Unburning, video, 3 hr. 59 min., 2021. Score produced in collaboration with Richard Chowenhill.

66 Lidar Scan Animations: Jason Stapleton, Lightfarm Blender Effects: Inga Tilda Underwater Filming, Field & Studio Recordings: David van Rensburg Octopus Footage: Ranu Mukherjee, Maggie Roberts & Olivia Berke Audio Textures: Justin Allart Synth Audio: Aragorn 23 Audio Mix: Maggie Roberts with Mike Maurillo Catalogue Design: Jack Orsulak

PANOPTIC

TREVOR PAGLEN Trevor Paglen was born in 1974 in Camp Springs, Maryland, and lives and works in Berlin. In 2018 his mid-career survey exhibition Sights Unseen was held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog. Further one-person shows have been held at the Barbican, London; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno; Secession, Vienna; Berkeley Art Museum; Kunsthall Oslo; and Kunsthalle Giessen, Germany. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art,

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Gateshead, United Kingdom; Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Haus der Kunst, Munich; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. He participated in the 2009 Istanbul Biennial; 2012 Liverpool Biennial; 2013 ICP Triennial, New York; and the 11th Gwangju Biennale. He has received numerous awards, including a 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2014 Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award for his contributions to counter-surveillance, and the 2016 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize. His authored publications include The Last Pictures (New York: Creative Time Books; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), a critical compendium of his Creative Time project to launch an ultra-archival disc, micro-etched with one hundred photographs, into orbit around the Earth for billions of years; Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York: Penguin Publishers, 2009); and I Could Tell You but Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me: Emblems from the Pentagons Black World (Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing, 2007). Phaidon published the artist's first complete monograph in 2018. (Metro Pictures) National Security Agency Utah Data Center, Bluffdale, UT, C-print, 36 ✗ 48 in., 2012.

Courtesy of Colby College Museum of Art. Museum purchase from the Jetté Acquisition Fund 2013.530.

YAZAN KHALILI Yazan Khalili lives and works between Ramallah and Amsterdam. He is an architect, visual artist, educator, and cultural producer. Currently he is a Ph.D candidate at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, and a guest artist resident at Rijksakademie. His artistic and cultural practice frames landscapes, institutions, and social and technological phenomena as politicized entities. He is interested in structures, institutional as well as other, and how those structures are built, and how they perform. This aspect can be traced in his work at Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, in Ramallah where he led the institution between the years 2015–2019, critiquing funding and the foundations of a cultural institution under settler colonialism and donors’ economy. He is also co-founder of Radio Alhara in 2020. His works have been exhibited in several major solo and collective exhibitions, including at KW, Berlin (2020); MoCA-Toronto (2020); New Photography, MoMA (2018); Jerusalem Lives, Palestinian Museum (2017), Post-Peace, Kunstverein

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Stuttgart (2017); Shanghai Biennial (2016); and Sharjah Biennial (2013). His writings and photographs have been featured in several publications, including eflux journal, Assuming Boycotts, Kalamon, and Race & Class. He is also the co-chair of photography discipline at the MFA program at Bard, NY. Medusa, 6 channel video installation, 21:57 min., 2020.

PROPRIOCEPTION

Produced with support of Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco

PANOPTIC

12/04–

Courtesy of Colby College Museum of Art. Museum purchase from the Jetté Acquisition Fund 2013.530.

–12/05

PROPRIOCEPTION

Produced with support of Telematic Media Arts, San Francisco

MONITOR

A FRAMEWORK

MARGARET LAURENA KEMP + ABRAM STERN, Unburning, metadata extracted from surveillance footage, printed data, paper, 2021.

12/06–

–12/07

MONITOR

A FRAMEWORK

MARGARET LAURENA KEMP + ABRAM STERN, Unburning, metadata extracted from surveillance footage, printed data, paper, 2021.

12/06–

–12/07

This publication is prepared in conjunction with Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic, an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design from October 1 –December 10, 2021.

Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic is funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional generous support provided by Jeremy Moser and Laura Kittle. The exhibition is organized by Julie Poitras Santos, Director of Exhibitions, ICA at MECA&D, in conversation with Sophie Hamacher, Assistant Professor of Academic Studies at Maine College of Art & Design, and Brendan McQuade, Assistant Professor of Criminology at University of Southern Maine, and will be accompanied by visiting artist talks and a panel discussion. A film series, organized in conjunction with the exhibition by Sophie Hamacher, screened at the ICA at MECA&D, Portland Museum of Art, SPACE Gallery, and Congress Square Park. Preparatorial work for Yazan Khalili realized by Assistant Director Nikki Rayburn; large wall prints for Christopher Gregory-Rivera’s work by generous donation from Designtex.

A NETWORK

SURVEILLANCE

The exhibition features the work of 8 visual artists, Christopher Gregory-Rivera, Margaret Laurena Kemp + Abram Stern, Yazan Khalili, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ann Messner, Orphan Drift (Ranu Mukherjee + Maggie Roberts), and Trevor Paglen and includes works of photography, sculpture, video, installation, and print.

Ann Messner’s project, the free library and other histories, distributed, with the help of the MECA&D Joanne Waxman Library, throughout the state via Maine State Library. Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic is part of Freedom & Captivity, a statewide, coalition-based public humanities initiative to explore and promote abolitionist visions and organizing in Maine during fall 2021.

12/08–

–12/09

A NETWORK

SURVEILLANCE

12/08–

–12/09

The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design cultivates engagement and dialogue regarding contemporary visual art practices, aiming to foster discourse on the critical conversations of our time and to enhance understanding of visual culture. Located in stunning galleries in Maine College of Art’s landmark Porteous Building, the ICA at MECA&D presents an exhibition calendar of ambitious work by living artists accompanied by public events and artist talks, operates as a learning laboratory for MECA&D students, and as a center for public programming regarding contemporary art that engages with the local, national and global art community. © Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design. All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be published without the written permission of the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design.

Logo Design | Brittany Martin Catalog Design | Samantha Haedrich Installation Photography | Luc Demers The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design 522 Congress Street Portland, ME 04101 www.meca.edu/ica

12/10

–12/10

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART AT MECA&D

Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic

Articles inside

INTRODUCTION

EXHIBITION ARTISTS

SURVEILLANCE IN MAINE

MONITOR: A FILM SERIES

MONITOR: SURVEILLANCE DATA, AND THE NEW PANOPTIC