Panel Statement

Keywords: Poetic, disruption, surveillance, counter-surveillance, art, appropriation, federal, documents, visualization, augmented reality

This paper explores artistic practices that reappropriate released and “leaked” United States governmental documents. The steady trickle of documents from Edward Snowden’s cache, alongside the massive disclosures from Wikileaks, are only a small part of the regular release of documents via the Freedom of Information Act. This trove of material provides much fodder for artistic investigations into open culture, surveillance, counter-surveillance, drone warfare, and torture, among other topics. Nevertheless, the historical and contemporary artistic approaches discussed will focus more on poetic responses that upset a purely instrumental, objective analysis of the material. Art for Spooks and the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA) will serve as the main catalysts for exploring the efficacy of the poetic in a time of objectification and quantification.

• Derek Curry (USA). His artistic practice engages questions of agency and knowledge production through a variety of media from video games and data analytics, to participatory performance and sculptural data visualizations, and his research focuses on algorithmic modes of control, particularly in the electronic stock exchanges.
• Jennifer Gradecki’s artistic practice and research focuses on the relationship between information and power, particularly in intelligence agencies, and aims to make specialized knowledge and technical information more accessible. Curry and Gradecki are both currently PhD candidates at SUNY Buffalo, USA, in Media Study and Visual Studies, respectively. They earned their MFAs in New Genres from UCLA’s Department of Art in 2010 and have participated in numerous international exhibitions and conferences, including the New Media Gallery in Zadar, the AC Institute in New York, the Science Gallery in Dublin, Critical Finance Studies in Amsterdam, the International Symposium on Electronic Art in Vancouver, and Radical Networks at NYU Polytechnic–Eyebeam.
• Nicholas Knouf is an Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College in Wellesley, MA, USA. His research explores the interstitial spaces between media studies, information science, critical theory, digital art, and science and technology studies. His work has been discussed in print and online media, including Vice (Motherboard), ID Magazine, the Boston Globe, CNN, Slashdot, and Afterimage. He has a PhD in Information Science from Cornell University.
• Claudia Pederson’s research interests focus on the theories, histories and practices spanning art, technology, and social agency. Her writings on play, games, digital photography, and techno-ecological art are published in Afterimage, Intelligent Agent, Eludamos, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, as well as the ISEA, DAC, and CHI conference proceedings. Her most recent essays on contemporary Latin American artists working with robotics, interactive textiles and consumer electronics are forthcoming in an anthology on Latin American Modernism and Journal of Peer Production. Pederson holds a PhD from the History of Art and Visual Studies Department at Cornell University (USA) and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art, Design and Creative Industries at Wichita State University (USA).

Full text (PDF) p. 1006-1013