[ISEA2015] Artists Statement: Claudia Pederson & Nicholas Knouf — Art for Spooks

Artists Statement

Art for Spooks is an augmented book that takes a poetic angle to electronic surveillance. It combines texts and images from “leaked” NSA documents that evidence mundane concerns of NSA employees with grooming etiquette, gossip and surveillance at the work place; the development of encryption and psychological profiling tools modeled on alleged historical links between magicians and the military; and a delirious imaginary steeped in the world of modern folklore, populated as is with UFOs, popular media archetypes of evil and good, as well as (apparently) a taste for buffalo meat, high art, and orientalist and gendered themes. These materials are juxtaposed with graphics read through a tablet interface. The act of reading generates randomized data in the forms of new images and texts which are concurrently uploaded to various social media platforms. The traces of this data are refracted through algorithmic manipulation. Art for Spooks suggests that the intense categorization and cataloging of facts, phenomena, and life under current modes of surveillance, demands the invention of new ones that resist the stultifying effects of this kind of instrumentalization. With this in mind, the project concerns the creation of feedback meant to augment the paranoiac impulses of the spy (unburdened by such trivialities as plausibility or verification) through the fabrication of evidence for unprovable verification and the grafting of this evidence on the world. We will discuss the concept, process, context, and ideas behind the project.

art-for-spooks.org
The app can be downloaded from the Apple App Store

  • Claudia Pederson, Assistant Professor, Art History in New Media & Technology, Wichita University, USA. Claudia Pederson writes on and lectures in modern and contemporary art, with a focus on technology, media theory, and social practice. As an assistant professor of screen studies, she taught film at the H. Roy Park School at Ithaca College. Her writings on play, games, digital photography, and techno- ecological art are published in Afterimage, Intelligent Agent, Eludamos, as well as the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Design Automation Conference (DAC), and CHI conference proceedings. Her most recent essay on contemporary Latin American artists working with robotics is forthcoming in an anthology on Latin American Modernism. Other forthcoming writings include two essays on contemporary Latin American practices in art and ecology in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, no. 90 (Spring 2015), and in art, feminism, and technology in Journal of Peer Production (Special issue: “Feminism and (un)Hacking,” July, 2015). A co-authored chapter (with the Film scholar Patricia Zimmerman), on feminist engagements with post-cinematic media will be published in Indie Reframed: Women Filmmakers and Contemporary American Cinema (Edinburgh University Press). [Source: wichita.edu/academics/fine_arts/adci/about/faculty_staff/claudia_pederson.php]
  • 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. Ongoing work includes sylloge of codes, a self-contained wireless network that explores communication codes in the wake of Snowden, and Art for Spooks (with Claudia Pederson), an augmented reality book that takes a poetic approach to electronic surveillance. [source: turbulence.org/people/nicholas-knouf]