In the last seven years, in a series of performances, publications, exhibitions, and installations, Trevor Paglen has explored the world of hidden military projects and infrastructure. One of his best-known series is Limit Telephotography, for which he trained lenses designed for astronomical photography on secret military bases in the U.S., using their very-long-range photographic capabilities to capture images that would otherwise be hidden to civilian eyes. These are the “limits” that lie at the heart of Paglen’s project: the limits of democracy, secrecy, visibility, and the knowable. He is one of many artists who have evolved new and various ways of engaging with the military and the secret state in the years following the declaration of the “War on Terror.” The work of these artists remains as apposite as ever, as the U.S. and its allies continue to bomb suspected enemies (and anyone else who gets “too close”) and to run “black” sites and secret gulags in which people are held (and tortured) beyond the reach of the law. Paglen has made works that raise fundamental questions about what can be known and seen, while simultaneously writing investigative exposés of the shadow state. This interview explores some of the relations and tensions between the two practices.

Access (by Marie Sester) is a public art installation that applies web and surveillance technologies, allowing web users to track individuals in public spaces with a unique robotic spotlight and acoustic beam system, without people wearing any gear, exploring the ambiguities among surveillance, control, visibility and celebrity.

Architecture of Fear explores how feelings of fear pervade daily life in the contemporary media society. The cause of fear seems interchangeable and constantly fluctuating. Shifting from one thing to the next, often relating to invisible or indirect phenomena’s (terrorism, viral diseases, pollution, financial crisis), anything has the ability to become a potential threat. Rather than an immediate emotional strategy for survival fear is becoming a constant low level feeling in the background that gives rise to a new global infrastructure based on security, prevention and risk-management.

Architecture of Fear brings together a selection of international artists and designers that reflect in different ways on the society of fear, ranging from registration and critical research, to exploring its emotional, social and spatial mechanisms.

With Bureau D’Etudes, De Geuzen, Floris Douma, Laurent Grasso, Ilkka Halso, Susanna Hertrich, Charlotte Lybeer, Jill Magid, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Tracey Moffatt, Trevor Paglen, Marie Sester, Kin Wah Tsang and Els Vanden Meersch.

LoVid: 486 Shorts (2006) stems from a personal interaction with an ordinarily closed off part of a common machine. By getting inside the black box (the casing of an archaic 486 computer), LoVid reached the physical location where signals are passed. Wire was used to make connections on the circuit board of the video card, to produce short videos. Recordings made from these shorts were then edited into 486 short clips, each corresponding to one of the physical shorts. 486 Shorts was recorded during a residency at iEAR in 2006 and released on Analogous in 2009.

More of the Same (2007) loads copies of one sound sample, causing each computer/browser/network system to produce different sounds. 
Many copies challenge the setup and may not “work” properly, or may cause the browser to crash.
One image is also repeated horizontally and vertically in each window, the same number of times as the sound is loaded.

Commissioned by New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., for Networked_Music_Review. It was made possible with funding from the New York State Music Fund, established by the New York State Attorney general at Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

LoVid, the artist duo Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, has performed at Lampo at Graham Foundation, International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA, PS1, The Kitchen, Roulette, Aurora Picture Show , and FACT. LoVid installations and objects have been exhibited at Netherland Media Art Institute, The Science Gallery (Ireland), Real Art Ways, Urbis, (UK), The Jewish Museum, The Neuberger Museum, and The New Museum. LoVid has been artist in residence at STEIM, Smack Mellon, Cue Art Foundation, Eyebeam, Harvestworks, free103point9, and Alfred University, and has received fellowships and grants from The Netherland America Foundation, NYFA, LMCC, Experimental TV Center, NYSCA, turbulence.org, and Greenwall Foundation.

Jill Magid seeks intimate relations with impersonal structures. She is intrigued by hidden information, being public as a condition for existence, and intimacy in relation to power and observation. Magid has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Tate Modern, London; Berkeley Art Museum, Matrix program; Yvon Lambert in New York and Paris; Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam; and Gagosian Gallery, New York. She has written three books: One Cycle of Memory in the City of L; Lincoln Ocean Victor Eddy, Becoming Tarden, and is currently working on her fourth, Failed States. Magid lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

In 2004, Magid spent 31 days in Liverpool, during which time she developed a close relationship with Citywatch (Merseyside Police and Liverpool City Council), whose function is citywide video surveillance – the largest system of its kind in England. The videos of Evidence Locker were staged and edited by the artist and filmed by the police using the public surveillance cameras in the city centre. Wearing a bright red trench coat she would call the police on duty with details of where she was and ask them to film her in particular poses, places or even guide her through the city with her eyes closed, as seen in the video Trust. Unless requested as evidence, CCTV footage obtained from the system is stored for 31 days before being erased. For access to this footage, Magid had to submit 31 Subject Access Request Forms – the legal document necessary to outline to the police details of how and when an ‘incident’ occurred. Magid chose to complete these forms as though they were letters to a lover, expressing how she was feeling and what she was thinking. These ‘letters’ form the diary One Cycle of Memory in the City of L – an intimate portrait of the relationship between herself, the police and the city.

‘Art, as part of our time, culture and society, shares and is affected by rules, structures and tics like other economic, political and social systems in our environment.’ So began the interviews given by Antoni Muntadas between 1983 and 1991 to one hundred and sixty agents from the international art circuit, and compiled in the installation Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona), 1983–1993 (2011). The origins of the work are to be found in the exhibition Comments at the Long Beach Museum of Art, 1983, in which the artist took part, and where the explanations of his piece La Televisión, 1983, given by the museum guides, prompted him to initiate this new project. The work is part of Muntadas’s multiple installations that dissect the complex mechanisms of art, politics and economics.

According to the author, Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona), 1983–1993 (2011) presents ‘a vision of the art system in the eighties’, although the configuration of the work continued until the beginning of the year 2000, through the artist’s constant re-elaborations and modifications of the presentation device of the installation. The work includes eight ‘chapters’ of different durations (between 15 and 45 minutes), amounting to a total of 260 minutes of screening, edited by Muntadas from two hundred hours of interviews conducted by him with dealers, gallery owners, collectors, museum directors, guides, critics and media specialists. The last chapter serves as an ‘epilogue’ in which Muntadas gathers together the opinions of several artists regarding the art system. The interviewees — professionals representing the various levels of mediation between the work of art and the public — talk about their values, functions, responsibilities and points of view. Even though every interviewee was asked the same questions, the flow of responses expresses a significant variety of often-conflicting opinions.

Muntadas presents these videos with a radial exhibiting device: a circular modular structure with a central space (a physical space for discussions, hence the term Forum in the title), marking the convergence of seven cellular spaces with a monitor each, where the various chapters are projected simultaneously. Each space (lit in a different colour) is dedicated to a particular type of art professional. Each section functions independently, but also as an integral part of the series that converges into the central space, a meeting place where contrasting opinions are expressed and where the spectator can wander, reorder and interpret what is being seen and heard. The installation’s radial structure evokes an inverted Panoptic, the architecture of the modern penitentiary system, which, according to Michel Foucault, characterises disciplinarian modern societies. Muntadas puts the spectator in the place of the invigilator, so that he becomes a supervisor of the art system. In this way, the public is asked to be vigilant.

In the videos projected in the different spaces of the installation, Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona), 1983–1993 (2011) avoids the classic visual format for interviews. Instead of showing the interviewee (who appears only at the beginning), the recorded answers are accompanied by images that function as a visual metaphor of the role of the interviewee in the art system. Thus, a day at the Tokyo Stock Exchange for the collectors, the comings and goings of waves for the critics, and a train for dealers and gallery owners. These images, qualified as ‘open visuals’ by the artist, are a visual resort that helps to reinforce the project’s intention. However, although generic names such as ‘critics’ or ‘collectors’ are used and their specific roles expressed, the interviewees offer a totally heterogeneous perception of their role. The images reinforce this plurality: Muntadas associates each group of professionals with a visual theme, but the images come from multiple camera perspectives: a way of indicating that what matters are not the people speaking or their positions of authority, but the values and opinions they bring to the fore. This allows Muntadas to avoid the art world’s tendency towards mystification. Furthermore, all the interviews are presented in their original language: English, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, French and Portuguese.

The installation’s modular structure is adapted to the architectural constitution and the different needs of every space. Although the original version of the work was circular, in 1994, at the Musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux, the monitors were distributed in different parts of the museum. Lately, Muntadas has invited various professionals from the art world and other cultural fields to construct the presentation device, in accordance with the music model where every musician plays his own score. Since MACBA acquired the work in 2010, Muntadas has recovered the original circular structure, which is shown next to the testimonials of the successive installations and actualisations of the work.

Coinciding with the presentation of Between the Frames: The Forum (Barcelona), 1983–1993 (2011) at MACBA, visitors will find, on the ground floor of the MACBA Study Center, the original interviews that served as raw material for the videos in the installation. The recordings were acquired by the Library in 2009, when the artist and MACBA agreed on the digitalisation of the material, since it constitutes a valuable document for anyone interested in the art world’s protagonists during the eighties. Far from limiting or closing the work, this double acquisition offers new readings and interpretations of the project, given its long duration and constant reformulation.

*Image above: MACBA Collection. Fundació Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Colección Fundación Repsol. Photo: Yokohama Portside Gallery, Yokohama, Japan, 1997. Courtesy of the artist. © Muntadas, VEGAP, Barcelona, 2011

In conjunction with the exhibition The Talent Show (through August 21), The Henry Art Gallery invites you to join artist James Coupe for a screening and discussion of the artist’s recent work with ’surveillance cinema’ in (re)collector, Surveillance Suite, and the web-based work Today, too, I experienced something… I hope to understand in a few days.

James Coupe is an artist whose work focuses on emergent systems, aesthetic machines, autonomy, and networks. Educated in Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) and Creative Technology at the University of Salford (England), his recent projects have included appropriative powerline networks, parasitical cellular phone agents, autonomous robot systems, self-organizing telephone call centres, and installations in which computers use spam to search for the meaning of the Internet. His recent work with ’surveillance cinema’ explores the witting and un-witting relationship between the artist/participant and the viewer/ participant. This method of ‘surveillance cinema’ utilizes computer vision software to extract demographic and behavioral information from video footage from a variety of sources including YouTube clips, studio footage, and surveillance camera feeds. The footage is then algorithmically reorganized and recontextualized into narratives, often using cinematic ‘templates’ such as Antonioni’s classic film Blow-Up.

(re)collector (2007) from James Coupe on Vimeo.

Day 3 from James Coupe on Vimeo.

Coupe has exhibited both nationally and internationally, receiving awards from the U.K. Arts and Humanities Research Board Innovation Award, Creative Capital and Artist’s Trust.

The Interception series of actions consists of the illegal interception of CCTV cameras monitoring urban areas. The intercepted CCTV cameras are then used in order to raise public awareness of the growing issues of social surveillance implemented by means of technological devices — Surveillance Culture.

This time the action involved the use of a remote control robot constructed by the author himself. The robot enabled monitoring of the location of a security officer who supervised the part of the residential area concerned. Such a solution permitted to carry out an effective intervention at the perfect time.
The robot had been designed and constructed at home with the use of the generally available technology (shops selling model kits, CCTV devices, electrical appliances, metal and aluminium strips). No construction elements (subassemblies) had been purchased with the use of a credit card and their selection had not been discussed on online forums, which made potential identification of the creator of such a device significantly more difficult. The action was illegal.

[...] “What is being lived today is new because of its relationship with space.

It’s here that the thinking of Zygmunt Bauman is illuminating. He points out that the corporate market forces now running the world are ex-territorial, that’s to say “free from territorial constraints — the constraints of locality.” They are perpetually remote, anonymous and thus never have to take account of the territorial, physical consequences of their actions. He quotes Hans Tietmeyer, former President of the German Federal Bank: “Today’s stake is to create conditions favorable to the confidence of investors.” The single supreme priority.

Following this, the control of the world’s populations, who consist of producers, consumers, and the marginalized poor, is the task allotted to the obedient national governments.

The planet is a prison and the obedient governments, whether of left or right, are the herders.

***

The prison system operates thanks to cyberspace. Cyberspace offers the market a speed of exchange which is almost instantaneous and used across the world day and night for trading. From this speed, the market tyranny gains its ex-territorial license. Such velocity, however, has a pathological effect on its practitioners: it anesthetizes them. No matter what has befallen, “business as usual.”

There is no place for pain in that velocity; announcements of pain perhaps, but not the suffering of it. Consequently, the human condition is banished, excluded from those operating the system. They are alone because utterly heartless.

[...]

For fellow prisoners the opposite is true. Cells have walls that touch across the world. Effective acts of sustained resistance will be embedded in the local, near and far. Outback resistance, listening to the earth.

[...]

The authorities do their systematic best to keep fellow prisoners misinformed about what is happening elsewhere in the world prison.

[...]

This is done with carefully selected information, with misinformation, commentaries, rumors, fictions. Insofar as the operation succeeds, it proposes and maintains a hallucinating paradox, for it tricks a prison population into believing that the priority for each one of them is to make arrangements for their own personal protection and to acquire somehow, even though incarcerated, their own particular exemption from the common fate. This image of mankind as transmitted through a view of the world is truly without precedent. Mankind is presented as a coward; only winners are brave. In addition, there are no gifts; there are only prizes.

[...] “My feeling is that the complexity of this terrain is such that abstract principles and so-called “best practices” aren’t particularly likely to be useful in guiding us toward better decisions unless they’re firmly grounded in a concrete consideration of some present-day actualities. In our attempt to think more clearly about these issues, therefore, we start by considering five real-world informatic systems, all developed and deployed in the past three years. These are arrayed along a spectrum of concern, from a sensor I think of as self-evidently non-threatening, to something I believe the privacy community particularly — and advocates of high-quality public space in general — ought to be deeply troubled by…”

The Texas Border — by Joana Moll — is an audiovisual installation in which the recorded broadcasts of surveillance cameras placed along the US Mexican border in Texas are shown. BlueServo is an Internet platform run by The Texas Border Sheriff’s Coalition where 25 surveillance cameras are opened to anyone willing to control Mexican individuals attempting to enter the US in an illegal way and report those actions through the website. The installation also includes sixty four videos, part of the BlueServo archive, that show failed incursions into the US territory as a direct consequence of those reports carried out by anonymous BlueServo users. 500 post cards with BlueServo’s direct instructions on how to execute this surveillance in an efficient way were printed specially for the exhibition. Visit the online version here.

Discontrol Party is a dispositif which brings together two worlds: that of state-of-the-art surveillance techniques and that of partying. The dancefloor/ live music venue/ performance space will appear in the dual spotlight of a partying event and a data-driven control and surveillance system (computer vision, RFID, recording by smartphones, etc.) The main space of the Gaíté Lyrique becomes for the space of one evening a night-club set up as a control room: far from light effects or other VJing, the participants, while partying, are confronted by multiple visualizations of the information technology system which observes them and seeks to analyze their behavior.

Like a game presented to a focus group or a large scale Beta-testing, the challenge is launched: Can partying outplay the system? Lead it into a confusion which escapes it? Cause breakdown? Create a bug in the system? Because here, you are invited to a party where the ‘monitoring’ by the dispositif on which you are acting is openly visible: the mappings and the listings of movements and behaviors, the attempts at interpretation, the raw images from the surveillance cameras, those same images transformed for and through automatic analysis, the representation of the activities of the information technology systems and, further, the consequences of these activities in the virtual space of Second Life and the reciprocal infiltration of this universe into the party.

Surveillance and partying: if these worlds seem entirely opposed on all fronts, they both however are based on group - or even crowd - activities. But the former, most frequently destined for public spaces, focuses primarily on ordered crowd movements: a flow of persons, a line or waiting room, a boarding platform, etc. The rapid, disordered and even sometimes fusional movements of partying are at the limits of compatibility with the detection, tracking and aim to individually identify of the increasingly automatized dispositifs of surveillance and control: recognition of shapes, individuals, behaviors, traceability… In provoking their confrontation and possible overrunning of one world by the other, this prospective dispositif could reconnect with primitive traits of some of our oldest rituals: partying, celebrating, group celebration.

The musicians invited to incarnate the dispositif Discontrol Party are the evolutionary front-line of current electronic music: they are all experimenters, provocateurs. We can trust them to unleash a celebratory energy - with the verve and taste for danger of stunt riders - in the Discontrol dispositif: and to incite the spectators to do likewise!

Discontrol Party is being developed as part of the research project ‘Large Group Interaction’ at EnsadLab/DRii, laboratory of the National School of Decorative Arts, Paris with the support of the Cap Digital business cluster and of the Ile-de-France region within the framework of the program Futur en Seine 2011 in partnership with the Gaíté Lyrique

in collaboration with the Calhiste laboratory of the University of Valenciennes the European Institute of the Sciences of Humanity and Society (MESHS-CNRS) – Lille and the Espace Pasolini - International Theatre of Valenciennes as part of the research project Praticables (ANR-08-CREA-063) supported by the National Research Agency

Music programming: Sylvie Astié (Dokidoki)
Friday 24 June: Schlachthofbronx; Ceephax Acid Crew; Absolute Body Control; Errorsmith; DJ Krikor
Saturday 25 June: Captain Ahab; Covox; Bass Jog (DJ Elephant Power + FX.Randomiz); Nero’s Day at Disneyland; DJ Krikor

Environmental visualization software (KetchupAddict): Oussama Mubarak in collaboration with Tomek Jarolim and a contribution by Marie-Julie Bourgeois
Embedded RFID-UWB capture: Xavier Boissarie et Jonathan Tanant (Orbe) with technology and partnership of the company Ubisense
Video device (artistic collaboration and engineering): Antoine Villeret and Keyvane Alinaghi
Technical consultancy: Cyrille Henry

In partnership with Philips

On ‘Second Life’, teleperformance Disorder Screen Control: Lucile Haute, Claire Sistach, Alain Barthélémy and Frédérick Thomson with the support of EnsadLab/EN-ER and for the hosting on Second Life Metalab 3D- ARTESI íle-de-France.

Design of RFID accessories: Claire Bonardot, Ornella Coffi, Cécile Gay, Jennifer Hugot, Pauline Jamilloux, Laure Pétré, Valentine Rosi, Chloé Severyns, Alice Topart, students in Textile & Texture Design and Fashion Design at the National School of Decorative Arts.

Thanks to the Progis company and to the Francophone Library.

Laboratory of the National School of Decorative Arts (EnsadLab)

The School’s EnsadLab research laboratory, physically situated within the School, provides a specific conceptual and research axis in the domaines of creation and innovation, identified or emerging, in relation with social, economic, technological, political, industrial and cultural contexts in the contemporary world.

Combining research and training ‘in research and through research’, in preparation for a third cycle at doctoral level, EnsadLab currently consists of a dozen research programs covering the fields of art and design, graphics and typography, design of services, objects or spaces, interactive installations, virtual spaces, new materials, mobility…

These programs are directed by research professors, faculty members and professionals with the highest levels of expertise. Each program involves a number of research students (around five per program), French and international, selected by the school, all of whom hold at least a Master’s degree – and some being doctoral students - generally from EnsadLab partner research institutions (around 50 student researchers and 20 faculty members, researchers and well-known professionals).

Samuel Bianchini, principal author and project coordinator

Samuel Bianchini is an artist and professor-researcher (lecturer) at the University of Valenciennes and at EnsadLab, the research laboratory of the National School of Decorative Arts (Paris) for whom he coordinates the Drii (Relational Dispositives: interactive installations) research program. After defending his doctoral thesis at the Palais de Tokyo with a solo exhibition, he is currently a member of the Calhiste laboratory (University of Valenciennes) and associated with the Citu laboratory (University of Paris 8). He is scientific leader and coordinator of the research project ‘Practicable. The Work of Art as Dispositif: Setting the Stage for Audience Participation’ supported by the French Research Agency (ANR).

Samuel Bianchini lives and works in Paris. He shows regularly in France and abroad. Exhibitions have included, recently, institutions such as Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, Jeu de Paume in Paris, Laboratoria in Moscow, Jozsa Gallery in Brussels, Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. His work investigates the impact of technology on modes of representation, on our new forms of aesthetic experiences and our socio-political organizations. To bring his projects to fruition, he collaborates with scientists and technology research centers. In tight correlation with his artistic practice, Samuel Bianchini has undertaken theoretical work that has been published by the Centre Pompidou, Jean-Michel Place, MIT Press, Analogues, Burozoïque, Hermes and Les presses du réel.

He is represented by the Ilan Engel Gallery (Paris).

Website:
www.dispotheque.org
drii.ensad.fr