10
11
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.
10/09–
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
–10/10
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?
