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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.
11/06–
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
–11/07
DATA BREACHES
SURVEILLANCE
JULIE POITRAS SANTOS DIRECTOR OF EXHIBITIONS, ICA AT MECA&D
