INTRODUCTION

from Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic

EXHIBITION ARTISTS

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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. CHRISTOPHER GREGORY-RIVERA, Las Carpetas, Untitled, archival inkjet photograph, 16 ✗ 20 in., 2014.

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JULIE POITRAS SANTOS DIRECTOR OF EXHIBITIONS, ICA AT MECA&D

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?

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

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are broadly open to misuse if we are not aware of them. The artists in this exhibition ask questions about imbalances of power, racist histories, biased algorithms, and the distinct vulnerabilities and methodologies inherent to these practices of oversight.

Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic has been developed in conversation with Brendan McQuade, Assistant Professor of Criminology at University of Southern Maine and Sophie Hamacher, artist and Assistant Professor of Academic Studies at Maine College of Art & Design. I met Brendan over Zoom in early January of this year. His book, Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision (2019), unpacks the network of interagency intelligence centers called “fusion centers” that were developed after 9/11, asking questions about mass incarceration and policing. As an expert in considering the complexities of surveillance as it pertains to larger society, and specifically to Maine, his collaboration has been invaluable.

Sophie Hamacher has thought deeply about surveillance through her work on a forthcoming book, Supervision: On Motherhood and Surveillance. In collaboration with the exhibition, she has curated an extensive and powerful film series, MONITOR, that teases out and extends numerous conceptual threads such as oversight, enclosure, and sound in relation to surveillance. Her selection of films, screened at the ICA at MECA&D, Portland Museum of Art, SPACE Gallery, and Congress Square Park, amplify and further extend our understandings of surveillance technologies and the questions we might ask of them.

I am grateful to Assistant Director Nikki Rayburn and to Exhibitions Assistant Sarah Sawtelle who have worked diligently to bring the exhibition to fruition. Samantha Haedrich designed this beautiful catalog in your hands. Finally, we are grateful for the support of the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, and to Jeremy Moser and Laura Kittle who provided additional generous support.

Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic is part of Freedom & Captivity, a statewide, coalition-based public humanities initiative to explore and promote abolitionist visions and organizing in Maine during fall 2021, spearheaded by Catherine Besteman, Professor of Anthropology at Colby College. Recognizing that mass incarceration is fueled by racism and profit-generating mechanisms that tear apart communities and families, Freedom & Captivity offers opportunities for public engagement about imagining prison abolition and the redirection of resources toward community investments, the repair of racial and gender injustice, intergenerational trauma, and eldercare for the aging population in Maine’s prisons. Conceived with the

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participation of people in Maine directly impacted by the carceral system, the project includes over 50 participating organizations and institutions from across Maine. The ICA at MECA&D is honored to work alongside so many generous organizations and individuals.

Further fueling the conversation, Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic is accompanied by a robust series of visiting artist talks, and a panel discussion, in addition to the film series. Using research, film, video installation, sculpture, photography, and print media, the artists and collaborators of Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic tease out the complexities of surveillance, challenging us to be active watchers in the world. In becoming more alert to the gazes that monitor our lives, we are empowered to look back at them, to question and change them.

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ANN MESSNER, the free library and other histories, 20 pages, offset tabloid, printed on 50lb white newsprint. 3rd edition, 2000 copies 12.5 ✗ 17 in. (each), 2018–2021.