THE GROOVE ISSUE 6 - WE ARE LIVING IN THE MATRIX
Welcome to the sixth issue of The Groove.
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Love,
Maria
WE ARE LIVING IN THE MATRIX
Trevor Paglen’s current solo show Bloom at Pace Gallery in London
If you spend a good amount of time online, like we all do, chances are that you have been hacked. Hacking as both a form of cyberespionage and a cyberattack was once a thing of the movies and far from real life. Looking back, Hollywood found the best and most creative material in those stories about cybersecurity breaches. WarGames (1983), The Matrix (1999), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and Jason Bourne (2016), are just a handful of some of my favorite movies around cybercrimes. But with the massive explosion of fake news, the unconscionable power of giant tech companies over all of us, conspiracy theories surrounding everything that we do, the way algorithms selectively decide what we see (or what we don’t see) in our electronic devices, I’ve been wondering: Is it all a simulation? Are we living in The Matrix? I wish those films had stayed in big screens and not in our phone screens, because I feel we are characters in their movie sets, daily.
Hackers didn’t start as spies or criminals. “Hacker culture” emerged as a subculture in academia in the 1960s at MIT. This was a group of legit programmers who were up for the intellectual challenge of overcoming software limitations, meddling with open software with the intent to improve on them and share their results with the world. These types of hackers were an extremely creative group who used their abilities and ideas to make something of value out of what already existed. When any of them did something clever and exciting, they called it “hacker value” and this is where the word “hack” originated from.
But today, many of those good hackers run cybersecurity firms or consult for governments and other entities in the public sector. Thanks to all the spying and hacking, the business of cybersecurity is a global industry that doubled its size in the past ten years and is currently worth $152 billion and expected to reach $208 billion by 2023. The video surveillance market, which includes facial recognition technologies, cameras, software, hardware, management, and other services, was estimated at $43 billion in 2019 and analysts predict it will reach $145 billion by 2027.
New York-and Berlin-based artist Trevor Paglen wants to educate and call people’s attention to systems of surveillance and what’s at stake in connection to their privacy. He has learned how to scuba dive to find government cables that allow data transfer, taken pictures of the CIA black sites, and launched the first satellite sculpture into space. That is commitment. He is now very much into AI. If you are in London, he currently has a show at Pace Gallery called Bloom, about the history of facial recognition technologies and his own experiments in the field. If you are on this side of the world, Paglen has a solo exhibition called Opposing Geometries at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, which looks at the history of surveillance alongside the history of photography. Both exhibitions couldn’t be more timely.
Paglen has his finger on the pulse and his creative output and innovative approach on revealing all this information about surveillance and AI has paid off. He is represented by Pace, one of the biggest and most recognized galleries in the world, has had solo shows in museums worldwide, including the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and the Vienna Secession, and was the recipient of a MacArthur Genius grant in 2017 ($625,000 paid out in quarterly installments over five years, in case you are wondering).
A still from Omer Fast’s 2011 short film 5,000 Feet is the Best
Drone surveillance and long-distance sophisticated warfare are issues tackled in some of the works produced by Israeli artist Omer Fast. Like in the 2011 short film 5,000 Feet is the Best, where Fast conducts a series of interviews with an anonymous Predator drone operator, but uses an actor to play him, intercutting fact and fiction in one hell of a video that is as sobering as it is innovative. Others have agreed, as 5,000 Feet is the Best caused a sensation at the 2011 Venice Biennale where it premiered and has been shown in and acquired by museums around the world, including the Imperial War Museum in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Berlin and the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA.
The irony is that the commercial drone market has raised the eyebrows of government officials who fear consequences around privacy and security issues. Despite those concerns, the drone business is such a hot market right now. Nobody really thought that these flying devices would become so accessible and pervasive, but in 2018, the commercial drones’ market was valued at $3.5 billion and it is expected to grow to $7.1 billion through 2022. In the United States alone there are more than 500,000 drones flying in the sky. And most of them have very impressive cameras. Ethics aside, and assuming that every drone-enthusiast isn’t spying on us (I have one and I don’t!) the commercial drone business isn’t only creative as an invention, but also a gold of mine, at least for the time being.
Laura Poitra’s Citizenfour, a documentary on Edward Snowden that won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2015
We also have those who tattle on the spies, like Edward Snowden, who became a hero for some and a traitor for others, when he copied and leaked tons of classified information from the National Security Agency while working for the CIA. Snowden gave the documents to several journalists and asked them to tell his story in the media. Oh surprise! We are being watched! The US is spying on us and recording each of our moves! And using our moves to track terrorists, drug dealers, and money launderers around the world!
Snowden’s story gave way to an avalanche of creative projects, including books like The Snowden Files (2014) by Luke Hardin and The Time of the Octopus (2015) by Anatoly Kucherena, a bio-thriller movie called Snowden (2016) directed by Oliver Stone, and Laura Poitra’s documentary Citizenfour, which won the 2015 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Later in February of 2016, Poitra presented Astro Noise, a solo show at The Whitney Museum, mostly comprised of videos cut out of her many hours of footage exposing similar startling topics. I went to see this show right when it opened and I must confess, it was rather unusual, and I didn’t like it. Perhaps it was its execution: all the dark rooms, the annoying noises extracted from sound files, the barely legible documents. Everything was contrived, like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I believe she presented stronger work in Citizenfour, which kept me engaged for the two hours of run time. But hey, Poitra’s creativity, starting with her willingness to take a chance on such a thorny and risky topic, earned her an Oscar and a solo at the Whitney, all which happened during the same month.
The colored picture on the left was taken by me after pressing a button on an iPad at Ai Weiwei’s Hansel & Gretel an immersive exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, in collaboration with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron in 2017. The facial recognition app matched my face to the picture on the right which unbeknownst to me, was taken moments before while moving around in a pitch black room
But not all surveillance exhibitions are bad. I loved Ai Weiwei’s 2017 Hansel & Gretel presented in collaboration with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron at the Park Avenue Armory, which was divided in two parts. In Part I, one had to get in from the back entrance of the Armory into a giant pitch-black space whose ample floors invited people to lie down, sit, or just aimlessly walk in the dark– the whole floor projected infrared outlines that looked like Tron, the video game. Then people walked into other rooms through narrow passageways, where there were other projections on the floor that mirrored the visitors’ movements. That was an equally eerie and fun realization.
In Part II of the exhibition, with proper lighting, one became the observer instead of the observed and could watch the visitors through iPads or look for our own pictures taken in the dark. I placed myself in front of another iPad and through a facial recognition scan within seconds, my picture, which had been taken in the darkest side of the exhibition, popped up. Wow! That was something. Not only had the camera photographed me under zero lighting conditions, but the facial recognition device was so accurate it found me at lightning speed.
If this is what Ai Weiwei can have in an art exhibition, I wonder what the Russian/Chinese/American governments use in surveillance equipment? What other opportunities do creative people, artists, or entrepreneurs have in the areas of surveillance, drones, cybersecurity, and AI that haven’t yet been mined and explored? Will we live forever in The Matrix?