This man has a problem. How do you tell the story of suspicion as it continues to act upon your life?
Hasan Elahi is a conceptual artist whose life is an ongoing work about surveillance. He starts by telling us a chilling story – his detention by the INS at Detroit Airport after returning from a trip from overseas. An immigration officer scanned his passport and blanched, then led Alahi through a maze under the airport to an INS detention facility. As a US citizen, this was pretty odd – he tried to talk with the guards to figure out what was going on. But it all became clearer when the man from the FBI in the dark suit came to talk with him.
And this is his solution. I love this idea, in a sad way:
For the next few months, every trip Elahi took, he’d call his FBI agent and give the routing, so he didn’t get detained along the way. He realized, after a point – why just tell the FBI – why not tell everyone?
So he hacked his cellphone into a tracking bracelet which he wears on his ankle, reporting his movements on a map – log onto his site and you can see that he’s in Camden. But he’s gone further, trying to document his life in a series of photos: the airports he passes through, the meals he eats, the bathrooms he uses. The result is a photographic record of his daily life which would be very hard to falsify. We all know photos can be digitally altered– but altering as many photos as Elahi puts online would require a whole team trying to build this alternative path through the world.
Elahi also puts other apsects of his life online, including his banking records. This gives a record of his purchases, which complements the photographs. He doesn’t put the phone records online, because it would compromise the privacy of the people he talks with, and some friends have asked him to stop visiting, but he views the self-surveillance both as an art form and as his perpetual alibi for the next time the FBI questions him.
At the same time, he’s stretching the limits of surveillance systems, taking advantage of non-places. He flew to Singapore for four days and never left the airport, never clearing customs. For four days, he was noplace – he’d fallen off the map, which is precisely what the FBI and others worry about. But he documented every noodle and every toilet along the way.
On the one hand, that’s brilliant. On the other hand, it should never have come to this. It’s horrifying.
Totally weird but I see where he is coming from on the artistic side. He knows that he is subject to surveillance, as we all are at this point and so he turns it to his own uses. He becomes the agent of his own surveillance and forces the external agents to conform to his vision. He makes the security forces and FBI into actors in his own personal drama. I get where his friends and family will want to distance themselves but by their very own legislation, the gouvernment forces can’t, they have to respond. I like the term “his FBI agent”. What would happen if we all wanted “our own FBI agent”? Just a thought.
Jesus. Brilliant. If only it were a brilliant screenplay, and not a brilliant high-value response to an untenable situation.
You can already get your very own FBI file just by asking if you have one or not. So why not? I do hope we can share, though, because otherwise the government will go bankrupt trying to provide everyone with his or her own individual agent.
Well, he illustrates one possible way to get around Big Brother… have everyone be able to know what everyone else is doing at all times. Leave no one unaccounted for.
I believe they call it the “Participatory Panopticon” at Worldchanging–and I also think they don’t quite take it to the extreme I just did.
Very scary, but possibly liberating. It would require us to shed our most valued notions of privacy but would, in turn, provide almost absolute security for everyone.
This is interesting, but if he seriously thinks that hiring a lawyer would have been “act of resistance [that] could have gotten him sent to Guantanamo”, why isn’t he similarly worried about resistance in the form of a conceptual art project to protest his treatment? It’s a little disingenuous to link a series of interviews (which cleared him) with constant surveillance, which is pretty much what his art project is attempting to do.
No, because this conceptual art project is designed to make it impossible to prosecute him, as well as very embarrassing.
There’s an Irish thriller called “Freeze Frame” I just watched this weekend, which pretty much fictionalizes this concept. A man is falsely accused, so he starts documenting his life in video. It takes it to some ridiculous extremes (he has a harness upon which he can strap a mini DV cam for when he leaves his home), but it was never as ridiculous as someone in reality ever having to do the same thing. Sheesh.
I don’t know, I sort of feel like this isn’t much different from guys who say, “Well, I’m just going to videotape every sexual encounter now so I can’t be accused of rape.”
I think it would be more analagous to a Maryland woman who decided to document every sexual encounter so that she could not be raped with impunity.
Does anyone remember “Me and the Big Guy?”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYQKDqjCEBQ
I do not know if this is true, but Mr. Elahi might have presented us with a way out. (?)
Also see “The Surveillance Society,” an essay by an author whose name escapes me. He posited that the problem did not lie in ubiquitous surveillance per se, but in who held the cameras and the information that they record. He asserted that the only solution to being watched is to turn around and watch the watcher in return. The fact that is is Mr. Elahi, and not the government, doing the recording does raise some interesting questions.
re: 11. maatnofret
That’s probably David Brin in
“The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?”
That analogy only stands up if you think that it’s as common for men who do not rape to be falsely accused of rape as it is for men and women of south Asian or Middle Eastern ancestry to be harrassed at airports.
As common, no. Similarly likely to be used to minimize the crime of which the person is accused, yes. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the FBI repeatedly interviewing, and then clearing, someone whom they at first suspect of a crime.
KJ –
you are exactly right. Thanks!
–mnf
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the FBI repeatedly interviewing, and then clearing, someone whom they at first suspect of a crime.
So, your analogy re rape was more of a pouty reaction to Elahi’s unfairly picking on the FBI?
A man videotaping all his sexual encounters is also videotaping his sexual partners. Elahi isn’t, apparently, posting the movements of people he chats with on his trips, or the names of the salespeople who sell him things. He’s involving no innocent bystanders.