security

Infowars: Big Sis’ Street Scanners Target Of FOIA Request

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Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
November 26, 2010

The Electronic Privacy Information Center is demanding that Big Sis spill the beans on street scanners as part of a FOIA request that seeks to unveil the truth behind Homeland Security’s hundreds of roaming backscatter devices that are now radiating Americans in their homes and vehicles at internal checkpoints in the name of “safety”.

http://www.infowars.com/big-sis-street-scanners-target-of-foia-request/

Professor to implant camera in the back of his head

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Professor Wafaa Bilal, who works at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts’ photography and imaging department, is causing a stir because of his artistic experiment raises privacy concerns.Bilal, who has a countdown on his website for the project – dubbed 3rdI – will have images from the camera broadcast live from the back of his head to an exhibit in a museum in Qatar scheduled to open in December.

3rdi.me

The camera, which will be the size of a thumbnail, will be attached using a method similar to piercing, according to The Wall Street Journal, which spoke to Bilal’s colleagues familiar with the project.
Bilal will have the camera in his head for a year, and it will take pictures in one-minute intervals.

What will museum visitors see? Well, that depends on Bilal’s travels, which is where the controversy comes in. Questions have been raised as to whether he will have the camera on while he teaches at NYU and whether students’ privacy may be invaded. NYU is looking into the issue.

“As a school of the arts, a school whose mission is to educate artists, we place a high value on his right to free expression in his creative work as an artist, and take that principle very seriously,” NYU Spokesman John Beckman said in a statement. “But as a school of the arts, we also take seriously the privacy issues his project raises, its impact on our students and the importance of preserving trust in the pedagogical relationship between a faculty member and students.

“There have been numerous conversations since Professor Bilal informed us of his project as we sought to find the right balance; we think they have been constructive and productive. We continue to discuss with him the right mechanism to ensure that his camera will not take pictures in NYU buildings.”

This isn’t the first time the Iraqi artist’s experiments have caught people’s attention.

His work “Domestic Tension,” where he stood in front of a paintball gun and allowed people to shoot him over the Internet 24/7, caused widespread buzz online.

His controversial video game piece, “Virtual Jihadi,” ended with a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union. Bilal hacked a video game and put an avatar of himself in the game and then appeared as a suicide-bomber hunting Former President George W. Bush.

source: CNN online

Rivane Neuenschwander: A Brazilian Makes Playful but Serious Art

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At the New Museum last Friday the artist Rivane Neuenschwander was on her knees, slicing up the carpeting in a third-floor gallery as she searched energetically for microphones hidden in the floorboards and walls. A security and surveillance team had secreted the bugs there at her request, but without her knowing their locations; now the devices were recording her hunt in the otherwise silent room, in preparation for a fast-approaching show.

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/arts/design/22neuen.html

Surveillance, Performance and New Media Art

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Vol 7, No 2 (2010)
Surveillance, Performance and New Media Art

The relationship between the visual arts and surveillance has been explored through large scale exhibitions (CTRL:Space, ZKM), and texts such as Loving Big Brother (McGrath, 2004) have introduced questions of performance and performativity into the surveillance debate. However, as the technological possibilities available to artists grow, and the social impact of surveillance is increasingly recognized, there is a need for a thorough examination of the uses of surveillance in the visual arts, particularly in the genres of new media and performance art, where issues regarding technological engagement and embodiment come to the fore. This special issue of Surveillance & Society presents papers and works that examine the complexities of surveillance in new media and performance art.

http://surveillance-and-society.org/ojs/index.php/journal/issue/view/Performance/showToc

Sun Valley Center for the Arts presents I Spy: Surveillance and Security

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I Spy: Surveillance and Security
Feb 26 – Apr 30, 2010

Sun Valley Center for the Arts
191 5th Street East
Ketchum, Idaho
208.726.9491

http://www.sunvalleycenter.org

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I Spy: Surveillance and Security, a multidisciplinary project of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, examines the relationship between surveillance, security and privacy in the early 21st century. A visual art exhibition is on view from February 26 through April 30.

The attempted bombing on Christmas Day of a Detroit-bound flight reopened the urgent national conversation about security and surveillance that has been going on since September 11, 2001. Government today has unprecedented access into our lives. At the same time that we are debating how to balance civil rights against our need for security, corporations use hidden cameras and track our internet use to sell us their products. Millions of us willingly (or unwittingly) give up our privacy to participate in social networking sites like Facebook.

How has increased governmental and corporate intrusion into our lives shaped our assumptions about what is private and what is public? How has our definition of civil liberties changed? What effect has the Internet and the boom in social networking sites had on our behavior? Are we safer now than we were before?

The exhibition features work by artists Deborah Aschheim, Hasan Elahi, Trevor Paglen and Paul Shambroom.

Between 2003 and 2005, Deborah Aschheim created six installations she called Neural Architecture (a smart building is a nervous building). “Nervous systems” for architecture, these sculptural projects reflect our tendency to think about buildings in human terms. They also convey our ambivalence toward surveillance; technologies that initially seem invasive or Orwellian eventually become simple conveniences. The sculpture Aschheim presents in this exhibition is a recreation of one neural column from her earlier projects.

Hasan Elahi has made his everyday life part of his artwork. Erroneously targeted as a suspected terrorist and interrogated by the FBI, Elahi decided that his best defense was to open up his life to public and governmental scrutiny. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is an online database that documents his travels, finances and even the meals he eats on airplanes. For I Spy, Elahi is creating a timely installation that considers security and surveillance in the world of aviation. Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is a project of Creative Capital.

The work of artist, writer and geographer Trevor Paglen explores the relationship between surveillance and security in a post-September 11th world. His long-distance photographs of secret military installations, badges from classified military programs and photos of U.S. spy satellites in orbit expose a world of secret operations and surveillance that sometimes exists in plain sight.

>From 2003 to 2007 Paul Shambroom photographed Homeland Security training environments like “Disaster City” in Texas and “Terror Town” in New Mexico. His images of personnel in their disaster gear, training in simulated settings, get at the difficulty we sometimes have discerning between legitimate security threats and paranoid fear. Shambroom is a 2001 Creative Capital Visual Arts grantee.

Related Programs

Lecture: Living in a Wired World: Can Personal Privacy Survive in the 21st Century?
by Frederick Lane
Attorney, author and technology expert
Wed, Mar 10, 7pm

Lecture: The Role of Surveillance in National Security
by John Lehman
Former Secretary of the Navy and member of the 9/11 Commission
Thu, Apr 1, 7pm