Review: Laura Poitras: Astro Noise

Abstract

Laura Poitras: Astro Noise WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART NEW YORK CITY FEBRUARY 5-MAY 1, 2016 Astro Noise is the first solo exhibition worldwide of the work of documentary filmmaker and political activist Laura Poitras. It is her first attempt to translate her research about post-9/11 anxieties into the context of an installation in order to develop a more direct interaction with audiences. (1) Astro Noise is the name of the first encrypted file containing evidence of mass surveillance that former CIA employee and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden shared with Poitras in 2013. It also refers to the muffled disturbance of leftover thermal radiation that is believed to have dispersed in the universe in the form of aimless microwaves after the Big Bang. The Snowden leaks had a similar retroactive effect, producing a leftover noise that is still echoing politically and socially. In this exhibition, Poitras attempts to construct a critical space to reflect on what happened, extending its ethical implications. The itinerary commences with the ANARCHIST series (2016), large-scale blown-up photographic images from the Snowden archive printed on huge aluminum sheets. At first sight they are merely beautiful images, but they are actually generated from signals from Israeli and Syrian drone feeds and radars intercepted by the British surveillance agency Government Communications Headquarters. The sheer scale and brilliance of the images is blinding and disorienting, so at first one barely registers the content. The real content of the images and their origin is not revealed until the visitor reads the wall labels. At this point, the images intercepted are no longer simply data collected from signals. They are pieces of a puzzle that can be put together in radically different manners. Data collection is the foundation on which governments create retrospective narratives based on specific political agendas. This retrospective manipulation of data, for Poitras, seems to convert objective data into malleable political narratives for deep state maneuvers. (2) For Poitras, Astro Noise functions as a subversive (3) that uses visitors' knowledge of the historical narrative to clash directly with the data itself. She intends to strip the images, creating new possibilities of vision, (4) but instead incites a move toward the spectacularization of horror by favoring aesthetic contemplation and experiential involvement over critical distancing. Other artists have explored the question of data collection and governments' tendencies to interpret patterns within data in ways useful to their own interests. Hasan Elahi, for instance, has turned surveillance on himself 24/7 in his ongoing project Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project (2005-present). In this project, Elahi questions the efficacy of surveillance by making nearly everything about himself, including his exact location, continuously available to anyone with an internet connection, simultaneously saying everything and nothing. Instead of forcing an experiential countermapping like Poitras, Elahi distances the audience, making them think critically about the aporias and absurdities of compulsive data collection and interpretation. After offering the starting coordinates of the post-Snowden moment, the timeline moves backward to begin with the immediate post-9/11 moment, at the origins of the War on Terror initiated by the United States government. In the first room, O'Say Can You See (2001/2016) is a large two-screen projection that captures the simultaneous development of post-9/11 events. The two screens hang in the middle of the room, placed back-to-back with a visible space in between, so that visitors can wander around them. The front screen shows slow-motion video images of visitors at Ground Zero shortly after the attacks, combined with audio of the national anthem performed at Yankee Stadium in 2001, while the back screen features a US military video of the interrogations of Said Boujaadia and Salim Hamdan in Afghanistan before they were transferred to Guantanamo Bay. …