Envision being tracked online unceasingly, for every click, comment, like, share that you give by an all-seeing gaze, be it by an authority or marketer. This is the situation we face today, and though some might find it unimportant, for others it could mean their freedom. Autonomy Cube (2014) a work by Trevor Paglen (b. 1974, New York), made in collaboration with digital civil liberties activist, computer security researcher, and artist Jacob Appelbaum, which subverts that situation. The cube is intended to be placed in art institutions, galleries, and other public spaces, and provides a secure Wi-Fi network to visitors.
Autonomy Cube functions by latching onto the host site’s Wi-Fi, rerouting the user’s traffic to Tor, a global network run by relay volunteers which, through their systems, successively bounce communications, making users’ precise information virtually untraceable. The Tor network is used by thousands of people around the world to protect their privacy, from activists and journalists, to populations living under dictatorships or other repressive regimes. As a post-Minimalist sculpture, with direct reference to Hans Haacke’s sculpture Condensation Cube 1963–65, the piece plays with notions of autonomy in art history, proposing the need to keep art spaces as civic infrastructures autonomous of data surveillance.
Paglen’s practice, from geographical research to video and photography, reveals that which attempts to remain invisible and suggests taking a closer look at the familiar, where covert activities are constantly at play. Along with Autonomy Cube, he also presents a new project for GB11. The camera and its ways of seeing is the starting point; the project deals with emerging forms of “machine vision,” through a series of images. It affirms the fact that most images captured today are done so by machines and are then “seen” by other machines. Examples abound, from Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) to facial recognition-enabled algorithms, and from tracking systems in department stores to object-recognition bots crawling through billions of photographs on Facebook. The central question would be: How do automated forms of the machine gaze “see” the world? How do computer algorithms designed to see and interpret images engage with photographs, landscapes, or people?
Being from the United States, he tends to look inward at his country and current surveillance strategies and mechanisms administered by that government. His intentions to continually uncover and expose said mechanisms are markedly present in various presentations of his photographic projects. From his recent series on tapped undersea cables that disclose the explicit physicality of what we consider being the ethereal “cloud” of the Internet, to the group of images available to the National Security Agency (NSA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)—three of the largest agencies in US intelligence. JV + AM
self-presentation:
Trevor Paglen is an artist whose work spans image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, engineering, and numerous other disciplines. Among his chief concerns are learning how to see the historical moment we live in and developing the means to imagine alternative futures.
