By coincidence (or was it?) the two most recent Berkeley Art Technology and Culture Colloquium lectures were given by artists whose careers have been catapulted to new levels due to their being detained (separately) by US Homeland Security: Steve Kurtz and Hasan Elahi. The video podcast of Kurtz’ talk is already online (http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/podcasts/atc/kurtz) and Elahi’s is coming soon. Both were working and prolific artists before their separate encounters with Homeland Security, but certainly their respective work and careers were forever altered by those encounters.

Kurtz’s talk was intriguing and his ordeal serious, but I couldn’t get the image of Arlo Guthrie out of my head; Kurtz has a very folksy way of describing the ineptitude and Kafkaesque attention to irrelevant detail on the part of the government agencies. I could almost hear the repetitive refrain, “….and they took twenty seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us.”

Elahi’s talk took place just last week and is freshest in my mind. Elahi has turned his life into an open book via the Tracking Transience project (http://trackingtransience.net), turning the government’s secret (and inaccurate) surveillance into an ongoing act of public revelation (that seems equally inaccurate or at least designed to create a false sense of truth).

I heard some guys in the restroom after the talk wondering to each other why Elahi seemed to focus his revelatory “blog” pics on food he eats and toilets he uses in airports and why he leaves himself out of all his photos. Of course it seemed obvious to me that those two motifs present Elahi reduced to his animal functions, to the ultimate Other, an object of impartial observation, not present and not quite even human like some kind of false terrorist Sasquatch.

He presented this project as both satirizing the new levels of intrusion into personal privacy that American’s have accepted with the Patriot Act and as a model for how every person could provide such a glut of personal information about themselves, and in hard-to-read formats like pictures, that it could foil attempts at surveillance by introducing too much noise. I think there was some confusion on the part of the audience, and perhaps the artist too, on whether that latter prospect was more symbolic or instrumental. Symbolically, I think the project works because indeed it reveals and satirizes a new level of “acceptable intrusion”, it emphasizes irrelevant details that don’t lead to truth, and it turns surveillance from a secret activity with a passive object into an act of public revelation with a proactive subject. Instrumentally, it doesn’t work quite as well. If anyone is good at cutting through noise, intentional or not, it’s got to be the FBI and NSA (give them some credit after all). And besides, Elahi’s website and art project is probably not the source any government agency is going to use if asked to seriously survey him; they’ll go right to the sources that they know work; credit card records directly from the company (not edited by Elahi on his site), academic, medical, financial, and legal records; all from third parties. In effect, these sources create a kind of second Elahi “data-body”, and Elahi’s own project has created that data-body’s shadow, but perhaps not its replacement.

Like many people, I know Elahi’s work primarily through this project, but in seeing many of his other works presented from past and present, the one thing that stood out for me, and was not addressed explicitly, was the continual obsession with water. Just sitting through his talk made me thirsty.