Art Talk: Hasan Elahi “Tracking Transience”
EFA Project Space
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In an age where everything is archived and the need to delete is almost nonexistent, can we remain private anymore? Hasan Elahi will discuss the new normal of post 9/11 privacy and describe his experiences with FBI interrogations and his subsequent projects in the lecture, “Hiding in Plain Sight”. An erroneous tip called into law enforcement authorities in 2002 subjected Elahi to an intensive investigation by the FBI. After undergoing months of interrogations, he was finally cleared of suspicions.
After this harrowing experience, Elahi conceived “Tracking Transience” (http://trackingtransience.net/), and opened just about every aspect of his life to the public. Predating the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program by nearly a decade, the project questions the consequences of living under constant surveillance and has continuously generated a database of imagery and locative information that tracks the artist and his points of transit in real-time. Although initially created for his FBI agent, the public can also monitor the artist’s communication records, banking transactions, and transportation logs along with various intelligence and government agencies who have been confirmed visiting his website.
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Schedule
March 06, 2014 from 18:30 to 20:00