(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Laura Poitras (red): Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2016
Astro Noise is an independent work, but also serves as a catalog for the exhibition of the same name that has been listed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this spring (featured in the March issue of New Time). The exhibition and the book are a culmination of 15 years of work to document the war on terror and its consequences. The woman behind the work, Laura Poitras, is basically a documentary filmmaker, and is also behind it Citizenfour, the Oscar-winning film about working with Edward Snowden's revelations.
To describe an invisible giant. Trying to understand and describe today's surveillance regime and how this is transforming our society is a recurring problem. You feel a bit like Tor trying to lift the Midgard worm: It's almost impossible to find the head and tail of the beast, and it's far bigger than it looks at first glance. Although intelligence services have grown into a global squid whose goal is to exercise total control, they operate in hiding, and the consequences for democracy and freedom of speech appear abstract and philosophical.
Not so in Astro Noise. The content is a mix of fiction, photography, released documents, personal stories and essays that illuminate various aspects of the intelligence services business, and the implications for those selected in their spotlight. The form is creative, and the quality of the various contributions is generally very high – sometimes virtuoso. It does Astro Noise to a delight to read, despite the bleak theme. Contributors include well-known names such as artists Ai Wei Wei and Trevor Paglen, former Guantánamo prisoner Lakhdar Boumediene, and Edward Snowden himself. The special shape allows that Astro Noise perhaps the closest we can come to a successful representation of the nature of the modern surveillance state. The intellectual level of understanding is present, but the main focus is personal and emotional. In this way the book appears both as an introduction to the activities of the deep state, and as a deeply personal and desperate cry in the dark.
The story is dark and tragic, and shows the enormous human cost of taking corporate social responsibility and uncovering abuse of power.
Like a spy thriller. The biggest impression is the excerpts from Laura Poitras's diary from the time she was first contacted by Snowden until just before the disclosures were published in June 2013. The excerpts appear almost like a spy thriller, giving an intense insight into all the uncertainty and anguish she was facing. opposite when Snowden contacted under the code name «Citizenfour». Was this person a real alert, or was it all a trap laid by the FBI? Who could she talk to and seek advice from without exposing herself and Citizenfour to danger? How could she avoid being accused of espionage? Poitras could not help but move on with the case, knowing the possible consequences. Heavily censored FBI documents printed in Astro Noise testifies to what she also knew at this time: that she had been under secret investigation by the FBI for many years, not knowing what she was accused of.
What appears in the diary is not a simple story about a heroic journalist and an announcer who confidently placed the power of responsibility. The story, on the contrary, is grim and tragic, and shows the enormous human cost of taking corporate social responsibility by uncovering abuse of power. This is the story of how this invisible superpower, the deep state, can completely shape the world around a human until one begins to wonder at one's own perception of reality. It's like reading the diary of someone who has disconnected The Matrix. Poitras and Snowden live in a dark, totalitarian world, and the glossy surface most of us see is an unreserved lie. As a consequence of her work, Poitras never again expects to have a privacy – the surveillance state will always follow her. How will it be possible to have meaningful human bonds, to feel free, to maintain their integrity, when one can constantly be observed by someone who does not want one?
A silent revolution. The impression given by the protagonists in this story is that the sense of powerlessness is far stronger than the ability to deal with the powers of the surveillance state. That is the subtitle, A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance, something misleading. Astro Noise rather acts as a guide to the surveillance state, complete with chapters on its architecture, technology, psychology and tribal languages. The perspectives are many, but the common denominator is that it is about the deep state, populated by bureaucrats, with and without uniform, with an almost limitless power and a total disdain for the uninitiated. The emotional explosiveness in the story of the protagonists underpins the political situation description, which is a highly wanted part of Poitras' project. It is most evident in Jacob Appelbaum's appeal to the younger generation – the first to grow up in a totally supervised environment.
Appelbaum describes the rise of the overall surveillance state over the past 40 years as "a quiet revolution." We have almost imperceptibly slipped into an age where the sum of the information collected about us is greater than ourselves. Our digital doubles hold our most intimate and sensitive secrets, yet are completely unknown to us. The material collected cannot be understood without the help of machines, but what kind of knowledge does the machines produce about us? What stories can be constructed about us based on the data? And what happens when mechanical processing of our digital double-gangs forms the basis for decisions about who are considered enemies of the state? Astro Noise opens the possibility that we already live in a regime so totalitarian and so absorbing that it is hardly possible to see the contours of it. Despite the sense of powerlessness, Appelbaum is hoping for hope on the horizon if the youngsters choose to take up the fight.
Strong instruments. In the introduction to Astro Noise Poitras says that she consciously seeks to avoid the distancing and non-binding quality that is often found within the museum's framework. The political content should not be rendered harmless or purified. Poitras uses strong instruments, in the book as in the exhibition, and it is clear that she wants to give her audience a solid fist in the stomach to wake us up. The goal is to expand the audience's understanding of monitoring on an emotional level. Much theoretical and intellectual has been written and said on the subject, but some things need to be used to understand our empathy. It is, for example, about our privileges as citizens of Western countries. We don't have to deal with the consequences of surveillance all the time we don't have drones in the sky making decisions about who to die today based solely on SIGINT (tribal language for "signal intelligence"). Laura Poitras will force us to do this anyway.
tori@toriaarseth.no
