[“Astro Noise,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Feb…]
2016 2016-05Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 11 →
The words are the paper's own, from its digital file; the division into articles was made by machine, so a box or caption can end up inside the article next to it.
Scan page 11
“Astro Noise,” Whitney Museum of American Art, Feb.
5 – May 2, 2016.
In the “Seeds of Time,” Frederic Jameson famously wrote of our cultural moment, “It seems to be easier to imagine the thorough-going deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capi talism; perhaps that is due to some weakness of our imaginations.”
In response, many artists have taken it upon them selves to try to find ways to communicate the reality of the increasingly obscure mechanisms of the con temporary global capitalist system, giving some sort of materiality to its circuits of finance, its systems of transportation and communication, its maps of sur veillance infrastructure, and the interrelationships among sites of extreme exploitation, in the hope that artistic practice can once again be deeply intertwined with some kind of revolutionary practice.
Allan Sekula made films and photographs of global maritime trade that tried to make palpable the system of commodity production and its basis in the exploita tion of low-wage workers. Trevor Paglan has tracked surveillance satellites and photographed “choke points,” the clusters of fiber optic cable offshore of the U.S. and Europe where the NSA tries to intercept in formation traveling over the internet.
In “Astro Noise,” an exhibition at the Whitney Muse um of American Art, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras builds on this impulse with an immersive in stallation designed to force museum goers to move from a simple intellectual awareness of the extent of the new surveillance state to the kind of knowledge enriched by experience and emotion.
“Astro Noise” was first conceived by Poitras in 20122013 while exiled in Berlin to avoid U.S. government confiscation of film footage she was editing, and at the same time, receiving the first e-mails from Edward Snowden, a disembodied voice she knew only as Citi zen Four. The context of her creative work, as noted in her “Berlin Journal”—excerpts of which are included a companion volume to the show—was the impend ing imprisonment of John Kiriakou, an ex-CIA agent put away for telling a reporter about the torture going on at black sites, the suicide of Aaron Schwartz who was facing imprisonment for trying to “free” academic journals from commercial pay walls, and her own se cret meetings with Julian Assange.
C4, as she calls Snowden, could be the agent of en trapment, for her, or for Assange, or even other col laborators, she worries. She wants to publish audio of Chelsea Manning before being shut down. She records her expectations that proceeding to engage with Snowden would likely land them both in jail or exiled.
These musings are interspersed with her thoughts upon re-reading “1984” and Cory Doctorow’s “Home land,” as well as accounts of her nightmares and ex treme physical reactions to anxiety.
In the midst of all this, she critiques the naïveté of her first film about Iraq, “My Country My Country”: “As if appealing to people’s consciences could change any thing. Ten years into this war it is obvious that other forces are at work.” As the engagement with Snowden proceeds, she realizes that a film may not be best way to empower viewers. She imagines an art exhibition that could create an aesthetic experience and reveal information in a way that more directly engages.
She turned to Whitney performance curator Jay Sanders to execute that idea. Installation, she and her collaborators hoped, might be able to do what high ly layered, complex, and non-didactic documentary films, such as Poitras’ “The Oath,” seemingly could not—position the viewer in a less passive relation ship to the outrages of state spying and torture.
“Astro Noise,” then, represents a most serious ef fort by an artist given unparalleled trust by some of ... NDP convention (continued from page 8: “Hillary Clinton, Kissinger, and the coup in Honduras”) on the family fortunes of Thomson and Irving, the Westons, Pattison, Desmarais, Richardson, McCain, Munk, Stron ach, Peladeau, and all the non-elected barons of Bay Street. By taxing their off-shore billions, and by conscripting their trillions in fixed assets, an NDP government will have no trouble leading the transition to a green and democratic economy, and setting an example that just might save civi lization on Earth.
As president of the party I will work to ensure that NDP election campaigns reflect members’ priorities. By devot ing 80% of convention time to policy debate we can rea son together. I will oppose any move to rescind or block NY Times