Laura Poitras: ‘Astro Time’

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the most important whistleblowers of our time—and radicalizing under the pressure of events—to bring capitalist reality home in an important venue for mass culture. While the reality of the increasingly rapacious art market and liberal character of public art institu­ tions like the Whitney make one initially suspicious of her choice of venue, there is no doubt that the thou­ sands of New Yorkers and tourists who found their way to her show are more politically sophisticated and thoughtful about how to act than before they went in.

In addition, Poitras and her collaborators on the ac­ companying text, Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Liv­ ing Under Total Surveillance, have taken every advan­ tage of the privileged space still accorded art to try to break through the normalization of 24-7 spying that is the goal of much popular culture dealing with the so-called War on Terror, streaming panels and creat­ ing a book that stands alone and offers theory as well as fiction.

One ponders entering the spaces of the installation while gazing at giant vibrantly colored images that lightly reference the giant color field paintings hang­ ing in other parts of the museum. The images are in fact the output of a British spy program named ANAR­ CHIST and were created from the intercepted feed of Israeli drones. I was immediately reminded of stand­ ing in a house in Ramallah with a fellow activist who explained that the sound I heard was the noise of drones that flew 24-7 in a grid pattern over the entire West Bank, allowing the Israeli government to track each individual at any point in time, day in and day out.

Once inside the first darkened space, the viewer confronts a room-size dual-channel video screen. On one side is slow-motion film of New Yorkers in a stadium reacting to the sight of the Twin Towers fall­ ing. As one walks around the divider, and looks at another giant screen, one finds oneself thrust into a mud-floored room where several prisoners, including Salim Hamdan (Hamdan v. United States), are hooded and interrogated by masked U.S. soldiers. The foot­ age was declassified some time ago, at the time of the Hamdan trial; it is not its newness but its projection, which puts one in the room, which makes the experi­ ence so shocking.

The viewer next enters the “Disposition Matrix,” a long narrow series of halls punctuated by narrow slits that remind one of the eyeholes in a prison cell door. Through the slits one can view part of the Snowden “archive” of leaked documents, including the graph­ ics and world maps that various spy agencies used to promote their tradecraft at conferences, as well as the a candidate nomination for reasons of political difference within the frame of our principles. Candidates who have the courage to stand up for Palestinians, and oppose the Zionist apartheid state and NATO, should be praised, not punished.

NDP conventions must be more accessible to workers, women and the poor. Lower registration fees, and bigger subsidies for travel should be the rule. I see the NDP as the party of labour and social justice movements in the streets, not just in Parliament.

I will push the party to invite more unions and community organizations to affiliate. More of the money raised should go to EDAs for year-round local organizing and direct par­ ticipation in the class struggle. The huge economic barriers to run for NDP Leader should be removed.

Many hard working party supporters gave millions of dol­ lars for a campaign they hoped would offer a real alterna­ (Above) Laura Poitras in her studio with objects exhibited at the Whitney Museum.

cartoonish sketches used inside the agencies to boast of their omnipotence. The position of the slits forces the viewers to share a narrow space and spurs strang­ ers to interact while trying to decipher just what they are seeing.

One of the most moving elements of Disposition Matrix is a video interview with Murat Kurnaz, an in­ nocent sold to the U.S. for bounty and then secretly rendered. Kurnaz describes how he was tortured by being hung by his wrists from the ceiling and how he felt after the man hanging in front of him was left in place long after his death.

“Disposition Matrix” feeds into the space called “Bed Down Location.” The space is named with the phrase that U.S. troops use to designate a site where a target sleeps in preparation for the assault. Museum-goers enter the darkened room and lie down facing up at the projection of night skies over Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, watching the stars and the glints of drones constantly in motion above them. A faint sound of drones and intermittent transmissions from drone pi­ lots completes the experience of being a target night after night and for years on end.

Poitras’ own experience of surveillance is the theme of another space. Viewers watch the eight-minute clip of video she took from the roof of the home of an Iraqi family who lived in the Green Zone, a clip that intelli­ gence service documents on the adjacent wall explain led to Poitras’ becoming a person of interest, stopped 40 times at airports with her working materials con­ fiscated, before she fled to Berlin.

Despite this harassment and a reasonable fear of im­ prisonment for dealing with classified materials that shame the U.S. government, Poitras has made a show that is not about the inescapable totality of the police state but about resistance, the resistance of Murat Kurnaz, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, herself, and countless numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, Somalis, Yemenis. She clearly hopes that we, too, will resist, in solidarity with all of the victims who have allowed her to turn her camera upon them.

The socialist movement that we need in these dire times is a movement like those of the past, in which the heroism of the world’s working people in their battles for freedom, dignity, and justice nourished artists and an intelligentsia, who in turn created new ways to comprehend our situation and empower our action. Laura Poitras and her collaborators on “Astro Noise,” the exhibition and the book, should be thanked for making this vision a little less remote. n tive to austerity and inequality. Now they want their money back. Much more discussion is needed at the local level about NDP aims and policies. Members want real in-put, instead of dinnertime donation calls, instead of seeing the resources of the party used to lobby members to give the Leader one more chance, instead of telephone “town halls” where tough questions are filtered out.

Why am I running for president? To give members a voice, to give delegates a choice, to keep hope alive. At a time when the NDP is at 11% in the polls, when more NDP supporters say they’d vote for the Liberals than the current NDP leader, we need a change of direction.

We need to go back to the future–to the working class roots of the party. Together we can put democracy and so­ cialism back in the NDP, and build the cooperative com­ monwealth in our time. n SOCIALIST ACTION MAY 2016 11

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SOCIALIST ACTION Marty Goodman / Socialist Action