Introduction to Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies

In its year-end roundup for 2006, the New York Times declared “sousveillance” to be one of the key “ideas” of the year. Never mind that the list also includes “yodeling” “tushology” and “digital maoism,” when the NYT shows up with a six-pack under its arm, the party is probably nearly over anyway. Trevor Paglen didn’t invent the idea of reversing the gaze of the cultural panopticon, but he has been doing it with extraordinary virtuosity for nearly ten years. Legend has it that Paglen, who has been called the Fox Mulder of cultural geography, was personally instrumental in provoking the military to extend the perimeter around Area 51 by several miles in an attempt to thwart one of his counter-surveillance efforts, which he dubs “limit telephotography.” Basically, Paglen leads tours around the edges of the military industrial complex, and true to his training as a geographer, maps the contours and the surfaces that conceal as much as they give away. Even black-world operations, the government’s double-secret programs that take place largely in remote deserts and mountains, involve people and objects such as planes. And just as people and objects obey certain basic laws of physics (such as having mass and taking up space), they can be tracked using tools that are variously high and low tech – from high-power telephoto lenses to FAA flight-tracking data. Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies has it all. Fuzzy counter-surveillance photos taken from miles away sit side-by-side with crisply rendered map tracking data that shows the routes taken by planes with blocked tail numbers and no official destinations.

Paglen’s work deftly limns the boundaries between art and scholarship while also suggesting a provocative conjunction of politics and tourism. His unassuming prose requires visitors to read between the lines in order to generate their own interpretations and conclusions. Even if the truth is out there, Paglen’s work argues implicitly, finding answers is not an easy task. As access to unalloyed truth seems increasingly to occupy an elusive position on an infinitely receding horizon, Paglen’s rare type of work becomes ever more important. A responsible citizenry may no longer rely (if indeed it ever could) on official pronouncements from corporate and governmental press offices. Instead, those who wish to educate themselves about the world must function as detectives or journalists, following threads and triangulating sources. Paglen’s work is exemplary for its insistent look at some of the things we may least want to admit about our government. And his method is ultimately pedagogical, proferring more questions than answers, along with hints about how to uncover the truth for ourselves, if only we have the nerve to do so.

Subservient President

The Subservient President is a political parody of Burger King’s Subservient Chicken advertising campaign. The Subservient President attempts to give ordinary people a momentary sense of what it’s like to be a wealthy Bush campaign donor or an oil industry executive. Just type a command into the database and watch the President take your order – anything from “dodge the draft” or “get arrested for drunk driving” to “start a war in Iraq” or “give tax breaks to billionaires.”

Underlying the overtly satirical aspects of the project is the fact that American politics increasingly seem like they are being made-to-order, catering to public opinion polls and the whims of centrist, “undecided” voters rather than being guided by social needs or ethical principles. With the 2004 Presidential election looming, The Subservient President proposed a darkly humorous counterpoint to the media hype and superficial campaigning that sometimes stand in for legitimate political discourse in this country.

The Subservient President launched anonymously in July 2004 during the Democratic National Convention in Boston. After being picked up by bloggers covering the convention, the site was visited by more than 12 million unique users and received widespread media coverage, including a feature story on CNN, as part of a new generation of politically motivated web art. It is included in the Rhizome ArtBase and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Launch The Subservient President in a new window

Abuse of Power

Abuse of Power is a parody of the MPAA’s anti-piracy videos that consumers are forced to watch at the beginnings of DVDs and in movie theaters. This video was released anonymously and copyright-free onto the Internet in summer 2006 and has received more than one million views and inspired numerous related parodies.

Underlying the parodic goals of the video are a number of serious issues. The tools and networks of the digital age offer great potential for participation, sharing and creativity, but media conglomeration and expanding copyright protections threaten our ability to speak using those tools. We need to educate ourselves about copyright law and resist the efforts of organizations like the MPAA and RIAA to curtail the rights of media consumers. The conventional wisdom is that things will only change when there is movement on three fronts: law, technology and popular practice – we hope this video will encourage others to become more active as users, creators and remixers of existing media.

Abuse of Power screened at the Pacific Film Archive and is included on the Piracy in the Pacific DVD ROM (2006)

View Abuse of Power on the Internet Archive or on YouTube

So You Think You Can Be President?

I apologize for this break in protocol – Jonathan McIntosh’s new election remix video is just too brilliant to exclude for not being “interactive” on the eve of the election.

If it’s participatory culture you want, I also recommend Moveon.org’s excellent viral video engine to increase voter turnout. In a few seconds you can send a message to all your friends encouraging them to vote…and not for just anyone.

Mobile Voices project and class

Comm 620: Mobile Phones, On-Line Community, and Social Change, a year-long biweekly multidisciplinary research seminar
Instructors:
François Bar (Communication),
Steve Anderson (Cinematic Arts)
Murali Annavaram (Viterbi School of Engineering)
This seminar explores how mobile phones can serve to build on-line community, even among people who are mostly off-line. It runs in parallel with “Mobile Voices”, an academic-community partnership project to research and design a platform allowing low-wage immigrants in Los Angeles to publish stories about their lives and their communities directly from their mobile phones. The seminar provides a venue where researchers can explore the social, theoretical and technical issues raised by Mobile Voices. Students will engage in year-long research projects, individually or in groups, structured to culminate in publication by the end of the year. Some of these projects will directly be part of Mobile Voices, but there will be room for other research projects exploring the role of mobile phones in fostering community and/or social change.
Information about Mobile Voices can be found at https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/VozMob and a syllabus-in-progress for the class at https://docs.indymedia.org/view/Global/VozMobClass

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Abuse of Power launches!

My Abuse of Power remix video just went online! Show your contempt for the MPAA by adding this to the beginning of every DVD you burn – or go straight to the website youwouldnt.net.