5/1 Anti Surveillance Face Art 

This article describes the anti-surveillance tactic of applying face paint in a technique called “CV dazzle”, which when applied in the correct way (there’s a bit of a formula), can successfully keep facial-recognition algorithms from identifying a face as a face. I was fascinated to learn about this tactic and the way in which it incorporates protest, art, and technology at once. The article also touched on the effects of wearing the face paint itself, particularly the increase in double takes and glares from strangers. “The first thing to know about wearing the dazzle is that everyone looks at you. You can never forget you have it on. People glance at your face, their eyes lingering as you wait on escalators, pass on sidewalks, sit in museums or restaurants. It’s more than a quick double-take or turn of the head: Their eyes lock, and they stare. For a while.” 

To me this felt reminiscent of how our society is adapting to wearing masks in public and how different communities and individual people are interpreting this. Wearing a mask has different repercussions depending on a range of factors: whether or not someone believes the virus is not an issue might result in a glare or an eye roll. If someone is part of a population that is disproportionately stereotyped and targeted for wearing masks, such as Black men, they might feel their personal safety is at risk by wearing one. Another burden then emerges of having to balance the risks of exposure to the virus or exposure to the risks of police brutality, white supremacy and racism. 

As surveillance seems to merge more and more with the world’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, this article brought up interesting possibilities for me to explore at the intersection of facial appearance, technology, health, protest, and surveillance. Say we live in a world where facial-recognition tools read our temperature and then assign that number to our computer-analyzed face. How would we protest this safely, or should we even protest it? CV dazzle offers a great starting point for imagining reactions to scenarios that no longer feel associated with the distant future or science fiction. 

4/24-Empty Spaces
See the full gallery here: 

For this blog post, I wanted to take a minute and just observe (or surveil?) what the world looks like right now. As states begin to open back up, I already feel jetlagged at the thought of this strange time, which seemed like it would last forever, simply coming to an end. Immersing myself in images of this unprecedented time offered me the chance to see the situation in another light-one that wasn’t told in the form of a breaking news headline, a chart, or a graph. These images framed humanity as small, smaller than I’ve ever seen it, in the scope of the earth and the universe. I recognized how fragile our infrastructure is. How long would it take for vines to start crawling their way around telephone poles, sky scrapers, for rust to form on train tracks? As much as these images reminded me of humanity’s fragility, they also reminded me of its power. If it wasn’t causing so much death and destruction, it would be nearly comical how an invisible virus has emptied out streets of infamously bustling places around the world, from Times Square to New Delhi. These images show me that we forget the sheer power we have when we act as one humanity, something I have not seen in my lifetime. 

Although I am apprehensive about things returning to normal, I feel a surprising bittersweetness at the thought of this time coming to an end, which is ironic considering the cabin fever and agony I’ve experienced so far. I am doing my best to soak up what this time feels like, what it looks like, what it sounds like. I take photos of the empty streets on my walks. I paint the sky; when blue it is free of white streaks from airplanes. I listen to the harbor and hear birds chirping and waves lapping at the rocks instead of lobster boat engines gurgling. It doesn’t seem right calling all of this surveillance, but perhaps it is. Whatever it is, a heightened awareness, an intention to listen more closely and really see, it is comforting to me. And looking at these images from around the globe feels otherworldly-as if I am looking back in time at THE PANDEMIC, wondering what it was like, whilst still immersed in it. Perhaps right now engaging in a surveillance of this time is a precious thing.























4/17-Us versus Them or Us versus Pandemic? Article 1 Article 2

I live in Rockport, Maine, a tiny coastal town overlooking Penobscot Bay-a place that in the summer is bustling and beautiful, but in the off-season is frigid, and filled with shuttered businesses waiting for the affluent out-of-staters to arrive from New York and Massachusetts to summer in their homes on the islands and surrounding communities. It’s always been a bit of a charged relationship between the locals (largely consisting of hardworking fisherman) and the out-of-staters (generally extremely affluent “blue bloods”). However, nobody would ever dispute that the year round coastal communities of Maine rely entirely on the financial support of the out-of-state summer residents. Growing up I indulged in the jokes about the Audis coming across the Maine bridge memorial day weekend with their out of state plates and would go along with it when all the adults complained about the summer traffic. But I also watched as these same people cared for Maine, loved Maine, and supported it financially each summer, including my mom’s small business, which relied on support from summer out-of-staters to get us through the winter. 

These two articles give a glimpse into a phenomenon I’ve noticed in my specific community since the Coronavirus emerged, which is the polarization of ‘locals’ and ‘out of staters’. What has always been a symbiotic relationship between the two has morphed into an Us vs. Them situation. As described in the article,

“For the seasonal people, it is where they get married, where they hold funerals. This is a very meaningful place for them.” On the other hand, “The summer people rely on those [on the island] to keep their houses in working order, not to mention maintain some life on the island, while the residents are almost utterly dependent on their visitors economically.” 

I will be the first to admit I participate in this dynamic these days by rolling my eyes when I see a car with a New York plate pull into the driveway of a massive summer home, or when extended families with license plates from all around the country caravan into my neighborhood, which is far from a substantial hospital. However, I’m interested in pursuing this polarization further. What assumptions and labels do we attach to those we decide are “other”? What judgements do we jump to? Why do I feel so defensive and protective of a place that I wrongly think of as 'mine'? How do we resist the reaction (is it an instinctual one?) to blame someone else for the unprecedented, upending and terrifying situation we are in? I find myself needing to remind myself that the out-of-staters I am villainizing are people too-scared people-with their own set of circumstances just trying to do the best they can right now. How do the incidents and behavior described in the article apply to how our country or the world is handling Coronavirus? I suppose my conclusion is that we have more in common than we think, and if we don’t have much in common right now, we will at least all be people who love Maine who have lived through a pandemic.





4/12-Art in the time of Pandemic: Article

Last week I wrote about artist Trevor Paglen’s work on surveillance art. This week I found myself still intrigued by the theme of art-but art in the time of pandemic. I have been pondering questions such as, what will history define as art representative of covid-19? How will covid-19 change art forever? What will become of museums? How will the idea of “virtual art” blossom? Will a renewed sense of appreciation for the physical emerge after covid-19? How will the loneliness and solitude of isolation be expressed in art?

With these questions in mind, I found this article, “What Can We Learn from the Art of Pandemics Past?” by Megan O’Grady to be particularly relevant. I enjoyed looking through an archive of art from past pandemics and drawing connections and differences to the experience that we are living through. 

                    “The eerie images of abandoned thoroughfares hit us hard because they show 

                      us a glimpse of a possible future, a post-human universe, the built world without 

                      those who built it. Illness is, of course, all about the body, but what has been 

                      notable to me in the visuals of the past month is an absence of bodies...often it’s 

                      the unseen terrors that provoke the imagination.”  -Megan O’Grady

Megan O’Grady addresses similar questions to the ones I was considering, such as will something as seemingly mundane as the “coronavirus selfie”, made popular by Tom Hanks, come to represent this age of pandemic and the intersection of isolation and connection through social media? As I looked through this collection of art from times of Pandemic, I felt a new connection to these works that I never previously had-shared notions of fear, isolation, grief, and uncertainty.

It’s a challenging thing to try and appreciate the good in a time of such crises, but it has been a surprisingly pleasant feeling to feel connected to times of the past when I usually feel so far removed from them because of modern technology. In a nutshell, the humanity of past pandemics comes through in the art. I wonder what future generations will extract from the art produced during this time. 

As I got carried away with the concept of art in the time of pandemic, I came across another article about how museums and historians are documenting the pandemic as it’s happening, in real time: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/arts/design/museums-coronavirus-pandemic-artifacts.html 





(4/3) Link to short film:

My media contribution for this week is behind the scenes video about artist Trevor Paglen’s project to deep dive into the Atlantic Ocean to witness and photograph the NSA tapped underwater internet cables. Paglen, a MacArthur ‘genius’ awardee, as well as one of the cinematographers for “Citizenfour”, the groundbreaking documentary about Edward Snowden’s exposure of government surveillance programs, turns sites of surveillance usually clouded in secrecy and mystery into tangible form, thus shedding light on their existence. I was particularly intrigued by this video and thought it related well to all the themes of this cluster, particularly the Parry reading we recently read for Wendy’s class. Paglen seemed to exemplify the juxtaposition between the of beauty and aesthetics of surveillance with the reality of its danger and presence in our world. Through Paglen’s work, he gives his audience the power of viewing an image of concepts that usually are shrouded in such mystery. As he says in the behind the scenes video, the language around the internet is fluid and undefined, such as “the cloud, the internet” but the public doesn’t usually get to define what this really looks like. What is the thing collecting our data? Where is it? Paglen responds directly to these questions by photographing the very cable that is holding data of U.S. citizens. Viewing it empowers the audience as well as educates them. Paglen says his mission is “ insisting that we pay attention to certain things...the internet is a tool that can be used to prey on all of the people using it.


I was struck by how Paglen’s medium-photography-conveyed the very mysteries, intricacies, and hiddenness of surveillance itself. “In those photographs there’s absolutely no evidence whatsoever of that mass surveillance infrastructure because they're invisible, they’re underwater. A scene at a beach is a scene of mass surveillance” he says. The work Paglen is doing also seems very connected to the relationship between research and art we have focused on in this cluster. Paglen puts in tons of research and effort into his project, aside from the actual photography (he learned how to scuba dive and deep-sea navigate in preparation for his underwater cables project). On his research he says, “I’m not the kind of artist who goes into my studio every morning and throws around some paint and emerges with some masterpiece. My work really emerges out of research...I spent a lot of time looking at maritime charts, environmental impact statements, documents from the Snowden archive. I’m trying to put together an image of where I might be able to find these cables. I wanted to see what they look like.

More of Trevor Paglen’s work can be viewed here: https://www.tba21.org/journals/article/trevorpaglen