By Sarah Hromack
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Edward Snowden, 2013
Sarah Hromackis a worker and writer living in Brooklyn, New York. She is the Director of Digital Media at the Whitney Museum of American Art and teaches in New York University’s Steinhardt school.
2013 proved to be an exceptionally interesting year at the intersection of art, media, and technology. A few personal observations from the ground (and the network) here in New York.
Visible Invisibility: Culled from an interview with then-Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald shot in a Hong Kong hotel room by documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, the now-iconic video still-as-portrait of former CIA employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden was a defining image of 2013, for me and many, many others. Delivered with a level of rhetorical clarity uncommon to his field, Snowden’s disclosure did more than articulate the reasoning behind his decision to leak documents that continue to reveal the depth and breadth of the National Security Administration’s surveillance programs to various media outlets: His willingness to serve as a visual representation of ‘turnkey tyranny’ added another image – a human face – to a visual lexicon that has emerged in recent years as classified information trickles into public consciousness through various, mostly digital channels. (Private Chelsea Manning’s 2010 disclosure and subsequent distribution, via Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks organization, of the now-infamous Collateral Murder video footage and hundreds of thousands of military documents preceded Snowden, of course. Snowden’s precision of execution, however, is a marker of personal style if there ever was one.)
Not only are the general, mainstream media-consuming public thinking about network security and Internet privacy– these were not topics of everyday conversation a scant four or five years ago – but it also wants to see those concerns embodied in some form. Information isn’t enough to satiate the public imagination in 2013: Photographic proof is required.
Artists, it turns out, hold a particular form of agency here: I was very interested to see Poitras’s ‘9/11 Trilogy’ situated within the context of the 2012 Whitney Biennial, for instance. An image of the National Security Administration’s building, shot from a helicopter flying through restricted air space by artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, graces the December 23, 2013 issue of Time magazine. It is nothing short of stunning. The sublime beauty of Paglen’s images is a clever foil for the deep, dark government operations they often reveal and as such, they are infinitely suited to the Internet, where they now circulate widely to my simultaneous delight and dismay (I first encountered Paglen as an academic geographer in San Francisco and still miss what gets lost in translation when his pretty, pretty pictures go blindly viral).
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(Image courtesy: Trevor Paglen)
The Quantified Selfie: Speaking of the social media, the Oxford English Dictionary named ‘selfie’ its International Word of the Year for 2013, defined as ‘a photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website.’ People like to take pictures of themselves with famous works of art, not-so-shockingly, a phenomenon that I believe cultural producers– artists and institutions alike – not only actively recognize, but are playing to in ways that range from the mercenary and the circus-like to the potentially critical.
The Jeff Koons face off between New York’s David Zwirner and Gagosian galleries generated an obscene number of selfies shot in the metallic surfaces of Koons’s latest sculptural works. London audiences saw RAndom International’s ‘Rain Room’ debut at the Barbican Centre’s Curve Gallery in 2012; at its MoMA redux, in 2013, the admission queue promised hours-long wait times. The payoff? You guessed it. At the moment, social media channels – Instagram, especially – further attest to New Yorkers’ willingness to queue endlessly for the privilege of photographing themselves reflected in (very, very expensive) mirrored surfaces: entrance lines to Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Infinity Mirrored Room’ at David Zwirner were rumored to be holding at six hours for 45 seconds’ worth of shooting time. A few reading suggestions for those moored outside the galleries: Hito Steyerl’s ‘The Wretched of the Screen’ (e-flux/Sternberg Press, 2012); Paul Chan’s 2010 e-flux essay The Unthinkable Community and Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter’s more recent Mousse essay, Mass Effect, are worth a go. Gallery going selfie-takers might consider posting their mugs to DIS Magazine’s #Artselfie project, which is still going strong.
Massive Attack vs. Adam Curtis also enjoyed its U.S. debut at the Park Avenue Armory in late September. While reviews were mixed (in my cohort of Curtis devotees and Massive Attack/Cocteau Twins holdovers, at least) it was very refreshing to see the cheerful perfection of New Yorkers’ Instagram feeds blindsided by dystopic historical revisionism in the form of full-on propagandist performance spectacle. I could just feel Edward Bernays smiling down upon us all.
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Enter the Glassholes: Google Glass hasn’t quite reached the consumer market yet, but 2013 was a year of chance sightings on the nerdy little heads of Google ‘Glass Ambassadors’ the world over: All professional encounters aside, I spotted a young man having what appeared to be a psychedelic experience with a flower while wearing Glass on a sunny day in Madison Square Park; a school of Glass-clad Googlers greeted me in at San Francisco International Airport and seemed to follow me throughout the city on a weekend trip to visit old friends; a kilted man in plastic clogs stared at me very, very intently through Glass while ambling through the New York Art Book Fair. I glared back at him, as if my pointed scowl could disable his new toy. Each encounter prompted a reaction of simultaneous curiosity and abject horror at the thought of being recorded without my consent, as if the physical presence of the apparatus somehow rendered it more nefarious than less-visible forms of surveillance that have been documenting my workaday existence for years.
Shot outside Lubbock, Texas in 112-degree heat against the backdrop of architect Robert Bruno’s Steel House, which looms over Ransom Canyon, photographer Steven Klein’s Google Glass and a Futuristic Vision of Fashion shoot for the September issue of American Vogue captured my personal sense of ambivalence perfectly in a series of dystopic images whose colour saturation and spatial orientation could have been directed by Alfred Hitchcock himself.
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Steven Klein, ‘Google Glass and a Futuristic Vision of Fashion’, 2013
Interface Affect: In recent years, I have found it particularly curious to watch some of strongest, most invested relationships between art and technology develop at the places where both intersect with commerce—and ironically so at that, given the art world’s ever-awkward relationship with digital-born art works (and social media, for that matter). Clearly having learned from the unmitigated failure that was the 2011 VIP Art Fair, Christie’s, Artsy, Paddle 8, Artspace, Saatchi, and a host of smaller start-up outfits are working to develop inventive digital experiences that educate, inform, delight – and end in sales. Paddles On! an auction of ‘net art hosted by Phillips and Tumblr sought to establish a market for digital-born works once and for all – a complicated, yet attention-worthy endeavour.
On the Ground in 2014: Looking ahead, I’ll be watching the New Museum’s Incubator for Art, Technology, and Design here in New York, a project opening in the museum’s adjacent building on the Bowery that will undoubtedly impact the city’s burgeoning technology community in many ways. In Brooklyn – and specifically in and around the Greenpoint neighborhood, where I live – I’m eagerly testing Triple Canopy’s new, open-source publishing platform, Alongslide. The ‘real life’ relationship between art and technology only becomes more so in this city as spaces such as 319 Scholes, Transfer Gallery, Babycastles, and countless one-off events tie people, art, and technology together. Remember: One begets the others.
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