Reimagining resistance: Performing transparency and anonymity in surveillance art

Abstract

In response to being detained and interrogated at an airport by the INS under false accusations, multimedia artist Hasan Elahi launched the project Tracking Transience, a website designed to constantly publicize his activity. Rather than uphold claims to privacy, Elahi aims to enact a resistive posture to contemporary techniques of digital surveillance by releasing his personal information. Paradoxically, he voluntarily forgoes his privacy in order to feel more secure. This form of resistance registers his project of self-surveillance as a performance of transparency. In this context, he turns the normative flow of power in digital surveillance into a new critical posture, one in which the artist is anonymous to surveillance systems. Through anonymity, the artist participates with digital surveillance in order to avoid it. By tracing the methodologies that generate data on Elahi’s activity, this paper will speculate on how creative interventions can produce resistive strategies against surveillance systems by moving beyond the historical limits of privacy into the outer reaches of anonymity in our contemporary age of transparency.