Title

ANARCHIST: Israeli Drone Feed (Intercepted February 24, 2009)

Description

Poitras engages ambivalently with the language of fine art in six acid-hued abstract photographs hanging at the mouth of the exhibition. In another context, they could almost belong to the genus of decorative nonfigurative painting known under the pejorative nickname “Zombie Formalism.” Given to Poitras on a hard drive by Snowden, these authorless artworks are, quite literally, hackstractions—snapshots of armed Israeli drone feeds, intercepted by the U.K.’s classified data collection program codenamed Anarchist. A museum tour guide explained that they confirm Israel’s secret use of weaponized drones, a practice its government refuses to acknowledge.

Creator

Laura Poitras

Date

2016

Type

print

Medium

mounted inkjet print

aluminum composite panels

Source

The Brooklyn Rail: art review

Extent

45 × 64.75 inches

Coverage

ANARCHIST is a series of images that Laura Poitras has drawn from the documents provided to her by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. They display signals collected through an eponymous top-secret operation run by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the United Kingdom’s surveillance agency. From the top of the Troodos Mountains on the island nation of Cyprus, two antennae operating twenty-four hours a day intercept signals from satellites, drones, and radars in the Mediterranean region. The images in ANARCHIST show various stages in the process of descrambling the collected signals.

Whitney Museum Teacher Guide: Laura Poitras: Astro Noise

place of creation

United Kingdom

Is Part Of

ANARCHIST

References

Along with their exhibition of the artist's work, the Whitney Museum published "Astro Noise: A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance", a collection of fiction, non-fiction, imagery and primary documents that together create a metaphorical road map to understanding and navigating the landscape of total surveillance and the "war on terror.