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Introducing Art as Evidence: The Artistic Response to Whistleblowing
By Tatiana Bazzichelli
1. A New Form of Cultural Resistance
The time frame from 2009 to 2016 was a crucial period of collective experiences towards the formulation of artistic practices in relation to whistleblowing. In this period of time, close networks of trust were established around this topic, rooted in WikiLeaks’ activities which pushed the boundaries of what is correct to publish, and what could count as art.
In November 2009, WikiLeaks published 570,000 confidential 9/11 pager messages, documenting over 24-hours in real time of the period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington. The archive showed US national text pager intercepts of official exchanges at the Pentagon, FBI, FEMA and New York Police Department, and from computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Centre[1].
In 2010, the publication of Collateral Murder and the Afghan War Diary, anonymously disclosed by Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks, as well as the WikiLeaks release of top-secret State Department cables from US embassies around the world, signed the start of a specific period of time in which artists, hackers, activists, researchers, and critical thinkers engaged extensively with the formulation of new forms of technological resistances and artistic critique[2].
Three years later, Edward Snowden’s disclosures of National Security Agency documents have changed our perception of surveillance and control in the information society. The debate over abuses of government and large corporations has reached a broad audience, encouraging reflection on new tactics and strategies of resistance. Whistleblowing, leaking, and disclosing have opened up new terrains of struggle.
What is the artistic and activist response to this process? How is it possible to transfer the surveillance and whistleblowing debate into a cultural and artistic framework, to reach and empower both experts and non-experts?
The objective of this chapter is to introduce the concept of Art as Evidence as a framework to describe artistic and hacktivist practices able to reveal hidden facts, to expose misconducts and wrongdoings of institutions and corporations, to produce awareness about social, political and technological matters that need public exposure, and in general, to inform the reality we live in. Art becomes a means to sensibilise about sensitive issues, generating an in-depth analysis within the framework of social and political action, as well as hacktivism, post-digital culture, and network practices.
The framework of Art as Evidence is presented in this essay as a context of artistic exploration, in which the issues under scrutiny are investigated in their imaginative artistic potential by questioning the concept of evidence itself. The main tactics are not only the disclosure of information and provoking of awareness through artistic interventions, but also encouraging the imagining of alternative models of thinking and understanding which lead to the creation of new imaginaries by playing with the “unexpected”, a methodology that has been at the core of artistic experimentation since the Avant-garde, which introduced the use of shock and estrangement as artistic practice.
This chapter follows a situated perspective, based on the networks of trust I established in the course of the last ten years in this field, and the personal sharing with some of the key people that contributed to the development of the debate around art and whistleblowing. The concept of Art as Evidence was inspired by an exchange between Academy Award-winning filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras, artist, academic researcher, and investigative journalist Jacob Appelbaum, artist and geographer Trevor Paglen, and myself. As described in the following interview with Laura Poitras, in the fall of 2013 she suggested the framework of Art as Evidence for our keynote event at the transmediale festival in Berlin, to describe this common artistic perspective, and a conceptual zone to investigate artistic practices that speak and inform about reality, as well as provoke a reaction about it.[3]
According to Laura Poitras, connecting art with evidence means to reflect on “the tools and mediums we can use to translate evidence or information beyond simply revealing the facts, [and] how people experience that information differently—not just intellectually, but emotionally or conceptually.”[4] Following this perspective, art becomes not only a way to translate information, but also an entry point to investigate sensitive issues, and to explore and experience them by sharing them with an audience.
In Laura Poitras’ words: “The work that I’ve been trying to do is to find ways to communicate about what is a really horrible chapter in American history. We can do a reminder that Guantanamo opened in 2002 and there are people there who have never been charged with anything, but where’s the international pressure? […] It isn’t enough to change the reality, but it’s also not enough to say what it means. It’s actually incomprehensible to imagine being in prison and never be charged with anything. I feel like art is a way to express something about the real world. As artists we’re not separate from political realities, we’re responding to them and communicating about them.”[5]
In this context, the act of leaking and provoking awareness through whistleblowing and truth-telling becomes a central part of the strategy of media criticism, by bringing attention to abuses of governments, institutions, and corporations. The objective is to reflect on interventions that work within the systems under scrutiny, and increase awareness on sensitive subjects by exposing misconduct, misinformation and wrongdoing in the framework of politics and society. This means interlinking the act of disclosing with that of creating art, shifting the debate from the initial intentions of whistleblowers to inform the public, to another level where whistleblowing becomes a source of creative experimentation and social change.
The concept of whistleblowing in this essay is presented as something concrete and accessible to a broader public—something that everyone can experience and expand into the framework of artistic and activist interventions. Furthermore, the meaning of “evidence” itself is expressed in different ways, and expanded into a context of imaginary experimentation, which the artistic form allows.
2. Resisting the Normalisation of Surveillance
As Glenn Greenwald points out in his book No Place to Hide, reflecting on the harm of surveillance in society, “Only when we believe that nobody else is watching us do we feel free—safe—to truly experiment, to test boundaries, to explore new ways of thinking and being, to explore what it means to be ourselves. What made the internet so appealing was precisely that it afforded the ability to speak and act anonymously, which is so vital to individual exploration. For that reason, it is in the realm of privacy where creativity, dissent, and challenges to orthodoxy germinate.”[6]
This point is crucial to sensibilising people on the use of codes and software for protecting privacy, improving tools of counter-surveillance and anonymity. However, if we assume that today there is “No Place to Hide”, as proven by the global surveillance disclosures of Edward Snowden and other acts of whistleblowing described in this book, how can we imagine tactics of criticism and artistic experimentation that happen within a context of freedom of expression?
On one side, the perception of constant surveillance might be a limitation to imagination. On the other side, if the idea of being surveilled became normalised, we could start imagining how to produce artistic explorations that come from within systems of monitoring and oppression.
There is an obvious risk in living with the perception of being monitored through pervasive surveillance. As Greenwald himself suggests, reconnecting his reflections with the ones of Michael Foucault in Discipline and Punish, “those who believe they are watched will instinctively choose to do that which is wanted of them without even realizing that they are being controlled.”[7] In the context of debate over disclosures about state surveillance networks that function globally, the challenge becomes to find terrains of struggles and interventions, assuming we are all potentially watched.
As the hacktivist and researcher Jaromil writes in his abstract for the talk Demilitarize technology: An insider’s critique of contemporary hacker politics, “On a subjective level, while we constantly risk becoming obsessed by revelations about the global surveillance panopticon and the military-industrial complex, we are also exposed to mass-deceiving propaganda and media manipulations, while even interpersonal communication becomes a field for the expanding narrative of total war.”[8]
What he advocates is to circumvent the shared “grim aura” of fear and individualism through our capacity to imagine a better society, enhancing “the possibility for a hacker subject to maintain integrity and seek a positive constituency for her relations” by growing socially oriented networks of trust. This implies a reflection on collective empowerment, opening up the discourse of whistleblowing to a broader community of people.
In a panel at the Disruption Network Lab’s 2015 conference event SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy, Jacob Appelbaum observed that surveillance forces you to do things that you are asked to do. By normalising surveillance, we legitimise systemic power structures and asymmetries in society. As is widely known, Appelbaum has been in self-exile in Germany for the past eight years, unwilling to submit himself to harassment from the US authorities for his previous involvement with WikiLeaks and his refusal to testify against Julian Assange in the context of the Grand Jury investigation against him. He points out that surveillance is only an aspect of a broader political structure, whilst the challenge is to work on liberating each other, provoking systemic changes: “Whistleblowing is a tactic but it is not a whole strategy, it is not enough on its own. We should find terrains of struggles in the information society.”[9]
On the same panel, speaking about information asymmetry, researcher on civil disobedience, Theresa Züger, pointed out that state and corporations gather information about us, but we don’t have information about how much we are surveilled: “Whistleblowing is breaking this, by directly intervening within politics, and changing what we know. It is not only a symbolic gesture of disobedience, but people have taken enormous risks.”[10]
This debate relates to the necessity of collective empowerment and simultaneously lowering risks, distributing the potential punishment and sharing information that only relatively few people have access to, as was pointed out in the early days of the debate on the Snowden Files.
The models of disclosing information we have witnessed over the past decade are diverse, from leaking the information to specific organisations, as whistleblower Chelsea Manning did in 2010, passing her material to WikiLeaks; to appointing specific people to filter information, as Edward Snowden chose to do in 2013, by trusting Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras to receive and have access to the NSA documents; to leaking large information via BitTorrent and Mega, as happened in the 2015 case of the hack of the Hacker Team data by Phineas Fisher, and the reporting of evidence by Citizen Lab on the targeting of human rights activists via the surveillance software provided by the Hacking Team company; to the collaborative model adopted in the 2015-2016 Panama Papers investigation by Süddeutsche Zeitung journalists Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, connecting with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to analyse the law firm documents, involving a multitude of journalists from more than one hundred media organisations in around eighty countries.
In the case of the Snowden Files, the Berlin-based journalist and curator Krystian Woznicki started a public debate in July 2014 with his article, “Open the Snowden Files! Raising New Issues of Public Interest”, attracting a significant amount of comments on the Berliner Gazette website.[11] Woznicki argued that “the access to the documents of the NSA-Gate remains closed” and “this blocks the democratic potential of the Snowden disclosures.”[12] Laura Poitras, referring to her activity of reporting the Snowden disclosures and her contact with the source, pointed out that “it is a very justified criticism just in terms of how to scale the reporting, and it certainty has been a challenge, but it is also about how you build this kind of relationship and networks of trust, and they have been hard to balance” —an issue that we have discussed further in the context of our recent interview for this book.[13]
In the chapter on the role of political media, “The Fourth Estate”, in his book No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald describes the power dynamics at stake when media subservient to government try to discredit him for reporting on sensitive issues and working with a source that disclosed classified information. Many parallel issues play a role: the trust of the source seeking to co-ordinate the reporting via specific journalists, the clear risk of punishment from the powers of government, and the sensitive choice of deciding what is appropriate to report and what is not. At the end of his book, he writes:
The prevailing institutions seem too powerful to challenge; orthodoxies feel too entrenched to uproot; there are always many parties with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. But it is human beings collectively, not a small number of elites working in secret who can decide what kind of world we want to live in. Promoting the human capacity to reason and make decisions: that is the purpose of whistleblowing, of activism, of political journalism. And that’s what is happening now, thanks to the revelations brought about by Edward Snowden.[14]
Between the end of the 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, in the so-called media art scene, the debate about the collectivisation of media tactics was central. Today, the challenge is to imagine a distributed range of practices able to bring back a shared perception of power, which should not only rely on the traditional mass media system, but also reflect on strategies of collective actions and interventions—providing solutions, which are political and not merely technological.
3. Artistic Practice as Evidence of Reality
In April 2012, Laura Poitras held a surveillance teach-in at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. It was an artistic and practical commentary on living in the contemporary Panopticon. For this programme, NSA whistleblower William Binney and Jacob Appelbaum joined her to discuss state surveillance, civil right to privacy, and how technological innovations are legitimating pervasive access to private information[15]. The event took place in the context of Laura Poitras’ work, which had previously chronicled post-9/11 America with her films My Country, My Country (2006), The Oath (2010), and before the release of Citizenfour, her 2014 Academy Award winning documentary on the surveillance state and Edward Snowden’s disclosures.
As stated in our 2013 interview (included in this publication), describing her artistic practice, Laura Poitras stated: “I don’t want the audience to think that it’s some other reality that they have no connection with. I want to emotionally implicate the audience—especially U.S. audiences—in the events they are seeing.”[16] Her solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Astro Noise (February 5 to May 1, 2016), expanded this perspective; she created installations of immersive environments combining various material, from footage to information around NSA surveillance and post-9/11 America.
Connecting to this line of imagining art as a means to speak about reality, in February 2014 I curated a panel at the transmediale festival in Berlin involving Laura Poitras, Jacob Appelbaum and Trevor Paglen. On this specific occasion, the filmmaking work of Poitras was combined with the secret geographies of Trevor Paglen and the colour infrared photography of Jacob Appelbaum. The concept of surveillance was translated and explored through concrete artistic examples, interlinking various areas of expertise. We discussed how art could become functional in creating evidence and informing about our society; a scope that is clear in the work of Laura Poitras, and her films and exhibitions that show how art can be used to transfer information, and to expose misconduct and wrongdoing. This approach is also relevant in the work of Trevor Paglen, bringing misconduct and systems of powers into the light. He does this through his photography, and through other artistic projects investigating hidden mechanisms of artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and machine learning, as we can read in the interview that follows in this publication.
In the 2010 photographic monograph Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, Trevor Paglen explored the secret activities of the US military and intelligence agencies, creating photos of top-secret sites that are not accessible, but that can be mapped and brought to evidence. As we discuss in the interview, photography becomes a means of truth-telling, revealing to the public the existence of secret operations, depicting both what can and cannot be seen. High-end optical systems are used to document government locations, and classified spacecrafts in Earth’s orbit are photographed by tracking the data of amateur satellite watchers. In Paglen’s series of drone photography, we see an apparently normal landscape, but only when the photo is exposed to its maximum resolution are we are able to disclose drones in the sky, and therefore have an idea of the clandestine military activities that are happening on the American landscape.
During our panel at the transmediale festival, the notion of Art as Evidence was also related with the colour infrared photographic work by Jacob Appelbaum, based on a Kodak EIR colour infrared film, medium format. The following 2015 solo show SAMIZDATA: Evidence of Conspiracy that I curated at the NOME Gallery in Berlin, presented six cibachrome prints (a fully analogue positive slide printing technique), portraying Bill Binney, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, David Miranda, Julian Assange, Sarah Harrison and Ai Weiwei, as well as two installations: P2P Panda-to-Panda, and the necklace piece Schuld, Scham & Angst (Guilt, Shame & Fear).
Appelbaum shot the photos using colour infrared films, previously adopted to expose hidden details during aerial surveillance, to portray people under surveillance who have themselves worked to report on governmental misconducts and exposed crimes against civil society. According to him, “it is beautiful irony and conceptually strong to use surveillance film to critique surveillance culture. In a world of digital surveillance, re-purposing analogue aerial agricultural surveillance film for the portraiture of peoples who are exposed to and who work to expose surveillance seemed the appropriate medium.”[17]
The photos, given as a gift by Appelbaum to the people that are portrayed, were also the evidence of a personal network of trust, where grassroots collaboration between trusted people who share passions, ideals and political views were documented. In the context of the interconnected network of artistic evidence, the installation P2P (Panda-to-Panda), created in collaboration with Ai Weiwei, was a stuffed panda with Snowden materials and other classified documents saved in a SD card, exemplifying a peer-to-peer network of trusted individuals that got the panda as gift for their struggle for social justice. The project Schuld, Scham & Angst (Guilt, Shame & Fear) was a piece of one hundred necklaces, each containing shredded unreleased documents, journalistic notes, and other classified documents from the previous two years of reporting on the Snowden files, thought to be pieces of evidence carried around by people, symbolising the shame and guilt of shredding sensitive documents, as society often demands.[18]
Another project resulting from collaboration between Jacob Appelbaum and Trevor Paglen is the Autonomy Cube sculpture (exhibited at the Edith-Russ-Haus for Media Art, Oldenburg, from October 22, 2015 to January 3, 2016). The cube, which worked as a node in the Tor network, gave visitors access to the Tor network along with a copy of the Tor programme, turning the museum into a space for free speech and autonomy. By making the cube enter into a cultural context, the exhibition allowed “art institutions to actually be part of a worldwide network of things such as opening up lines of communication, securing people’s fundamental right to anonymity, to free speech, and thus to human rights.”[19] Paglen and Appelbaum have built around a dozen cubes in total, that have often been activated at the same time, building and improving the Tor network.
4. Blowing the Whistle, Questioning Evidence
In 2016, I was asked by Akademie Schloss Solitude and ZKM Center for Art and Media to curate a call that I named “Blowing the Whistle, Questioning Evidence”, which was announced in February 2017.[20] I was trying to bring together a multiple perspective: from one side, to imagine art as an source of exposing misconduct, reflecting on the impact and consequences of whistleblowing; from the other side, I wanted to question the discourse of providing evidence. What does it mean to produce art as evidence of our society? Is there only one single truth, or are there many? This question opens up a crucial debate in the artistic field, because it can result in the deconstruction of a linear form of understanding, proposing the idea that truth (and evidence) is always multiple. Whistleblowers often work on exposing hidden evidence of crimes, but what if the truth could be varied, and how do we then work with the consequent discourse of providing social justice? This double-sided perspective becomes an occasion to speak about power mechanisms and different forces of powers that are usually at stake.
In relation to the concept of art as evidence, I proposed to open up a field of artistic research and practice where the fight against surveillance and for the protection of civil rights and social justice becomes a terrain of intervention by understanding the inner logic of systems of power and questioning them: questioning government agencies, private enterprises and corporations that base their profit on the collection of meta-data, as well as intelligence services that base their business in tracking and surveilling people.
What normally motivates whistleblowers is informing the public, and many whistleblowers would not compare themselves with artists. However, following a speculative perspective, I would argue that whistleblowers are able to provoke the unexpected, operate a disruption of closed systems from within, and investigate hidden sides of reality. They experience in their personal life a radical change of perspective, a sort of détournement of belief that contributes to generating societal transformations. Although their risks and mindsets are not equal, artists are able to encourage different modes of thinking by investigating hidden sides of power and society, and, at the same time, provoke a reflection on the meaning and limits of evidence itself.
Conceptually interlinking the act of whistleblowing to artistic practices, focusing on the function of generating awareness by producing as well as questioning evidence, would allow for the opening up of the meaning of whistleblowing more widely. If we see the act of whistleblowing as a cultural perspective able to provoke change, with the strength to radically construct a different point of view, it is possible to find such mindset in the activities of many artists, activists, journalists, researchers and people in general. Obviously, the consequences of an act of whistleblowing and the creation of an artistic project are not the same, at least in countries where artistic expression is not persecuted as a crime. But I consider very it important to engage in this speculative comparison, to better understand the aim of whistleblowing, to decriminalise it, to open up a wider debate on what this practice is in the first place, as well as to stretch the boundaries of what art might be. The following experiences which lie at the crossing between generating social awareness, providing public knowledge, and sharing the tools for producing evidence, are a good example of how whistleblowing could inform activist practices and inspire artistic projects.
More than thirty years ago, Norwegian researcher and journalist Jørgen Johansen exposed the sites of secret NATO military bases in Norway, combining and analysing public records, freely accessible to everyone. The government considered his publications to be the disclosure of classified information and prosecuted him with espionage charges, although he had collected and analysed information that anyone could have found. In an interview in September 2015, he points out: “If you are a person who thinks the world should be better, you must act in a way that gives the opposition movements around the world the possibility to do their jobs. If you’re just an obedient consumer or an obedient citizen, you’re letting surveillance continue on those who really have something to hide because they are the state’s opposition.”[21]
Following the opening up of the practice of whistleblowing among wider society, German artist collective Peng! launched their campaign Intelexit in September 2015, inviting people inside the secret services, as well as intelligence agencies, to blow the whistle and make a stand (www.intelexit.org). This initiative promoted whistleblowing as a common practice, by building up a support structure and safety network to enable whistleblowing, taking into account the risks. The campaign used disruptive methods to intervene with intelligence systems, for example placing unexpected billboards in front of the offices of intelligence services and distributing flyers via drones flying over NSA bases. As usual for the interventions by the Peng! collective, the project served also as a provocation to open up a debate about the issues of surveillance and truth-telling, as well as the importance of sources’ protection[22].
The act of speaking out as a tactic of resistance and societal change is nothing new, but it deserves an in-depth analysis, especially today, with the debate about surveillance and big data involving an increasing audience. In recent years, more artists and groups have been dealing with the topics of art and evidence, and many have stressed the importance of investigative aesthetics as an artistic practice.
To mention a few: James Bridle, who focused his practice on the concept of the New Aesthetics (2012), researching drones, military technologies and asylum seeker deportation, among other topics; the !Mediengruppe Bitnik, that work critically on online and offline systems of control, and in early 2013 developed the project “Delivery for Mr. Assange”, tracking the journey of a parcel sent to the Ecuadorian embassy; Paolo Cirio, who explored the concept of Evidentiary Realism (2017) and related artistic works, scrutinising and revealing the hidden systems of social reality, intersecting documentary, forensic, and investigative practices; Joana Moll, tracing the connection between hidden interfaces, data exploitation, corporate business models, free labour, media surveillance, CO2 exploitation and domesticated electricity as also highlighted in this publication; Adam Harvey, researching privacy, surveillance, and computer vision, developing camouflage techniques for subverting face detection, thermal imaging, and location tracking; Ingrid Burrington and her work focusing on mapping, documenting, and identifying elements of network infrastructure, exposing the hidden landscapes of the internet; the artistic duo UBERMORGEN, net.art pioneers and media hackers that research data and create polarising social experiments, who have been creatively working with the concept of truth-telling since the 1990s; and of course the long lasting investigative work of Forensic Architecture, based on the collaborative concept of Horizontal Verification and the Socialised Production of Evidence, applying an open-source counter-forensic practice for the production of evidence—a strategy well described in the following contribution in this book by Robert Trafford.[23]
This essay is an invitation to discuss, reflect and develop new artistic practices that take inspiration by, but also go beyond, whistleblowing, to open up the fight against surveillance to a broader community. Art as Evidence therefore means, in this context, to explore the current transformation of political and technological criticism in times of increased geopolitical surveillance, analysing methods and artistic practices to question and produce evidence.
Artistic works of evidence and about evidence become therefore not only a challenge to expose facts and wrongdoings that are hidden and not accessible to the general public, but also an opportunity to collectively question the concept of evidence itself, and to reflect on which speculative forms of artistic research and practice might arise from its analysis.