As a form of surveillance protest art Professor and Artist Hasan Elahi launched a project called Hiding in Plain Sight. The project was inspired by his experience of being detained by the FBI catching a plane post 9/11. He was accused of being a terror suspect after authorities were looking for an Arab man (Elahi isn’t even an Arab) in Detroit.
Hiding in Plain Sight is made up of thousands of photos of every single detail of his life. The idea behind it is that if the FBI wants to watch him then they can watch everything he does “And then I started thinking to myself, I have a file at the FBI, but how accurate is it? What do they know about me? Then I started saying, “Well, in theory, if I tell everything to everyone, then that file is much more comprehensive than any information the FBI has.
” What that basically does is borrow th
e simplest of all economics principles, where by flooding the market with all this information that I have of myself, the information that the FBI has about me has absolutely no value whatsoever.” (Mu, E. 2011)
Elahi also see it as a two way mirror in that he can see who checks his website and be spying on then in return. It is a very interesting concept of using the surveillance technology against the people who do the spying. Hasan Elahi work is a sarcastic but very personal form of protest art that draws attention to the issue of surveillance.
It is a fascinating idea of taking the way in which people share on social media and showing it to the most extreme degree such as taking pictures of every toilet you use or every bit of food you eat. The extreme number of pictures of an everyday activity is very effective and humours in highlighting the way Elahi feels if ‘they’ are going to watch my life ‘they can watch all of it.
Mu, Erica. (2012) Looking at you looking at me: surveillance protest art. Available at: http://kalwnews.org/audio/2011/04/12/looking-you-looking-me-surveillance-protest-art_933747.html (Accessed 15 January 2014)
Laura McDonald Art and Design 