Images courtesy the artists, unless otherwise noted
Who is the average NSA employee? To artists Nicholas Knouf and Claudia Pederson, she's a bored female office employee filtering through reams of information: “We don't know what she looks like; we don’t know what her daily activity is. We only know that this person has access to a vast amount of data, data provided to her by programs approved by people much higher in the chain of command.” With snippets of “leaked” documents, Powerpoint presentations, and internal newsletters from the covert office in hand, the duo set out to knit together a surveillers’ perspective of the world.
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The result is called Art for Spooks, a printed augmented reality book and app combo that employs a mixture of analog and digital technologies to give users a view inside the mind of their imaginary employee. “We took text from the 'Ask Zelda' columns, an internal NSA blog post entitled 'i hunt sysadmins,' and an internal GCHQ wiki page on current electronic surveillance capabilities,” to piece the project together, Knouf and Pederson told The Creators Project. They then selected images from the agency's publicly-available presentations to provide insight into the “cultural imaginary” vocabularies of the agents who created them.Knouf and Pederson wanted to point out the brittleness of electronic surveillance and show how easy and hazardous it was to spread “disinformation,” so they turned to Salvador Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical” surrealist technique of pairing images that are not rationally linked. An important detail when it comes to their app is the ability for people to upload the available images to other social networking sites. “We know that the NSA/GCHQ monitors and mines the metadata of images and other media on these services.” But the metadata of the images in Art for Spooks includes GPS coordinates with the locations of US drone strikes in Pakistan, and text fields filled with scholarly texts about surveillance.
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