Hasan ELAHI

Hasan Elahi is an artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, citizenship, migration, transport, and the challenges of borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Sundance Film Festival, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Venice Biennale. His work is frequently in the media and has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, and has appeared on Al Jazeera, Fox News, and The Colbert Report. Elahi has spoken about his work to a broad range of audiences such as Tate Modern, Einstein Forum, National Geographic, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, TED, and the World Economic Forum. His recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship, grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and he is a recipient of a Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award. He serves on the National Advisory Council at Creative Capital and on the Advisory Board for the New Media Caucus. He is part of the core faculty at the Chautauqua School of Art summer residency program and has previously been the resident faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He is currently Professor and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University.

I decided to give the FBI a helping hand after an erroneous tip accusing me of terrorist activities led to a six-month long investigation. During this period, I spent justifying nearly every aspect of my existence to the authorities in the name of national security. The investigation prompted me to monitor myself voluntarily and open up my life to the public. Predating public knowledge of the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program by over a decade, this project questions the consequences of living under constant surveillance and continuously generates databases of imagery that tracks me and my points of transit in real-time. Although I initially created this for my FBI agent, the public can also monitor my communication records, banking transactions, and transportation logs along with the various intelligence and government agencies who frequent my website.

Thousand Little Brothers is a print created from thousands of images from the Tracking Transience database using the backdrop of the SMPTE color bars. The bright color bars, used for both calibration of video signals and as the Emergency Broadcast System in the US alerting viewers of impending doom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Broadcast_System

The Orb series is the three-dimensional version of the images from the Tracking Transience database evoking a satellite and a landmine, and in this duality between the call and response, the physical and the virtual, the spectator and the target, surveillance and protection, voyeurism and exhibitionism, and ultimately, the nation and the individual.