Watching the watchmen

Who says the government doesn’t listen to the people? Folks who make that complaint might want to check out the new exhibit at the Helen Day Art Center.

“Surveillance Society,” which opened Friday, showcases a half-dozen artists’ takes on the watchful eyes of governments and corporations, sometimes playfully, sometimes seriously, sometimes hiding from it, and sometimes turning it back on itself. The exhibit runs through April 20 at the art center in Stowe.

Helen Day curator Nathan Suter has been working on putting the exhibit together for a couple of years, and his timing could not have been better, with National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden becoming such an everyday topic of conversation that Time magazine considered him for its 2013 person of the year.

“This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a long time,” Suter said last week. “The Snowden leaks serve to confirm what we already knew, or suspected. Are we afraid enough to trade our privacy and civil liberties for security and safety?”

Many of the artists use similar tools to what the government and private sector use to spy on people, particularly Hasan Elahi, a professor at the University of Maryland. One of Elahi’s pieces in the exhibit, titled “Hawkeye,” is a large-scale photograph of the titular AT&T data collection center in San Francisco, where all AT&T call records have been stored since 2001. Without context, it is an unremarkable photograph of a plain-looking building. But Elahi created the photograph using stitched-together images from Google Street View.

In another large piece, “An Undisclosed Location,” Elahi recreated the interior of former Vice President Dick Cheney’s residence in Maryland by studying no-fly zones in the region and matching them with real estate records.

Dutch artist Marnix de Nijs plays with the concept of video cameras in public places, and turns the lens on the viewer. A digital camera mounted in the gallery is linked to facial recognition software that de Nijs has linked with a list of known artists, pop stars, political dissidents and criminals. When a viewer looks at the camera, it scans the viewer’s face and matches it with the most similar-looking hit in the database.

UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), or drones, play a significant role in the show, too. Literally underfoot in the gallery is James Bridle’s “Drone Shadows,” an installation that places the outline of a 2012 Predator Drone on the gallery floor, spilling up onto the walls. Bridle also has a handy “UAC Identification Kit,” with scale models of the aircraft.

Not to worry, though — there’s always Adam Harvey’s “Stealth-Wear.” The New York City-based artist has created garments from special metallic fibers to hide the wearer from drones’ infrared cameras. “Stealth-Wear” is a highlight of the exhibit, pieces of present-day sci-fi that could be straight out of Hollywood if they weren’t so compellingly utilitarian in this day and age. Harvey’s got an editorial point to make, too: two of the three “anti-drone” garments are inspired by Muslim garb, the burqa and the hijab, or head scarf.

“Conceptually, these garments align themselves with the rationale behind the traditional hijab ad burqa: to act as ‘the veil which separates man or the world from God,’ replacing God with drone,” Harvey states in an accompanying narrative.

Spy tech, art tech

Every week or so since Edward Snowden blew his whistle, it seems, another new detail emerges in the overall picture of how the government is collecting data. Just this week, the New York Times reported spy agencies are looking at cell phone users’ app habits. Who knows? In a couple of years some of the pieces in “Surveillance Society” might already seem outdated.

Suter said the rapid advances in cellular and satellite technology in the past decade makes the pre-Sept. 11 world of landline wiretapping seem far away. He said before the cellular era, lawmakers had decades to craft policy regarding wire-tapping, because the technology remained relatively flat. Now, the tech is quickly outrunning the policies that govern it. Mix the Patriot Act with the advent of Facebook and Foursquare, and people are willingly giving away their personal data at the same time the government is collecting the rest.

“You picked up the bullhorn. You may not have realized what you were doing, but you picked it up,” Suter said of social media users.

Hasan Elahi has reason to stick it to the government. He was detained by the FBI in 2003 and interrogated numerous times before a lie detector test officially cleared him of wrongdoing. Yet, he says in an artist’s statement, his website still shows frequent hits from the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA.

Elahi’s piece “Tracking Transience” shows some of the results from turning his own phone into a tracking device. He paired data from his phone with mundane photos of his everyday existence and sent it all to the FBI.

“In an era in which everything is archived and tracked, the best way to maintain privacy may be to give it up,” Elahi wrote in a New York Times editorial. “If I cut out the middleman and flood the market with my information, the intelligence the FBI has on me will be of no value.”