Agency + Surveillance: March 31

Monday, March 31, 6:30pm
New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center
Arnhold Hall, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

A roundtable discussion of agency in surveilled space: who is watching, who is being watched, who decides which spaces are visible to the camera and which are effectively invisible, off-limits to authorities. The panelists will examine how engineers, artists, and activists intervene in surveillance systems to subvert, invert, and redefine these relationships, and how the principle of “sousveillance”—meaning surveillance from “below,” or watching the watchers—applies. It features artists and engineers who collaborate to produce software and hardware applications that access and visualize data usually obscured from public view; artists whose projects have questioned the rhetoric of surveillance by intervening more playfully in the expected aesthetics or power dynamics; and activists who monitor post-9/11 surveillance by intelligence agencies and its effects on immigrant and dissenting communities.

Panelists:
Tad Hirsch, researcher and member of the artist collective Institute for Applied Autonomy
Anjana Malhotra, human rights lawyer and former fellow with Human Rights Watch
Jenny Marketou, video and installation artist
Trevor Paglen, artist, writer, and experimental geographer, Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley
Brooke Singer, digital media artist, Assistant Professor of New Media at Purchase College, State University of New York, and cofounder of the art, technology, and activist group Preemptive Media.

Moderator:
Lex Bhagat, co-editor of Atlas of Radical Cartography

More info available here