Nadim Samman E-Book

Nadim Samman

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Hatje Cantz Text
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 233

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Proprietary algorithms, secret data troves, and inscrutable systems rule the day. How is this registered in art? In Poetics of Encryption Nadim Samman explores works that highlight the hidden dimensions of our technological landscape. Running counter to erroneous claims regarding a new culture of transparency and openness, such artworks address black sites, black boxes, and black holes—all the while, toggling between enlightened concern and occult dreaming. NADIM SAMMAN is Curator for the Digital Sphere at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin. He read Philosophy at University College London before receiving his PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Widely published, in 2019 he was First Prize recipient of the International Award for Art Criticism (IAAC). Major curatorial projects included the 4th Marrakech Biennale (2012), the 5th Moscow Biennale for Young Art (2015) and the 1st Antarctic Biennale (2017).

Leseprobe

God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.*

—Nicholas of Cusa

For Dehlia

Poetics of Encryption

Art and the Technocene

Nadim Samman

Colophon

Author

Nadim Samman

Managing editor

Louisa Elderton

Project management

Fabian Reichel

Copyediting

Bill Roberts

Graphic design

Neil Holt

Typeface

Arnhem

Production

Thomas Lemaître

Reproductions

DLG Graphic, Paris

Printing

Livonia Print, Riga

Paper

Munken Print White Vol. 1.5, 90 g/m2

© 2023 Hatje Cantz Verlag, Berlin,

and the author

© 2023 for the reproduced works by Nora Al-Badri, Jason Appelbaum, Tuur van Balen, Amy Balkin, Zach Blas, Émilie Brout, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Joshua Citarella, Revital Cohen, Kate Crawford, Simon Denny, Ed Fornieles, Adam Harvey, Susanna Hertrich, Marguerite Humeau, Vladan Joler, Egor Kraft, Félix Luque Sánchez, Maxime Marion, Eva and Franco Mattes, Mary Mattingly, Mimi Ọnụọha, Trevor Paglen, Davide Quayola, Jon Rafman, Evan Roth, Charles Stankievech, and Britta Thie: the artists

© 2023 for the reproduced works by Julian Charrière, Roger Hiorns, Tilman Hornig, Carsten Nicolai, and Hito Steyerl: VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, and the artists

Publishedby

Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH

Mommsenstraße 27

10629 Berlin

www.hatjecantz.com

A Ganske Publishing Group Company

isbn 978-3-7757-5265-7 (Print)

isbn 978-3-7757-5267-1 (ePub)

isbn 978-3-7757-5266-4 (ePDF)

Printed in Latvia

Co-produced with KW Institute for Contemporary Art

KW Institute for Contemporary Art is supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe

Dark Arts

Black Site

Black Box

Black Hole

Dark Times

Dark Arts

Contemporary life plays out amid a profusion of technical systems whose inner workings are obscure—if not locked. There is no master key. And yet, this encrypted world must be borne somehow. Fortunately, the term “encryption” contains a latent spatial imaginary. And this imaginary yields insight into what is hidden by and within tech. In the face of information asymmetries, and when cryptographic de-coding cannot (or does not) happen, this perspective affords aesthetic purchase.

A spatial imaginary enables poiesis—the sense of making or creation which lies at the core of art—even in the face of the uncrackable. If an encrypted matter cannot be opened up and inspected, it may yet be rescored. Poiesis supplies narrative and pictorial inroads, a kind of endogenous psychological map of strange terrain—or, at least, certain points of orientation. While reviewing select artworks from the last decade, this book runs counter to Big Tech’s erroneous claims regarding a new culture of transparency and openness—showcasing, instead, a poetics of encryption.

The word “encryption” is built around the image of a crypt, as a primary figure for an enclosed or hidden place. Harking back to ancient funerary practices, the “crypt” contains a latent history that far predates modern technology. As an implicit corollary, the question of burial techniques, and the ritual and performative aspect of sealing-up are raised (like the dead) by the term itself. A crypt, by definition, contains a body. Negotiating its built structure thus activates drama concerning whether the buried figure can rest in peace, whether it may be disinterred by a sanctioned practice, such as archeology, or de-crypted by grave robbing.

A crypt is an occult place. The knowledge that it contains is esoteric, and may be gleaned only through recondite or suspect methods. As a work of criticism, this book oscillates between both poles, but leans more towards the latter. If cryptography exemplifies a lawful right-hand path for dealing with digital encryption—a scientific method—then poiesis and its interpretation pursue the left-hand path. It is the road of images and their dynamic imagination. This path may seem suspect if judged incorrectly. Yet, as the philosopher Gaston Bachelard reminds us, “Images are not concepts. They do not withdraw into their meaning. Indeed, they tend to go beyond their meaning.”1 Furthermore, “If the image that is present does not make us think of one that is absent, if an image does not determine an abundance—an explosion—of unusual images, then there is no imagination.”2 Through such abundance, the alienating, guarded, or jealous implications of encrypted domains are revalued—a different operation from unlocking.

Lying partially buried within the term “encryption,” the image of the crypt does not only hold a store of latent spatial figures and language. It overflows with supplementary frames of reference. Indeed, the crypt image is the wellspring of a whole poetics, “an aspiration toward new images.”3 It is like a seed that, when properly cultivated, bears much fruit. While establishing a familiar architectural figure through which to speak about relations to encrypted space, it goes even further, emanating tokens for death, afterlife, and spirit. If the sublime object of a closed grave is the deceased’s soul, a cryptic imaginary introduces high stakes for what may lay buried in digitally encrypted domains, namely, an embodied, personified point of reference—the inscription of an individual’s “essence” or ontological status within the technological field. Here, the spiritual and political converge.

This said, endeavors to make poetic sense of encryption must reckon with gloom and spooky affects. For the crypt image does not merely contain darkness, safely, in the manner of spent nuclear fuel enclosed within a holding system. Whenever tapped, even slightly (and especially by Nietzsche’s tuning fork), it disgorges both optic metaphors and unenlightened effluvia. The latter washes over the cultural scene—a wave of mysteries, monsters, and hauntings that should be out of step with today’s scientism but which, in fact, track it like a shadow. As we shall see, more tech breeds more encryption. And with it, Mehr Dunkelheit.

According to the political economist Sarah Myers West, “Surfacing and making visible the imaginaries we develop around encryption provides an entry point to understanding the implications of encryption technologies in a networked society.”4 These imaginaries influence perceptions of “what encryption is, what it does, and what it should do.”5 Endeavoring to broaden the scope of her analysis, before taking on national security and state secrecy, West sketches a brief genealogy of cryptography—from Egyptian religious hieroglyphics, to the Renaissance occultist and inventor of steganography, Johannes Trithemius. In her view, this esoteric history still colors public attitudes. As she has it, “the association between cryptography and the occult is powerful: despite the efforts of cryptographers over centuries to establish the practice as a science, it retains the residual mark of these dark associations.”6 But what are these residual marks, beyond a general suspicion of secret practices? West’s article does not venture any further, instead moving onto questions of policy. As we shall see, encryption’s occult imaginary abides today—indeed, flourishes—in an updated and rather surprising iconography that does not only address code but all inscrutable infrastructures.

This book is structured with three sections; each is a meditation upon a particular mode of embodied relation to the encrypted “interior.” These are imaginative exercises that result in a cascade of images. The artworks and associations that make up each cascade imply distinct models for where an intelligent human is placed vis-à-vis the realm of digital secrets and/or hidden mechanisms. The first concerns being locked in: burial or entombment within a technological grave, and the labor of escape from this situation. The second explores the affective response to being intellectually locked out of ubiquitous consumer and industrial products; neither archeologist nor effective grave robber. The third offers an anatomy of strange effects associated with a scrambling of inside and outside, open and closed—oblique perspectives that are associated with being locked down.

That said, the more visible titles of each section deploy a metaphor of darkness classically associated with what is hidden from view. Following the Bachelardian logic of imagination, these dark tokens “go beyond” concepts of the locked while similarly emanating from the primary image of the crypt: “I. Black Site,” “II. Black Box,” and “III. Black Hole.” Each serves as a tag for the way encrypted objects are negotiated in the course of everyday life, and the way they order experience. If these names are not passwords, then they are incantations: spells that structure the discussion of visual art’s interest in what cannot be seen, through a magical focus on sensory aporia.

“Black Site” opens with Jon Rafman’s 2010 refashioning of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, setting up a discussion of who or what has been stolen away—through consideration of works by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, Lance Wakeling, Trevor Paglen, Simon Denny, Evan Roth, Julian Charrière, Mary Mattingly, Amy Balkin, Suzanne Treister, Vladan Joler, Critical Art Ensemble, Juliana Cerqueira Leite, Roger Hiorns, and Tom McCarthy.

“Black Box” unfastens with a melancholy rumination on the rhomboid in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 masterpiece, Melencolia I. The blurry outlines of a face appear on the surface of this object, presaging the following artists’ reflections on the inscrutable: Carsten Nicolai, Félix Luque Sánchez, Britta Thie, Susanna Hertrich, Beny Wagner, Tillman Hornig, Adam Harvey, Mimi Ọnụọha, Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, American Artist, Kate Crawford and Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Zach Blas, Chim↑Pom, and Eva and Franco Mattes.

Finally, “Black Hole” unseals a monstrous triangulation between the myths of Bitcoin and QAnon, astrophysics, and the riddle of the Sphinx. The artists discussed do not escape its event horizon, including Jonas Staal, Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Omsk Social Club, Ed Fornieles, Joshua Citarella, UBERMORGEN, Brad Troemel, Jalal Toufic, Eva and Franco Mattes, Paola Pivi, Marguerite Humeau, Davide Quayola, Egor Kraft, and Nora Al-Badri.

But what of the term “Technocene”? It denotes a way of thinking about the contemporary from the perspective of art, addressing how the overwhelming prevalence of technology in all corners of life (and death) becomes the subject of cultural reckoning. A significant feature of this moment is a preoccupation with periodization—not least “Anthropocene,” “Capitalocene,” “Chthulucene,” and so on—which is arguably a result of tech both preserving and putting to work everything that can be datafied: unsettling our place in time. The Technocene is punctuated by anachronism: from a cryogenically frozen human head awaiting reanimation, to the roars of prehistoric mammals echoing through museums; from a zombie social media profile, still active after the passing of its subject, to the DNA of ancient—unknown—viruses, revived in laboratories; indeed, from a return to archaic religious affect in the presence of consumer electronics, to the possible next moves of a powerful AI. Such examples, among countless others, testify to the Technocene as a simultaneous provisional assembly of disparate historical traces, encountered in flux.

In the context of a poetics of encryption, the term “Technocene” fixes upon the scrambled or open experience of temporality that is generated by a landscape of black sites, black boxes, and black holes. It names the phenomenon of cultural superposition—simultaneous location and dislocation in time. In the Technocene, what has been buried, or has died, manifests in the present, both as what it is (or was) and as something new. Perhaps as a consequence, while the Technocene is not the “end of history,” it is epitomized by intensive efforts to be in the now. This dynamic unites new-age seekers and the non-human agent, scratching at the walls of its chrysalis.

Earthrise, December 24, 1968

Black Site

Cave and Camera

“O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”1 Hamlet speaks for all of us—bounded, surrounded, enclosed, inside this thing. And it could feel like infinite space. It could, save for bad dreaming. But what is this nutshell of ours?

There are various answers, depending on the dream. Let us imagine a shell for a king of infinite space: in some feudal past, it was conceivable as a suit of armor or a castle, protecting an inner sanctum to better enable foreign conquest. Today, a contemporary techno-shell likewise expedites the projection of will. But its complex dimensions prove difficult to encapsulate in a coherent image. Any representation of it must simultaneously contain a person sitting behind a control panel, in Nevada, operating a Reaper drone above Iraq; and another, at home in Bangalore, ordering home-delivery kombucha via mobile phone app. In fact, both figures—and many more besides—are part of an assemblage that has come to encircle the whole earth, while serving as a framework for life within.

This assemblage forms an “accidental megastructure”: an epic prosthesis for the exercise of power. As Benjamin Bratton has elaborated, planetary-scale computation introduces new forms of sovereignty and geopolitics.2 Would-be kings of this planetary nutshell dream of moving virtually anywhere, and having any interaction, while ensconced in their redoubts. They dream of casting influence across the surface of the system by remote control. Not for nothing do the lords of techno-feudalism dream of conquering new worlds.3 The ascendant sovereign does not have to move; they are always already everywhere by networked proxy, influential but obscure. The shell externalizes their volition. Indeed, it is a precondition for the emergence of certain desires, supplying technical support for a particular kind and scale of human being: a scaffold for ambitions that cannot be extracted from its edifice and atmosphere without losing viability. A hard nut to crack.

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Another dream: In medieval England, an anchorite was a person (usually a woman) who was bricked into a small cell attached to a church (known as an “anchorhold”), to pass the rest of her life in intense prayer and contemplation.4 Having received the funeral office from a priest just prior to enclosure, such persons were considered dead to the world.5 Typically, their cells contained three small apertures: the first allowing for waste export and the receipt of food and water. Another, covered by an opaque veil, would let in air from outside. The last, at eye level, known as a “hagioscope,” afforded a view of Mass and the partake of Eucharist when its shutter was opened. Within this living tomb, the inhabitant sought visitation from angels and God. Thus, the anchorhold was an architectural focusing device for divine light and religious illumination. Though locked in, the anchorite’s dream was to have her life enlarged through communion with an infinite being, a goal pursued not despite the cell’s physical shell but through it.

Today, we can discern a secular parallel in the phenomenon of hikikomori—a Japanese term that describes the acute social withdrawal, isolation, and confinement of shut-ins, whose only significant connection to the outside world is through the Internet and video games.6 Like the anchorites, they trade physical mobility for concentration on a seemingly infinite dimension—the virtual scene. In so doing, they exemplify the enticement of the screen as hagioscopic aperture; the promise of rebirth in multiplayer game worlds and social media platforms; the scroll’s endless horizon; limitless hyperlinks; felicitous visitation by suggested content; and home delivery. They are avatars for a broader social fantasy that seeks virtual replacement for life beyond the hearth.7

Were it not that I have bad dreams… But they arrive. “I am thinking of those nights,” wrote Kafka, “at the end of which, having come out of sleep, I awakened with the sensation that I had been shut up inside a walnut shell.”8 Against the promise of unlimited extension and remote control, the inability to extract oneself from certain platforms, surveillance systems, and other infrastructures becomes a waking nightmare. Who can forget the oppressive mediatization of the COVID-19 lockdown, with its discipline of videoconferencing and live newsfeeds? Meditating on Kafka’s fragment, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard considers the shell’s interior: this kind of dreaming “goes into the walnut’s every wrinkle, becoming familiar with the oiliness of its two halves and with all the masochism of the interior prickles on the shell’s underside.”9 This vision is instructive. The cell’s interior feels comfortable as long as one does not move, or grow. Wriggle too much and it pokes.

The nightmare nutshell is an exoskeleton that we have been sutured into against our resolve or better judgment. A sovereign must be able to choose new garments, to put things on or take them off at will. Detainees, on the other hand, find themselves worn by their suit. Imagine an anchorite undergoing a change of heart: having initially welcomed the wall’s final bricks, now beginning to scream in terror, begging for emancipation—only to discover that, though her cries are heard, the matter will not be revisited. Of course they begged for help—begged God for release! Who can imagine that they did not suffer the worst regret inside their living tombs?

A species of horror obtains in the idea that we can no longer exist outside of our shell/cell—that we are locked in for good. Lost, somehow. It obtains, furthermore, in the strange presentiment that whatever we are, today, it is a species of invertebrate. The shell does not only imply an externalization of the brain but the rest of the body too. It suggests softening muscles, loss of posture, and general flaccidity. A key figure from the alt-right has attempted to remedy the prevailing mood of impotence with a spurious argument drawn from male hierarchy in lobsters.10 Men are, apparently, more crustacean than commonly thought, and must embrace this fact. Under the circumstances, saner persons among us feel like Jean-Paul Sartre, who, following an experiment with mescaline, would suffer the recurring hallucination of being chased around by crabs.11

Bad dreams and waking life converge in this age of techno-burial, in which one finds subjectivity and political agency smothered by layers of infrastructure that begin proximate to one’s body, but which ripple outward towards the stars. For certain artists, cracking open the shell, or crypt, in order to address the kernel within is of the highest priority. Others aspire to map “every wrinkle” of the techno-shell’s interior layers. This chapter enters their work.

Orpheus and the World-Kamára

Let us tug on a red thread that runs through artworks that are concerned with recovering what is locked inside a techno-shell. The artists considered here do not exhaust this tendency. Rather, the following readings elaborate some symptoms of what we may call a contemporary poetics of interiority. Since poetics is at issue, we begin by taking up the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

This tale concerns a poet who charmed his way into the underworld, in order to recover a great love who was stolen away from him. That love was Eurydice, bitten by a viper, captured by death, and so imprisoned in the house of Hades. In order to effect a rescue, Orpheus, the paradigmatic artist figure, used his special talents to gain entry into this dark and difficult realm. His effort was rewarded. He located Eurydice and won the principle of her release. Yet, she was only discharged on the condition that he not look over his shoulder during their ascent to the world of the living, to check if she be following. Thus, it was demanded that Orpheus trust Hades, god of the underworld, rather than indulge his own curiosity (a difficult promise for an artist to keep). The hero agreed, and so off the lovers set towards an exit from that place, ascending, together, for a time…

Of course, the story does not end here. Poets rarely follow orders. It will be picked up later. For now, it is notable that a particular characteristic of this myth is echoed in art that is concerned with search and recovery—namely, its spatial imaginary. Indeed, an Orphic poetics of interiority abides in works that take on very real (and in no way metaphysical) conditions within the technosphere. Contemporary Orphic quests foreground the functional texture of searching, both on and offline—the labor of finding one’s direction inside a network of passages. Diving deeper into the shell’s interior in order, perhaps, to move beyond it; or to recuperate the possibility of a human image itself, at a time when material facts on the ground (and above it, too) appear to be closing in—swallowing, burying, or in-crypting it ever more deeply.

Authored three years after the release of Google Street View, and standing as the first significant video work with visual content drawn from this resource, Jon Rafman’s You, the World and I (2010) retooled the ancient myth of Orpheus for a world caught not on but in camera. Rather than descending into a subterranean domain, its narrator seeks Eurydice inside a platform.12 Announcing the always already buried quality of life in the Technocene, all protagonists in the narrative—persons on the street, Rafman’s Orpheus, and Eurydice—are seen to be located beneath or within a planetary surveillance system. The work’s drama turns around the loss and recovery of identity.

Jon Rafman, You, the World and I, 2010

Video, sound, 6:23 min.

Jon Rafman, You, the World and I, 2010

Video, sound, 6:23 min.

Thematically, You, the World and I transposes the early Greek conception of Orpheus as revealer of mysteries into the figure of a platform user, parsing the inner space of a gigantic image-machine in an attempt to recover a picture of their lost love. In this respect, the work allegorizes the search function, conflating this most ubiquitous aspect of Internet use with a profound rite—framing the user as a seeker through their filiation with the mythical protagonist.13 The latter’s status as both poet and adept (founder of a mystery school) begs the question concerning user-effected poiesis, as opposed to mere browsing. Pace mytho-logic, this is a question of initiation. For the followers of the ancient Orphic religion, the trial involved successfully navigating the underworld; shunning its river of forgetfulness, concealment, and oblivion (lēthē, per Classical Greek) to drink, instead, from a lake of memory and truth.14You, the World and I’s premise concerns the narrator’s struggle to recover a photographic representation of his departed lover. His success hinges upon remembering the exact time and place where she was captured by a Google Street View camera, and then retrieving her from the map-archive. Plotting her whereabouts within the system is a performance that is both art and craft (technê). The operation involves passionately identifying someone, not confusing her with another, and not forgetting. At first, the viewer’s own lesson consists in successfully recognizing these conditions, not mistaking them for alternatives, and—one presumes—being able to apply them skillfully: a lesson for all users. But the true initiate of Rafman’s artwork acquires a deeper and more disturbing instruction. Namely, that their everyday lifeworld is the house of Hades. Moreover, that they have confused themselves with Orpheus when they are, in fact, Eurydice—captured and enclosed within a tomb.

The video begins with a God’s-eye perspective above a spinning globe, before cutting closer in to parse ancient sites like the Pyramids of Giza (crypts for kings), and geoglyphs including the Westbury White Horse. The montage is a visual genealogy of megastructures that goes on to encompass sprawling cityscapes. At the apex of this trajectory towards increasing complexity and scale, cataloguing humanity’s ever more outsize register, the video features a satellite constellation surrounding the planet, red beams of light bouncing between them—passages that, both literally and figuratively, ensnare you, the world, and I. The initiatory wisdom of this representation, and the video, more broadly, is our being-within a new form of megastructure. Rather than a defined architectural figure, rising up from the ground, within the horizon’s visible boundaries, this megastructure wraps itself around and captures the whole earth in its net. It is a world-camera, with countless eyes and other sensors facing inward, arresting all of terrestrial life, rendering it a world-picture.15

At this point, one must observe that, in Greek, kamára refers to a barrel-vault or ceiling, of the type found in Classical gravesites. It is built enclosure. The Latin camera still denotes “room”—with the architectural implication that a network-object comprising a satellite constellation and hundreds more cameras at street level must amount to a labyrinth. In this light, the subterranean and grave-like house of Hades, with its countless passages and adjoining chambers (requiring adept technê to successfully navigate, at the risk of forgetting oneself), and the world-camera collapse into one: the vision of a new underworld—a world-kamára that grows and grows. Soon there will be mega-constellations comprising tens of thousands of satellites, in addition to the hundreds already in orbit, and the billions of extant networked cameras on earth—some installed at fixed locations, many more in mobile use. Much, in the Western political bloc, is compromised by the Five Eyes that make up a global surveillance regime, along with the countless tracking systems deployed by the private sector—not least, the Nine Eyes of Google Street View (the title of a celebrated photography series by Rafman, 2008–ongoing).16

It is here, within, that the poet sings a song of disorientation and entrapment—having both discovered the situation and lost himself. For, inside the world-kamára, Orpheus and Eurydice are inverse doubles: two sides of a coin spinning along the symptomatic axis of gender, oscillating between seeker and sought, watcher and watched, living and dead, subject and object. Turning like the globe, this shifting gestalt flickers in the manner of so many transitions between night and day; or a candle burning within a camera obscura. It is a melancholy illumination.

Beyond Rafman’s piece, more explicitly political rhapsodies of infrastructural interiority abound in recent art. These are songs of counter-mapping, united by critical and embodied trajectories towards the obscure interior of a given system or platform, in order to recover concealed information. This new Orphism is a quest for material insight, rather than emotional or spiritual transcendence. For, despite Internet-enabled apps promising users power over information and the “world at your fingertips,” common modes of interface with the technosphere supply only partial perspectives. Newly encrypted geography stands to be deciphered. As the task of decoding grows more urgent, mines, cables, server farms, and security systems begin to feature in exhibitions.17 Against limited or manipulative depictions, proffered by states and corporations, artists seek to supply alternative spatial and technical metonyms for an inside view. Their images are meant to enable the efficacious plotting of subject positions—(new) possibilities for figuring identification or dis-identification with(in) the system.

Charles Stankievech, The Soniferous Aether of The Land Beyond The Land Beyond, 2013

35 mm film installation with Dolby Sound, 10:18 min.

Evan Roth, Red Lines, 2016–20

Network performance

Installation view: Carroll/Fletcher at the Armory Show 2017, New York City, March 2–5, 2017

Running throughout this type of work, artist-seekers attempt to uncover or de-crypt backend materials, hardware, or processes. Qua technê, their investigations foreground the labor of gaining entry and finding one’s direction inside the space. Diving deeper, on to recovery. Such approaches include attention to the geology of media, as in the work of Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (discussed on pp. 25–27); the documentation of network architectures such as undersea cables, as seen in Lance Wakeling’s video Tour of the AC-1 Transatlantic Submarine Cable (2011); and Trevor Paglen’s better-known Landing Sites (2015).18 The questing ethos also extends to exposing hidden labor conditions, such as those at various Google facilities, as detailed in Andrew Norman Wilson’s film Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011), and his ScanOps (2012–ongoing) image series—featuring found scanning errors in Google Books data, wherein glitches, the scanning site, and the hands of the employees who digitize the printed matter are made visible.19 After digging in another archive, Simon Denny (re)incarnates a chilling Amazon patent diagram for a “system and method for transporting personnel within an active workplace”—now universally referred to as the “worker cage.”20 Denny’s project Secret Power also showcased leaked NSA documents known as the “Snowden Files.”21

Lest readers imagine that the link between geography, buried information, and imprisonment is overstated, Lance Wakeling’s Field Visits for Chelsea Manning (2014) homes in on the issue. The third in a trilogy addressing what the American artist refers to as the physicality of the Internet, the video work is presented as a first-person travelogue, documenting sites where Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst, was detained before being convicted for supplying US diplomatic cables, battlefield videos, and other classified information to WikiLeaks. The locations include Camp Arifjan in Kuwait; the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia; Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; and Fort Meade, Maryland. Like the other videos in the trilogy, Field Visits addresses “the vulnerability and weakness of the human body in relation to the systems governing the movement of information, partly through [Wakeling’s representative] failure to access high-security locations.”22