Column

Kari Cwynar is a curator, writer and editor based in Toronto, where she is Director of Kunstverein Toronto and Editorial Director of _C Magazine_. She writes on contemporary art for publications and catalogues, contributes regularly to _Frieze_ and _Metropolis M_.

Writer

Surveillance

issue-120-p12-13.pdf

Language

Cultural Studies

This article discusses the notion of parasitism within art writing, and the art writer’s relationship to existing linguistic discourses, rules, and regulations.

On Writing: Linguistic Proxies

issue-120-p13-14.pdf

This section features an image of the cover to Douglas Richmond’s book How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found, a how-to guide on adopting a new identity.

Primer: How to Disappear Completely and Never be Found

Eugenia Kisin is a writer and scholar based in New York, where she is Associate Professor of Art and Society at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. Her book, _Aesthetics of Repair: Indigenous Art and the Form of Reconciliation_, is forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press

issue-120-p79-80.pdf

This section presents an inventory of items and sites related to living under surveillance states and societies, including: Adam Harvey and Johanna Bloomfield’s _Off Pocket_ Phone case, which blocks all wireless signals to make the user’s phone untrackable; the books Dutch Landscapes by Mishka Henner, Drone: The Automated Image edited by Paul Wombewll, and Failed States by Jill Magid; the Centre for Surveillance Studies at Queen’s University, the Surveillance Camera Awareness Network, and University College London’s Materials Library at the Institute of Making.

Inventory: Surveillance

issue-120-p80-81.pdf

Technology

This article discusses drones, and the ways in which it extends our bodies and vision, and patrols the boundaries of the nonhuman.

Artefact: Drone DIY

thumbnail_300x250.png

300x250.png

md_970x180.png

sm_970x180.png

thumbnail_970x180.png

970x180.png

TBA (b)

md_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_mobile.jpg

sm_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_mobile.jpg

thumbnail_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_mobile.jpg

Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_mobile.jpg

md_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_banner.jpg

sm_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_banner.jpg

thumbnail_Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_banner.jpg

Federation_Web 1_Nov 15-Dec15_2024_banner.jpg

Federation of Canadian Artists 1

md_C_MAG_call_mobile.jpg

sm_C_MAG_call_mobile.jpg

thumbnail_C_MAG_call_mobile.jpg

C_MAG_call_mobile.jpg

lg_C_MAG_call_web.jpg

md_C_MAG_call_web.jpg

sm_C_MAG_call_web.jpg

thumbnail_C_MAG_call_web.jpg

C_MAG_call_web.jpg

Artch 1

lg_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

md_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

sm_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

thumbnail_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeB.png

md_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeA.png

sm_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeA.png

thumbnail_VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeA.png

VarleyArtGallery_WEB1_Nov15-Dec15_SizeA.png

Varley 1

thumbnail_Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAD-B.jpg

Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAD-B.jpg

md_Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAd-A.jpg

sm_Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAd-A.jpg

thumbnail_Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAd-A.jpg

Eyelevel-CMAG-WebAd-A.jpg

eyelevel

md_cover image.jpg

sm_cover image.jpg

thumbnail_cover image.jpg

cover image.jpg

Editorial

This issue marks the 30th anniversary of _C Magazine_. We’re deeply indebted to the many people who have been behind C since our first issue was published in the winter of 1984\. They include C’s founding Editor, Richard Rhodes, and its subsequent Editors, Joyce Mason, Eileen Sommerman, Si Si Penaloza and Rosemary Heather, who all shaped the vision and direction of _C Magazine_ over more than 100 issues. We’re also grateful for the many staff and interns who have worked at C, and the numerous volunteers and board members who have donated their time over the years. And most importantly, we’re thankful to the writers and artists whose work appears in the magazine, all of whom continue to provide us with critical and enriching new ways of understanding and experiencing the world in which we live, and who make it a better place. We’re proud to be able to share their important work with our readers. 

In preparing for this occasion, we have been reflecting on how _C Magazine_ might continue to evolve as a platform for critical writing about contemporary art and culture. We spoke with many of our readers and contributors about what they most like about the magazine, and what new directions they would like us to take. In response to what they had to say, we are making changes to the physical appearance of the magazine and are introducing a number of new sections. These additions include _On Writing_, which will present experimental models for art writing and reflective or polemical essays about contemporary criticism. We’ve also changed the title of _Noteworthy_ to _Inventory_, so that this section functions as a list of useful ideas on the issue’s theme. Finally, we added two image-based sections: _Primer_, a single image that serves as a visual introduction to the issue theme; and _Artefact_, a short essay about an image or object that provides a point of aesthetic reference outside of contemporary art. We’ll have different writers for these sections in each issue. Our new design also includes additional pages and a more substantial binding, as well as a looser and more experimental style. We hope that these changes will invite more irreverence and humour from our contributors and provide readers with additional points of entry into the challenging ideas for which C is known. 

Our current theme of “Surveillance” has turned out to be a timely one both in the context of C’s history and in light of world events. When we started work on this issue, the Edward Snowden crisis was just unfolding. While the former US National Security Agency contractor, who leaked classified documents showing the surveillance capabilities of the US government, was in temporary asylum in Moscow, revelations continued to emerge about the capabilities of the NSA to intercept and analyze telephone and Internet communications from around the globe. Especially disturbing for many people was the complicity of major telecommunications and Internet service providers in allowing government security agencies access to their servers and networks. At the same time, reports of the use of military drones to carry out surveillance and drone attacks in countries like Yemen and Pakistan, and over Gaza, which often killed innocent bystanders, continued to surface. In response to these conditions, we present in this issue a number of artists and writers who deal with the use of surveillance technologies in geopolitical conflict as well as in everyday life. 

It is also temporally significant that we’re addressing surveillance while reflecting upon C’s thirty-year history. 1984, the year of our first issue, was the year that Michel Foucault died. Foucault arguably did more than any other 20th-century theorist to help us understand the complex social and institutional operations of surveillance. Also in 1984, George Orwell’s eponymous dystopian novel about state surveillance and mind control was a major topic of cultural debate. This book, whose sales through Amazon.com increased by 337% this past summer when stories about Snowden and the NSA dominated the news, anticipated many of the technologies of power that are being deployed and intensified in our post-9/11 security state.[^1] Finally, in the realm of art, the early 1980s signaled the beginning of the contemporary as an aesthetic and temporal category, marked by the de-escalation of the Cold War and the rise of new expressions of global capitalism, as well as new forms of criticism, informed by theories of postcolonialism and poststructuralism. It is from this context that publications like _C Magazine_ emerged, along with a flourishing of art practices that critically engage the same conditions. Fittingly this issue’s contributors attest to the need for correspondingly trenchant forms of art criticism – a project that is as urgent and vital today as it was in 1984\. We hope that you agree.

[^1]: Charlotte Meredith, “Big Brother is watching: Sales of George Orwell’s “1984” up 337% after NSA spying scandal,” Express (June 11, 2013). [“http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/406709/Big-Brother-is-watching-Sales-of-George-Orwell-s-1984-up-337-after-NSA\-spying-scandal]("http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/406709/Big-Brother-is-watching-Sales-of-George-Orwell-s-1984-up-337-after-NSA-spying-scandal) \[date accessed: November 21, 2013\].

Amish Morrell is Assistant Professor at OCAD University, where he teaches Criticism & Curatorial Practice, and Visual and Critical Studies.

Editor

issue-120-p6-8.pdf

Editor Amish Morrell discusses the 30th anniversary of C Magazine, its continuing evolution as a platform for critical writing about contemporary art and culture, and the changes introduced to this new issue of the magazine. He also discusses the issue’s theme of surveillance and its relevance to current world events, including the classified documents of the National Security Agency leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Editorial: Surveillance

Feature

Deborah Root writes on cultural politics and the arts.

A friend of mine in high school, who saw himself as a fellow–traveller of the ‘70s bombers Weather Underground, nailed flattened tin cans to the walls of his parents’ basement room. This was supposed to jam radio waves so the FBI couldn’t listen in on his political discussions with radical schoolmates. At the time the tin cans seemed a little excessive—why would the FBI be particularly interested in teenagers’ views of the Vietnam War?—but perhaps not as paranoid as one might think. We saw the police photographing marchers at anti-war rallies; we knew that the FBI had embedded agents in radical organizations, and sometimes recorded conversations. This was a few years before mad people living on the street began to wrap their heads in tinfoil to prevent the government from listening in on their thoughts. Clearly they were ill, but if we accept Foucault’s line that what happens on the margins of empire reveals the true nature of the empire—and given that crazy street people occupy a kind of margin in society—then the content of their delusion might reveal something true about the society in which they live. The paranoia that makes them fear government surveillance might well reflect a generalized anxiety that percolates through our culture. A real metaphor, perhaps, that speaks to how citizens imagine their own governments. The tin cans and the crazy people are extreme examples, but paranoia seems to be a generalized cultural phenomenon, an established feature of mainstream, popular culture.

Despite their dubious ideological agendas, I’m a great fan of spy novels, in which the hero or heroine must take elaborate precautions to avoid surveillance. Such books abound with descriptions of dead drops, “Moscow Rules,” and other techniques of tradecraft that are recounted by the authors in loving detail. The stakes are high: if you’re found out, you and others may die, or you might be tortured by evil communists in Lubyanka Prison. The reader is instructed how to tell if the enemy has watchers on you. The woman reading a newspaper on a park bench, for instance: maybe you saw her in a café the day before. The man fumbling for change at the subway kiosk: he too, perhaps, is clocking your moves. The point is, you never know. The mole, who lives a double life in the heart of enemy territory, must become especially skilled at shaking off the watchers. Years ago, such novels were generally about eluding the KGB. Today, although some involve al-Qaeda sleeper cells (thus generating another kind of paranoia), they increasingly combine traditional descriptions of spy paranoia with a new disillusionment with the espionage project in general. Now, the enemy is closer to home, and the hero has to figure out how to evade the agents of his or her own government. Olen Steinhauer’s _Tourist_ trilogy turns on the tension between orders (here from the CIA) and family: the hero wants to leave the service but cannot. He is alienated and, perhaps because his CIA masters sense this, they require him to perform a terrible act as a test. Here, empire’s agenda is reduced to controlling one man, and by extension his family, and in these books, the agent learns that the Americans are little better than the enemies they’ve demonized.

Other thriller sub–genres involve lessons in eluding surveillance by the Mob or other sinister forces, and offer instructions on how to do so. In these books, surveillance circulates around one’s personal life: the bad people (Mafia, government, pharmaceutical companies) watch one’s family and friends, looking for weaknesses, or moments when one is likely to slip up and show oneself, and give in to the lure of one’s old, normal life. The memoirs of the underground lives of ‘60s radicals also describe this severing from family, which is sometimes replaced by the new family of like-minded politicos who grasp the dangers of loose lips.

The lessons are clear: if you want to avoid surveillance, get rid of the cell phone, which has built-in GPS. No credit or bank cards, which can be traced. Change your hair and clothes and, if you’re really smart, change the way you walk. Assume your landline is bugged, and those of your friends. It’s best to have had the foresight to arrange for a fake ID and have a stash of cash on hand, just in case. As I read, I find myself taking mental notes.

For me, these books offer a vicarious experience of paranoia: a useful, practical paranoia that keeps one alive under extreme circumstances. Few of us here have life-or-death reasons for eluding the agents of the state, and indeed continue to use plastic, Facebook and Gmail, and talk about our business on open lines. I’m unhappy with the level of surveillance in everyday life, but I continue to stay wired. It’s easier, which seems like no excuse at all. And so we become complicit with our own surveillance. Why? Nothing appears to be at stake, and for most of us perhaps, nothing is. Does the government really care what kind of shoes we buy? Corporations do, and they also track Internet usage. This feels distasteful, but without real consequence, it seems. But with the increasingly blurred boundaries between corporate and political entities, it might be time to think again.

Nietzsche called the state “the coldest of all cold monsters” and it is the coldness of surveillance networks that is telling here. The detached, observing state doesn’t care about your individual subjectivity, about how you feel about your family and friends, or about your personal desires. It never has. Surveillance is an entity tasked with evaluating your actions with a jaded eye, and increasingly assessing your personal behaviours with reference to “national security,” or the state’s notion of the greater good, which may not be good for you. As for corporate tracking of your habits, well, economic health has come to be subsumed under the category of national security. Weren’t we told that shopping is patriotic?

As with the crazy people and their tinfoil, the popularity of narratives that focus on paranoia would seem to indicate a displaced recognition of something real, an externalized anxiety about the extent to which surveillance and policing of difference is what governments do, and increasingly what corporations do as well. The Cold War binary allowed this anxiety to be displaced onto the Other, but we can no longer fool ourselves. We’re under constant scrutiny, from surveillance cameras in public places to the monitoring of private correspondence and our entirely personal likes and dislikes.

It’s telling that the term “treason” was bandied about in the accusations against Manning and Snowden. This reveals the statist agenda both with respect to whistleblowers, and regarding the individual actions that are the object of NSA (and other) surveillance. Yes, governments spy on their allies; always have, always will. Now—thanks to Snowden—we’ve learned that the NSA is able to break Internet encryption and access our most personal information, which begs the question of just how many people are able to read this information. And so it seems that both my high school friend and the crazy people were right about the government spying on us. But the real question is where our complicity with these systems of surveillance comes from, and how easily most of us accept the collapsing of boundaries between our private lives and the societies in which we live. But behind the state lies the market, and if we allow ourselves to be transformed into creatures of corporate agendas, we’ll inevitably become more complacent about the methods used to track, and create, our most personal desires. And that may be a more serious issue than bureaucrats reading our e–mails.

issue-120-p14-18.pdf

Narrative

Government

In this article, the author discusses paranoia over government surveillance, themes and tropes of surveillance within spy novels and their didactic effect, and the cultural insights potentially revealed by the popularity of narratives that focus on paranoia.

Paranoia

Patricia Reed is an artist and writer based in Berlin. She has exhibited and lectured internationally at venues including Artists Space, Archive Kabinett, The House of World Cultures, Württembergischer Kunstverein and Witte de With (forthcoming). Texts have appeared with Fillip, Sternberg Press, 010 Publishing, Shifter Magazine and Art Papers, amongst others.

issue-120-p36-42.pdf

Social

Politics

This article features a conversation with Jodi Dean, Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. The conversation touches upon the medium of the blog as a cipher for the articulation of “communicative capitalism,” communication as commodity, Dean’s notion of “glitches” in orality and how it falls short of inviting interpretation, and the internet as a tool but not an end in itself with respect to resisting exploitation and inequality.

Glitches in Orality and the Stakes of Semantics: A Conversation with Jodi Dean

Interview

The collaborative work of Elle Flanders and Tamara Sawatzky, known as Public Studio, is diverse and idiosyncratic, combining film and architecture to explore the role of images in shaping and understanding everyday conflict in war zones. Their most recent exhibition, _Under the Last Sky_, held at O’Born Contemporary in the autumn of 2013, draws from Flanders’ experiences in the Middle East, exploring images of war not readily depicted by the media. The duo’s apprehension towards surveillance practices emerges in _Under the Last Sky_, where they have used silicon wafers and photography to address drone activity in remote villages in the Middle East. Nives Hajdin met up with them in Toronto to talk about their work.

Nives Hajdin: Your current show at O’Born Contemporary, _Under the Last Sky_, focuses on photography as well as the role of other technologies in presenting and decoding images. How are these works created and how do they reflect the political nature of your work?

Public Studio: Often, we like to begin by collapsing the false distinctions that are created between aesthetics and politics that in turn generate discrete categories. We see them as the same, both philosophically and pragmatically. We try to create images that inspire and lead to an event or produce communication between other human activities, from economy to politics and all aspects of our social fabric.

These works emanated from a trip we took to Singapore and Indonesia last year. We were asked to present an artist talk and thought it might be interesting to take people through our version of our travels, an artist’s reflection of an environment. Singapore felt somewhat sterile and manufactured; it is the largest import-export hub in the world and is the largest centre of logistics. Everything there felt ephemeral, a condition of one of the largest free-market economies with the highest trade-to-GDP ratio in the world today. With no natural resources or arable land to speak of, Singapore appeared as a constructed futuristic city. It is also one of the world’s largest manufacturers of silicon wafers and has an extremely sophisticated high-tech weapons industry. Wafers are a thin slice of semiconductor material used in the fabrication of integrated circuits which are then “diced” into individual microcircuits, and used in everything from your camera to a drone. As we see it, they could be understood as the base of the military industrial complex.

Interestingly, the way in which electronic circuits manifest on silicon wafers is through the oldest photographic printing technique known: photolithography. The circuitry is etched onto the wafer through light and chemicals. While this is done in high-tech “cleanrooms,” the roots of the process are as old as the history of photography itself. That piqued our interest. We wanted to repeat the etching process but sans cleanroom, which proved difficult. As we discovered, you can’t simply throw the wafer in an acid bath and get an image. We ended up having to sandblast the images that you see on the silicon wafers, which still held true to an etching process. The wafers represent for us the collision of the high-tech industry with militarism, that something as seemingly benign as a microchip, and its ability of image capture, translates to surveillance at the most sophisticated and insidious level.

NH: What is the significance of the exhibition title, _Under the Last Sky_?

PS: We took the title for the show, _Under the Last Sky_, from a poem by \[late\] Palestinian Poet Laureate Mahmoud Darwish: “Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?” Heaven and sky are often etymologically synonymous; we think of the skies above as transcendent places of refuge in most religions and cosmologies. But now the sky represents uncertainty, danger and instability. We selected 18 different skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan, each one representative of the sky on the date of the last 18 strikes that killed innocent people. The wafers now serve as meditations on our current landscapes.

NH: Your photography investigates what you call “landscapes as an area of cultural struggles.” To what extent do the ideas explored in Under the Last Sky reference your experiences in Palestine?

PS: As someone who grew up in a conflict zone, but often with little knowledge of the specific structure and location of that conflict, Elle became increasingly aware of the land and our environment as a site of struggle. As Canadian citizens, we both became aware of and concerned with our government and military’s role in the war in Afghanistan and ongoing war against aboriginal peoples and the environment. Landscape as a site of struggle has less to do with “war” as spectacle than as the site where conflict unfolds. In Palestine and Israel, we’ve been demarcating war as it takes place in the everyday, rather than picturing the blood and bombs that seem to dominate most images of the region. When we lived in Palestine from 2008 to 2009, we were making a film about the segregated road systems in the West Bank (Road Movie, 2011) when the Gaza incursion began. While we were certainly aware of Israeli drones flying over Gaza on a daily basis, it was only when we witnessed the swift mass destruction that drones cause that we began to understand their power and insidiousness. Even the sound of drones causes terror in the lives of Palestinian children. Faceless, unmanned warfare, surveillance from above, and the destruction and carnage that they leave below belong to a new paradigm that exposes a logic of speculation. Palestine, as a conflict zone, is a place where the inhabitants no longer have agency over their landscape. In fact, in the final settlement proposals, Israel demanded, and currently has, control of the airspace over the West Bank — unusual as international law states that there should be contiguity between one’s land and sky. Israeli architect and scholar Eyal Weizman refers to this as “the politics of verticality.” The situation in Pakistan, however, is different in that the US is in violation of Pakistan’s territorial integrity and is contravening international law. Drone warfare ultimately also controls landscape as the skies above are no longer benign.

NH: Can you speak more about this preference to represent the everyday, lesser-seen images that exist in war zones?

PS: When you’ve lived in and visited places like Palestine over many years, you become acutely aware of the repetition that takes place within the narratives that come to represent a place. Imagine if you stripped away every single Western media image of boys throwing rocks at Israeli soldiers, for instance. Or if we removed Middle Eastern media images of the martyred. What would be left and how would we construct the conflict in Israel and Palestine? These images only persist in miring the conflict further and further while the story of an illegal occupation never emerges. The same could be said for Afghanistan and Pakistan and the way in which images of drone strikes only serve to entrench a fragment of a complex story — to the exclusion of all else.

As artists, our job is to use the language of images to unravel the complexities of how ideological frameworks shape what gets seen and what doesn’t. For Elle, as a young person growing up in Israel, the dominant narrative was that the land was “empty,” uninhabited, ours for the taking. The saying was “A land without a people for a people without a land.” As she became more involved in feminist movements, which lead to peace movements and eventually to Palestinian solidarity, the larger reality revealed itself. We both found it amazing that you can indeed grow up in a place and not see what is right in front of you.

Our strategy is to represent this blind spot through highlighting the unfolding of colonization and subjugation within the everyday, rather than addressing war as spectacle. One of the things one learns most concretely about the occupation of Palestine is that it happens in the most mundane ways. It transpires through the bureaucracies that affect your everyday life: access to education, water, citizenship and economies. Thus, in our new work for Under the Last Sky, we don’t focus on the spectacularization of bombs falling from unmanned air vehicles, but on the more minute details of how surveillance and warfare is deployed, and what goes into the visual construction of those who are on the ground that allows this process to happen. In other words, how do drone pilots operating from places like Nevada, thousands of miles away, who have a particular worldview, conceive of what is happening on the ground in the mountains of Pakistan? And what is the extension of that, the repercussions in our everyday lives, as it relates to surveillance? We must care that Canada is currently spying on the Brazilian mining and energy industry and that this has absolutely no relationship to “security” but rather is industrial espionage.[^1] Many of us who have been active in peace movements, in social justice work and environmentalism know that resources and industry — rather than security and terrorism — are often the reasons for war. Surveillance is everywhere and its implications are far more vast than most of us can begin to imagine.

NH: The repetition of imagery, structure and process also appears in the various media you use. One sees different angles caught on surveillance cameras, a series of photographs taken in succession over the course of a journey, geometric ordering of Islamic decoration, and similar instances of repetition. What does this reiteration achieve within the larger scope of your conceptual aims?

PS: Our work is structured by the language of film and architecture. We like rules, patterns, editing and narrative. When you improvise in music, you respond in the moment, but it’s based on patterns and mathematical structuring. Conflict zones function similarly: while at times they appear to be total chaos, there is an orchestration to that chaos. This motif can be seen in the first of a series of works we did in collaboration with artist Eshrat Erfanian entitled _Kino Pravda 3G_ (2011), where we re-present images of protest almost as if they’ve been choreographed. If you watch a protest for its duration, you will see there is indeed a pattern, or a choreography. We’re not suggesting that everything is so very predictable, but rather we are trying to insert the ideas of consciousness and ideology that play out in conflict.

Through surveillance — specifically its random and all-encompassing collecting of images — governments and corporations search these images for patterns that are embedded in ideology. Our work, in turn, means to reveal those very ideological structures. For example, on a 40-foot vinyl strip that we adhered to the walls of the gallery, we depict images of everyday events that took place in Afghanistan and Pakistan. These “ground images,” as we like to think of them in contrast to the “sky images” on the wafers, are manipulated to imply surveillance images. This shifts our perception of these images from being documents of unfettered daily occurrences to being documents of suspicious activities. Manipulated in this way, a man changing a tire on a jeep can now easily be understood to be suspect. The citizen body is the subject of surveillance that is so pervasive that it too generates a kind of chaos that gets resolved through a reordering of codes. These codes — some of which are virtual, some physical — result in translations and mistranslations.

Our work is meant to decode images, to better close the gaps we allow between our use of images and the state’s uses of images. Surveillance is part of our everyday, and we wanted to think that through. It is something with which we are both complicit with and far too comfortable. We don’t think enough about the consequences of having all our private information completely accessible.

NH: _Under the Last Sky_ also explores the tension between photography and surveillance through the separation of images onto different levels of glass, and in the representation of the invasive practice of infrared photography. How does the traditional photographic image resonate in the face of an increasing global reliance on more advanced digital imaging technologies?

PS: What interested us in this project from the beginning was the fact that what we use to create images belongs to a larger lexicon. Images have always resonated within the rubric of a military-industrial complex. That’s not new, but their ubiquity is, and surveillance affects us in our everyday lives with enormous consequences.

The history of photography and images in general has always been of interest to us. How they are read, understood, circulated and reinterpreted is at the core of our practice. The silicon wafers that we produced for this show enshrine these processes. We use images as a way to understand how we interact based on how we interpret what we see. The mirrors at the bottom of our glass table reflect this back to us; they remind us how the assumptions we make can result in devastating consequences and that we are enmeshed in wars that occur elsewhere, whether we like to acknowledge it or not.

Similarly, in the surveillance-style vinyl series we created, we call into question our own positionality as viewers, arguing that depending on where these activities take place, we too read within certain frameworks. Like the drone operator, the viewer is complicit in reading these mundane activities as suspicious. For the drone operator, however, this can result in thousands of deaths with no apparent consequences.

NH: Issues of surveillance have a heightened urgency in society today. How do you situate this investigation within the larger context of your practice as a collective working across various media?

PS: We have different backgrounds as artists. One of us is trained as an architect; the other is a photographer and filmmaker. We start with the investigation of a specific idea or problem, which leads to the development of a concept. The medium we choose tends to reveal itself as the most appropriate vehicle of expression.

Working collectively is something familiar to both of us. Collaboration pushes us in directions we may not take otherwise, especially when our themes revolve around art as social practice or as a vehicle for thinking through the problems we are facing in the world today. Art is part of our social fabric and it only makes sense that we engage others in those conversations. The Kino Pravda 3G series, which tracks protest movements around the world, began as a conversation between the two of us and our friend Eshrat Erfanian, who was giving us a blow-by-blow report on the progress of Iran’s Green Movement as it took to the streets. The project began just after the 2010 G20 protests in Toronto, when everyone we knew was on the streets, so it became a perfect fit. We collaborated with several artists on that project, reflecting the nature of the social movements that were emerging.

Our film installation Road Movie that we created in Palestine would be another example; it began by documenting the apartheid roads in the West Bank for a friend who was writing a report for an ngo. This is how we understand our practice, as concomitant with the political. Art practice and the political are not separate spheres. Political philosopher Chantal Mouffe argues that every form of art has a political dimension, in that it emerges out of any relation. When something is named “political art,” it ghettoizes it and suggests that it opposes an “other art” or a “real art.” The result is the disempowerment of all art practice. Suffice it to say, perhaps in this present time, when there is a need to cogently restructure the world around us, collaborative and collective practice only makes sense. 

[^1]: James Fitz-Morris, “Why Would Canada Spy on Brazil Mining and Energy Officials?” CBC News (October 9, 2013). Accessed October 28, 2013\. [www.cbc.ca/news/politics/why-wouldcanada-spy-on-brazil-mining-and-energy-officials-1.1931465](http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/why-wouldcanada-spy-on-brazil-mining-and-energy-officials-1.1931465)

lg_120seeingtheunseen.jpg

md_120seeingtheunseen.jpg

sm_120seeingtheunseen.jpg

thumbnail_120seeingtheunseen.jpg

120seeingtheunseen.jpg

issue-120-p18-27.pdf

Installation

Photography

Canadian

This article features an interview with the Canadian artist collective Public Studio, comprised of Elle Flanders and Tamara Sawatzky. The article discusses the engagement with surveillance practices and technologies in the duo’s recent exhibition Under the Last Sky held at O’Born Contemporary in Toronto, in which works addressed drone activity in remote villages in the Middle East. The artists also discuss their experience while residing in Palestine in 2008 and 2009, the oppression of colonization in the everyday, and the role of collaboration within their collective artistic practice.

Seeing the Unseen: An Interview with Public Studio

issue-120-p28-36.pdf

Science

Film

Video

Environment

This article features an interview with Christina Battle, a Canadian artist working primarily in film, video, and installation and whose work deals with ideas such as non-official archives, our notions of evidence, environmental catastrophe, the bounds of scientific knowledge, supernatural phenomena, and collective memory. The interview discusses the aforementioned themes and her recent video installation work The Twelve Devil’s Graveyards Around the World (2013), as well as other works including Filing Memory (2010) and Explorations of an unexpected Time Traveler (2013).

Investigating the Unexplained: An Interview with Christina Battle

Letter

issue-120-p8-10.pdf

Conceptual

Feminism

A letter to the editor from Leah Modigliani in response to Adam Lauder’s article _Sensitivity Information: The Wild Body of N.E. Thing Co_. in C Magazine’s Issue 118\. The letter discusses the tendency to diminish or neglect the contributions of Ingrid Baxter to N.E. Thing Co. in writings on the collective and which Modigliani sees perpetuated in Lauder’s article.

Leah Modigliani - Oct. 12, 2013

issue-120-p9-12.pdf

A letter to the editor by Adam Lauder in response to Leah Modigliani’s letter to the editor, featured in the same issue, regarding his article _Sensitivity Information: The Wild Body of N.E. Thing Co_. in C Magazine’s Issue 118\. The letter points out the Company and their practice sought to look beyond binary labels, which Lauder sees enforced in Modigliani’s letter.

Adam Lauder - Oct. 18, 2013

lg_120

md_120

sm_120

thumbnail_120

Chris Lee is a graphic designer and educator based in Buffalo, New York and Toronto. His research explores graphic design’s entanglement with power, standards and legitimacy. Chris is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY.

Designer

Publisher

Artist Project

issue-120-p42-46.pdf

An artist project by artist Adam Harvey that presents everyday apparel for hiding in plain sight. The project is accompanied by a short text by Erin Freedman.

Stealthwear by Adam Harvey: Text

Artist

issue-120-p57-65.pdf

An artist project by Heather Dewey-Hagborg titled Stranger Visions. For this project, the artist created portrait sculptures from analyses of genetic material collected in public spaces, exploring the topics of genetic determinism and the potential for a culture of genetic surveillance.

Stranger Visions

Stealthwear

Review

issue-120-p48-50.pdf

Nature

This article reviews Sarah Fuller’s exhibition The Homecoming, held at KIAC Artist in Residence Program/ODD Gallery in Dawson City from Aug. 15 – Sept. 20, 2013.

Sarah Fuller: The Homecoming

issue-120-p49-51.pdf

Painting

Cities

This article reviews Bernice Vincent’s exhibition Time and Travels, held at Museum London in London, Ontario from July 6 to September 29, 2013.

Bernice Vincent: Time and Travels

issue-120-p50-53.pdf

Representation

This article reviews Jon Knowles’ exhibition I’m only in it for the Manet, held at G Gallery in Toronto from July 5 to August 10, 2013.

Jon Knowles: I'm only in it for the Manet

issue-120-p52-54.pdf

Performance

Body

This article reviews Jimmy Robert’s exhibition Draw the Line held at The Power Plant in Toronto from June 22 to September 2, 2013.

Jimmy Robert: Draw the Line

issue-120-p53-55.pdf

Libraries

Text

This article reviews Mana Rouholamini’s exhibition Marcher le texte/Walking the Text held at Ottawa School Art Gallery, Orleans Campus in Ottawa from April 26 to May 26, 2013.

Mana Rouholamini: Marcher le texte/Walking the Text

Jamie Ross is a visual artist and ﬁlmmaker living in Los Angeles and Montreal. Their current project touches the microhistorical world of a Los Angeles secret society of drag queens, harmonic hymn singers, and sea-shell collectors raided by the police in 1914.

issue-120-p55-56.pdf

Fairytale

This article reviews the video work Smile Stealers by artists Allison Moore and Jasa Baka. The video was screened during NXNE in Toronto on June 13, 2013 and Festival Phenomena in Montreal on October 18, 2013.

Allison Moore and Jasa Baka: Smile Stealers

**Rose Bouthillier** is Curator (Exhibitions) at Remai Modern in Saskatoon. Previously, she was Associate Curator & Publications Manager at MOCA Cleveland.

issue-120-p56-66.pdf

Museums

International

This article reviews the 2013 Carnegie International exhibition, co-curated by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski. The exhibition was held at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh from October 5, 2013 to March 16, 2014.

2013 Carnegie International

Jane Affleck is a PhD candidate in the Cultural Studies program at Trent University, a part-time instructor at NSCAD University and a freelance writer.

issue-120-p65-67.pdf

Animals

Found

This article reviews the Rita McKeough’s exhibition The Lion’s Share held at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax from August 30 to October 6, 2013.

Rita McKeough: The Lion's Share

issue-120-p67-69.pdf

Location

This article reviews Kate Newby’s exhibition Let the Other Thing In held at Fogo Island Gallery in Fogo Island, Newfoundland from June 27 to September 8, 2013.

Kate Newby: Let the Other Thing In

issue-120-p68-73.pdf

Public art

This article reviews the 13th Istanbul Biennial held in Istanbul, Turkey from September 14 to October 20, 2013.

13th Istanbul Biennial

issue-120-p72-74.pdf

Participation

This article reviews the exhibition Under the Mountain, a contemporary arts festival organized by the Jerusalem Season of Culture that took place in Jerusalem from July 11 to 15, 2013.

Under the Mountain

Currently based in New York City, Anna Khimasia is a curator and lecturer in Contemporary Art at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and Rutgers University.

issue-120-p74-75.pdf

Death

The article reviews the exhibition bones kneel in company, featuring the works of Juliana Pivato, Maura Doyle, and Laura Taler. The exhibition was held at Blink Gallery in Ottawa from August 8 to 18, 2013.

Juliana Pivato, Maura Doyle, Laura Taler: bones kneel in company

Heather White is a writer, and a psychotherapist-in-training, in Toronto.

issue-120-p75-77.pdf

Philosophy

Activism

This article reviews the book Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art by Jacques Ranciere, published by Verso (2013).

Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, by Jacques Ranciere

issue-120-p76-78.pdf

Work

This article reviews the book Living Labor, edited by Milena Hoegsberg and Cora Fisher, published by Sternberg Press/Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter (2013).

Header

C Mag

Issue 120