Agency + Surveillance — the Vera List Center for Art and Politics

"Agency + Surveillance"

Monday, March 31, 2008   ­­--  6:30 to 8:30 p.m.

The New School, Theresa Lang Community and Student Center

55 West 13th Street, 2nd floor

New York City

Admission: $8; free to all students and New School faculty, staff, and alumni with ID

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 jointly 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.

Moderator:

Lex Bhagat, co-editor of Atlas of Radical Cartography

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.

This panel is the third in a four-part series of roundtable discussions organized by Index of the Disappeared. A physical archive of post-9/11 disappearance and a mobile platform for public dialogue, Index for the Disappeared was founded by Chitra Ganesh and Mariam Ghani. The series is hosted and co-sponsored by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School along with NYU's Kevorkian Center for Middle Eastern Studies and Center for Media, Culture and History, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Art in General.

This event is co-organized by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics and presented as part of the Center's program cycle on "Agency."

Next Event:

April 2, 2008, 6:30 PM

The Public Art Fund Talks at The New School

with Liam Gillick

*   *   *

TICKETS:

In person purchases can be made at The New School Box Office at 66 West 12th Street, main floor, Monday to Friday 1:00 to 7:00 p.m. Ticket inquiries can be sent to boxoffice@newschool.edu or 212.229.5488. 

EVENT INFORMATION: 212.229.5353, specialprograms@newschool.edu, or www.newschool.edu/publicprograms.