Art In The Age Of... Asymmetrical Warfare

Autonomy Cube

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Trevor Paglen, Jacob Appelbaum

In the middle of the white cube in the exhibition Art In The Age Of... Asymmetrical Warfare I found a thick transparent plexiglass box on a pedestal. The box is a case for an ambiguous piece of hardware. A trained eye would see that the hardware is in fact an Arduino board, which is sending out a WiFi signal.

The work by Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum is a node in the Tor network. When visitors of the exhibition log in to the network and use the internet, their privacy is ensured by the network anonymizing all the traffic. With this sculpture, as Paglen calls it, he transforms the exhibition space in a political space. He describes this not as institutional critique, but institutional enhancement. Every modern infrastructure has at least some sort politics in the protocols that they use.

“Institutions like libraries and museums can help to create infrastructure that has different kinds of politics.”
– Trevor Paglen, June 18th 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1GHr0OsILM

Tor is an distributed anonymizing infrastructure with ideals of autonomy, which still has a kind of underground hacker feel to it. It's a pretty strange clash of worlds. The museum still is a very institutionalized closed-off environment, where everything is curated and all these invisible rules apply. The visitors are a niche with a certain political view and social status. That environment now also serves as a basis for a network of freedom and anarchy.

“When Autonomy Cube is installed, both the sculpture, host institution, and users become part of a privacy-oriented, volunteer run internet infrastructure.”
– Trevor Paglen, work description, http://paglen.com

By sending the data of visitors over this network, that new audience is introduced to this, without the actual need of deeper knowledge. I do have one question though: Are the artists deliberately ignoring the context of Tor – which still is that of a criminal network full of drug deals and child pornography?With this project they are trying to pull Tor above ground into mainstream usage.

Another aspect of the work is the transparency, which has a paradox. On the one hand we see everything that is going on. The naked hardware. On the other hand although we can see this board, we have no idea what it executes.

Trevor Paglen is an artist who is fascinated by mass surveillance and privacy. These themes can be found throughout his work. One of his latest works (Code Names of the Surveillance State) is a collection of code names used by NSA and GCHQ projected on public buildings. Jacob Appelbaum is an independent journalist and hacker who is also one of the core members of the Tor project and has represented WikiLeaks. They are both connected to the Edward Snowden revelations and the documentary (CitizenFour) that followed.

These themes have also had a big influence on my own work. When researching for my project Internet Switching Policies I have made a local and private file sharing network, independent from the world wide web, in an attempt to be autonomous. I believe the work of Paglen and Appelbaum is in the same spirit, but with of course a better technical execution and quite a larger reach.