Sensing Security Through Contemporary Art and Ethnographic Encounters

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Sensing Security through Contemporary Art and Ethnographic Encounters

A dissertation presented to

the faculty of

the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Jena M. Seiler

December 2017

This dissertation titled

Sensing Security through Contemporary Art and Ethnographic Encounters

JENA M. SEILER

has been approved for

Interdisciplinary Arts

and the College of Fine Arts by

Marina Peterson

Associate Professor of School of Interdisciplinary Arts

Matthew R. Shaftel

Dean, College of Fine Arts 3

ABSTRACT

SEILER, JENA M., Ph.D., December 2017, Interdisciplinary Arts

Sensing Security through Contemporary Art and Ethnographic Encounters

Director of Dissertation: Marina Peterson

This dissertation examines the sensory entanglements of security through an analysis of contemporary art and ethnographic encounters. I argue that the

“securitization” of society does not only entail a multiplicity of actors and practices, as

Marc Schuilenburg demonstrates, but sensory attunements that bring technologies, bodies, and spaces into security assemblages. The project is in line with recent scholarship on the senses in the social sciences and the humanities, what anthropologist

David Howes identifies as the “sensory turn.” The project particularly resonates with the work of Tim Ingold and Davide Panagia as they argue that the senses are phenomenological, social, and political. This project extends this understanding of the senses to the topic of security. To analyze the sensory dimensions of security, I draw upon a diverse set of materials, including artworks, ethnographic research, news sources, industry trade journals, and official government materials. From this collection of material, I draw out sensory moments and lines of sensation, examining the ways that seeing, hearing, touching, and smelling are at work in security. In this project, “sensing security” holds three meanings: first, I use it to refer to the sensory technologies that increasingly have become a part of contemporary security and how security acts as a sensing mechanism. Second, it refers to the way security conditions the senses, instructing us on how to see, hear, and touch. Security discourse not only outline threats 4 but also teaches us to turn our bodies into security machines in order to identify suspicion and alert authorities: enlisting our eyes, for example, in the counterterrorism campaign “If

You See Something, Say Something™.” Finally, by using this phrase I attempt to capture the work I do in the dissertation, as the project explicates, or senses out, the entangled sensory relations of security.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Marina Peterson.

Without her expertise, generosity, and guidance, this project could not have been realized.

I would also like to thank my committee, Dr. Andrea Frohne, Dr. Samuel Dodd, and Dr.

Yeong-Hyun Kim, for their critical contributions. I feel incredibly lucky to have worked with, and learned from, this diverse group of scholars. I am indebted to the staff at the

Columbus Museum of Art who accommodated my research needs and the Ohio

University students who allowed me to interview them. Additionally, I am thankful to

Tania El Khoury, Jen Urso, and Steve Badgett for sharing their artistic research with me. I am also grateful for the support I received from Dr. Jennie Klein and my colleagues in the

School of Interdisciplinary Arts. Additionally, I would like to thank Dr. Dustin Faulstick and Aili Seiler for reading selected chapters. Last, I would like to thank my family for their support. 6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Acknowledgments...... 5 List of Figures ...... 8 Introduction: Security Encounters ...... 9 Security/Sensory/Space/Scholarship...... 14 Security and Surveillance ...... 15 Sensation and the Senses ...... 18 Space ...... 22 Methodology: Analysis and Fieldwork ...... 24 Structure and Chapter Summaries ...... 29 Chapter One: Desert to Drone: Visibility Conditions ...... 30 Chapter Two: Eyes on the Street: Embodied Security...... 31 Chapter Three: Entering the Museum: Screening Visitors ...... 32 Chapter Four: Securing the Border: Sensing Everything ...... 33 Chapter Five: Waves in the Air: Transducing Security ...... 34 Conclusion: Security Toward Other Ends ...... 35 Chapter One: Desert to Drone: Visibility Conditions ...... 36 Seeing into the Sun ...... 38 Desert Visibilities...... 50 Drone Vision ...... 61 Conclusion ...... 72 Chapter Two: Eyes on the Street: Embodied Security...... 74 The Panopticon, Surviallance Cameras, and the Body ...... 76 Opening to Security: Walking the Streets ...... 83 A Highly “Suspicious” Encounter ...... 94 CCTV on the Streets: Appearing on Film...... 105 Conclusion ...... 114 Chapter Three: Securing the Museum: Terrorism, Embodiment, and the Economy...... 115 Entering the Museum: Geographies of Tourism and Terrorism ...... 118 The Louvre, Paris, France ...... 120 7

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, United States ...... 132 Guarding the Museum: Engaging Visitors, Spotting Suspicion ...... 139 Security Genius ...... 140 SVOT: Screening Visitors by Observations Techniques ...... 145 Sensing Security in the Museum...... 149 Security Structure: Assemblage ...... 154 Conclusion ...... 159 Chapter Four: Securing the Border: Sensing Everything ...... 162 Sensing Border: Weeds, Devices, Bodies, and Animals ...... 164 Sensing Airport: Moving, Seeing, Smelling, and Smiling...... 181 If Your Eyes Were Sensitive to These Wavelengths Like the Scanners...... 189 That Nose Does More Security than Anything Else...... 198 I Definitely Try to Smile a Lot...... 200 Conclusion ...... 207 Chapter Five: Waves in the Air: Transducing Security ...... 209 The Ether: “And Doth It Not Readily Pervade All Bodies?” ...... 210 Transducing Electromagnetic Security ...... 216 Flickering Security Signals ...... 218 Hearing Security Waves ...... 223 Seeing X-rays ...... 229 Medium Specificity ...... 235 Atmosphere of Security ...... 239 Conclusion ...... 242 Conclusion: Security Toward Other Ends ...... 245 Bibliography ...... 259

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1. Trevor Paglen, Reaper in the Sun, 2013...... 42 Figure 2. J.W.M. Turner, Rregulus 1828...... 47 Figure 3. Trevor Paglen, Open Hangar, 2007...... 56 Figure 4. Applied Autonomy, Routes of Least Surveillance 2001...... 86 Figure 5. Jen Urso, Unwelcom Map, 2015...... 89 Figure 6. “If You See Something, Say Something,” Poster, 2007...... 96 Figure 7. Tania El Khoury, Jarideh, 2011...... 101 Figure 8. James Bridle, Surveillance Spaulder, 2013...... 111 Figure 9. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art...... 154 Figure 10. Simparch, Rodadora Frontera (Border Tumbleweed), 2014...... 165 Figure 11. David Taylor, Seismic Sensor, and Camera Room, 2007...... 173 Figure 12. TSA Pre✓® Screening Ad...... 183 Figure 13. Roxy Paine, Checkpoint, 2014...... 185 Figure 14. Tanja Ostojić, Misplaced Woman, 2015...... 197 Figure 15. “SPOT Checklist,” 2015...... 205 Figure 16. Benjamin Gaulon, 2.4Grz, 2008...... 221 Figure 17. Walead Beshty, Travel Picture (Sunset), 2007...... 233 Figure 18. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Pavilion Zoom, 2015. ... 251 Figure 19. Walid Raad, Operator #17 (I only wish that I could weep), 2002...... 256

INTRODUCTION: SECURITY ENCOUNTERS

Waiting in line at Port Columbus International Airport, a young man goes to print his ticket at the kiosk, leaving his overstuffed bag behind. The line moves forward, but I do not. The proximity of the bag leaves me feeling caught—uncertain of how to proceed.

The man keeps glancing around, most likely looking for some kind of assistance, but the voice on the loudspeaker routinely reminds travelers to be alert: listen, look, be aware.

In March 2017, Los Angeles tested the ability to detect “gunshots and other noises” through a newly installed streetlight system called SmartSite.1 Developed in 2012 through a collaboration between Amerlux®, Illuminating Concepts and IntelliStreets,

SmartSite™ is an LED street lighting and network control system.2 A city’s network of lights—typically used to illuminate sidewalks, freeways, parking lots, and other urban spaces—can be transformed to play a central role in new security products equipped with multisensory capabilities. Products like SmartSite™ allow cities to record and measure the air, motion, noise, temperature, and vibrations through existing infrastructure.

Listening to Christina Kubisch’s 4-minute composition Security (2005) makes the skin tingle. The piece holds the listener in a relentless flow of unidentifiable sounds.

One’s breath is always trying to catch up—keep pace—with the pulses, thumps, thuds,

1. Matt Hamblen, “Los Angeles tests gunshot sensors on light poles,” Computerworld, March 13, 2017, http://www.computerworld.com/article/3180125/sustainable-it/los-angeles-tests-gunshot- sensors-on-light-poles.html 2. PR, Newswire. “Amerlux Partners with Illuminating Concepts and IntelliStreets to Develop SmartSite State of the Art LED Street Lighting and Network Control System.” PR Newswire US, May 03, 2012. 10 hisses, clicks, and dings, that speed up and then disappear into inaudibility. Using a pair of induction headphones, Kubisch recorded electromagnetic signals of security gates in malls around the world. As sounds pierce the ear, run down the neck, and tighten the chest, the composition gives bodily expression to an otherwise imperceptible transaction.

These vignettes draw attention to the entanglement of security and the senses. The tension that circumscribes the man’s unintended bag, the monitoring capabilities that smart lights provide, and the electromagnetic security waves that Kubisch makes audible, all convey sensory dimensions of security. These examples also signal the expansiveness and ubiquity of security across different registers and hints at the ways that security actively affects and enters everyday spaces, sociability, and conviviality – what it means to be in the world. While security has been traditionally associated with the state, Marc

Schuilenburg argues that multiple actors, now, carry out security in ways that augment and exceeds that of the state. Schuilenburg writes, “securitization is a wider and more pragmatic concept than ‘actuarial justice’ and ‘risk justice’ because it does not place the emphasis on the position of the judicial apparatus or the state, but makes it clear that the pursuit of security takes place in a plethora of practices and environments.”3 As the project traces security across different institutions and parties, public and private, I address this expansive securitization through the senses. I argue that more than just complimenting a reading of securitization, taking a sensory approach reveals the incredible pervasiveness of security as it vibrant through technologies, across spaces, and

3. Marc Schuilenburg, trans. George Hall, The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk, and Social Control (New York and London: New York University Press, 2015) 68. 11 in bodies. By taking account of the role of the senses in security, this project emphasizes the material and corporeal conditions of security as it is lived. Security is not something out there, but embodied in routine spaces, actions, and relations.

My approach to the sensory entanglements of security builds on the sensory work of Tim Ingold, Davide Panagia, and Erin Manning. The project also resonates with the work of materialist scholars such as Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, and Lucy Lippard.

Following their lead, I take seriously the intertwining and contingency of things, spaces, and bodies in relation to the senses. To tease out the sensory dimensions of security, I consider a diverse set of materials, including artworks, ethnographic research, news sources, industry trade journals, and official government materials (websites, campaigns, flyers, videos, documents, etc.). Rather than engaging these materials separately, this project brings them into dialogue with each other. This approach stresses the interplay of the sense across multiple security registers. The range of material encountered in the dissertation reflects the project’s interdisciplinary focus and helps to emphasize contemporary security as a force that seeps, spreads, vibrates, resonates, and rebounds.

The artworks considered in this project do not illustrate security but engage in site of security and take up security processes; as such, they afford entry into the unfolding of security. For these reasons, artworks function as a critical dimension of the project. Not only do they draw attention to security’s sensory underpinnings, but they also provide a way into spaces of security and security apparatuses. Specifically, as many of the artworks interrupt or interject in the unfolding of security they provide a kind of critical opening. In addition to complementing the project’s interdisciplinary bend, the research 12 material supports its underlying hypothesis that contemporary security is a pervasive force that links technology, bodies, and spaces through sensory operations.

By bringing seemingly disparate moments, objects, and spaces together, this study magnifies the sensory dimensions of security and the penetrating force of security within society. In the dissertation, “Sensing Security” holds three meanings. First, I use it to refer to the sensory technologies that increasingly have become a part of contemporary security and how security acts as a sensing mechanism. Second, it refers to the way security conditions the senses, instructing us on how to see, hear, and touch. Security discourse not only outline threats but also teaches us to turn our bodies into security machines in order to identify suspicion and alert authorities: enlisting our eyes, for example, in the counterterrorism campaign “If You See Something, Say Something™.”

Finally, by using this phrase I attempt to capture the work I do in the dissertation, as the project explicates, or senses out, the entangled sensory relations of security.

Despite the ubiquity of security, there are limits to how it can be studied. The research challenges that I encountered during the project informed the way I conducted research, what material I examined, and the way I came to think about security. In the early stages of the study, I contacted numerous organizations and institutions, these included: an international airport, a city CCTV control center, a shopping town center, a university police department, and a major regional museum. Although some of these organizations showed interest in the project, in the end, none of them was able to accommodate my research. After several months, I was given access to the Columbus

Museum of Art where I had direct contact with staff and security personnel. The 13 difficulty of studying security within designated security spaces and gaining access to security behind the scenes reaffirmed the importance of art within the project. The artworks provided a way to reach into spaces of security where people are encouraged to move quickly and not dwell, for example the airport security screening area. Although, to some, art might seem like an odd route into security, Davide Panagia reminds us, “[a] political act is also an aesthetic one, a partitioning of sensation that divides the body and its organs of sense perception and assigns to them corresponding capacities for the making of sense. With sensation we enter a world of contours, resonances, vibrations, attunements, syntonizations, hapticities, and impulses…”4 Echoing Jacques Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, Panagia’s assertion cast aesthetics as something that intersects the social, political, and creative. This fashioning of aesthetics makes room for art as process that is embedded in the world.

The material focus of the project sets it apart from both traditional security literature—which commonly focuses on the state and international relations—and standard art-history surveys—which trace the trajectory of an aesthetic movement or genre. Because my study fits neatly in neither camp, I draw upon a diverse array of disciplines, such as critical theory, art, media studies, surveillance studies, geography, anthropology, and sociology. The interdisciplinary shape of this project resonates most closely with recent scholarship that blends art analysis and critiques of technology and society: for example, Douglas Kahn’s 2013 book Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies

4. Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 9. 14 and Earth Magnitude in the Arts or Rachel Hall’s 2015 book The Transparent Traveler:

The Performance and Culture of Airport Security. These authors weave their analyses through a combined study of artworks (and other critical objects) and socio-historical processes. My project aligns with these interdisciplinary works as I take art as a rich site of inquiry that is of and in the world.

While the material considered in this study ranges widely, the temporal and geographical scope is more refined. The project primarily focuses on artworks and events that took place after September 11, 2001 and within the context of the United States and

Europe. Although most scholars agree that 9/11 accelerated already existing or desired security practices, the attacks have become part of the narrative of security in the 21st century from the perspective of both governments and the security industry. Therefore, despite the fact that 9/11 did not constitute a revolutionary shift in security; it serves as an important marker in the official discourse on security and the accompanying security rationale. Taking account of security sensorially provides a way to address security as both expansive and intimate, demonstrating its pervasive condition.

Security/Sensory/Space/Scholarship

While the role of the senses, or at least sensory capacities, is present in security- industry literature and from time to time appears in policy statements, the sensory dimensions of security has generally been left unscrutinized. By bringing the senses to bear on security, this project offers a different way to conceptualize and address security, and the broader political, social, and bodily implications caught up in security. This is not a dissertation about the efficacy, efficiency, or even desirability of security practices, 15 equipment, and strategies. Instead, the dissertation seeks to show how contemporary security pervades everyday spaces and bodies and to understand the ways that security operates as a kind of prosthesis or sensory apparatus. To draw out a sensory analysis of security and art—to explore security’s often-unacknowledged influence and occasionally criticize its unreflective assumptions—I engage multiple fields of study. Too expansive to address individually in this introduction, I’ve divided the main veins of literature incorporated in the dissertation into the following three thematic categories: Security and

Surveillance, Senses, and Space.

Security and Surveillance

Although security is frequently presented as neutral and in aim of safety and protection, it can also operate as a mechanism of power. The way security infiltrates the social sphere and extends into the social fabric may be considered in terms of what

Foucault articulates as a technology of power.5 Focusing on how security functions as a means of social control affords a reading of security that moves beyond its expressed purpose of safety and protection. In particular, Foucault’s conceptualization of the

Panopticon, a prison watchtower, has played a significant role in understanding modern security and surveillance. Of particular importance for this study is the way discipline relates to the senses; that is, seeing—and the perception of being seen—becomes a mode of social control.

5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). 16

The Panopticon serves as one of the central points of reference for subsequent work on security. While in Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation Zygmunt Bauman and

David Lyon suggest that an updated version of the Panopticon may be necessary in order to take account of contemporary technologies, their work shows the salience of

Foucault’s ideas while applying them to a critique of mass surveillance. Offering a theoretical discussion of power, Bauman and Lyon also delve into some of the potential consequences of contemporary surveillance. Specifically, they pose mass surveillance as unequally affecting already marginalized communities. For Jasbir Puar, the extended capacity to see contemporary surveillance networks deliver moves beyond the lateral and vertical functioning of the Panopticon. The extension of surveillance into everyday spaces, which unites these works, lends support to an investigation of the unintended consequences of security operations and the central role of vision in techniques of power.

Simone Brown’s rewriting of the history of surveillance in Dark Matter: On the

Surveillance of Blackness is helpful for understanding the discriminatory practices of security and that surveillance draws upon multiple technologies of power.

Technology and media play an ever-increasing role in security operations, and provide an intersection between art and security. Because literature dedicated to the relationship of art and security is minimal, this study draws on texts that take up art in relation to technology in order to productively analyze the artworks and their engagement with security apparatuses. Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction provides a point of reflection by conceptualizing the effects of technology in relation to art and the masses. The revolutionary potential Benjamin saw in technology 17 provides a critical referent for addressing how artists have used technological devises and media to intervene in security practice.

Directly engaging issues of media and security, Josh Lauer’s historical account of surveillance—which focuses on the development of the phonograph, the telephone, and the photograph—argues for understanding security in relation to a sensory basis extended through technology. Allan Sekula’s account of photography and images in the development of mining and criminal archives establishes an analytical approach that demonstrates how representation and technology are interpolated within larger social forces. His consideration of technology and representation in relation to social power helps to unpack the relationship between security and art.

While Sekula reveals the implicit ways technological representations, such as photography, come to function as part of a system of power, other scholars have identified ways in which technology might be a tool for social agency. For example, the sound art collective Ultra-red contends that audio recording can be mobilized as a mode of resistance. Conspiracy Dwellings: Surveillance in Contemporary Art address security and art in a compilation of essays edited by Outi Remes and Pam Skelton. In the book, surveillance and security technologies take center stage as the essays explore artworks created in the midst of political conflict. Although primarily focused on surveillance, this compilation serves as an instructive model for negotiating the intersection of art and security. Also important for this study is Marc Schuilenburg’s concept of

“securitization.” He writes, “With the term ‘the securitization of security,’ I refer to this mobilization of a range of actors—health, education, spatial planning, welfare, the retail 18 sector, energy utilities—whose aim is to make our lives safer and more secure.”6

Although this project primarily address security as it is directed at bodies and social order, this notion of securitization is important as it provides a means to conceptualize security as a productive force across multiple scales and institutions.

Ethnographies emphasizing security and surveillance demonstrate the validity and richness of studying security as it is experienced. Juliana Ochs’s Security and Suspicion:

An Ethnography of Everyday Life in Israel (2011) reveals the pervasiveness of security as it analyzes how ideas of citizenship and fear are constructed through security. Security and Development (2010), edited by John-Andrew McNeish and Jon Harald Sande Lie, situates security in relation to other global processes; specifically, the collection of ethnographies explains how security has become increasingly attached to global development since 9/11. While these ethnographies provide a productive background for addressing security from the ground level and for examining security in relation to external forces, sensation and the senses do not form a major part of their analyses.

Sensation and the Senses

Focusing on the senses offers a way to address the unarticulated and pervasive workings, and conditioning, of contemporary security. At its core, an investigation of the senses denotes a material presence. Whether taken as a site of inquiry or means of analysis, the senses are in and of the lived world. As such, literature on the senses provides a framework for examining how security fits into, and even configures social

6. Schuilenburg, The Securitization of Society, 23. 19 and spatial relationships. A critical undertaking of the senses first emerged in the field of anthropology with scholars such as David Howes, Constance Classen, and Tim Ingold.

Through their work, Howes and Classen demonstrate that the senses are socially and culturally constituted, taking on specific configurations in different contexts. Thus, they provide a basis for thinking through how security might actively condition our senses and reaffirm specific sensory hierarchies, such as the privileging of sight. Howes identifies the 1990s as the period that brought about the “sensory turn.” However, it was the work of early scholars, such as Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias, Lucien Febvre, Maurice

Merleau-Ponty, Luce Irigaray, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Marshall McLuhan that led the humanities and the social sciences to embrace the senses.7 The now interdisciplinary field of scholars working on the senses goes by “Sensory Studies.” For this study, the work of

Merleau-Ponty and McLuhan are specifically relevant as they offer ways of understanding embodied experience and entangled media.

Moving from this foundational observation, the project turns to the work of Carrie

Noland, Caroline Jones, Marina Peterson, Tim Ingold, Douglas Kahn, Davide Panagia, and Erin Manning. Beyond attending to the senses as critical avenue of research, these authors demonstrate the ways in which sensation is entangled in the material and social world. Carrie Noland’s book Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing

Culture (2009) provides a nuanced way to address the effects of culture on the body.

However, more importantly, Noland identifies ways in which normative practices might

7. David Howes, “The Social Life of the Senses.” Ars Vivendi Journal, no. 3 (February 2013): 4. 20 be challenged through corporeal experiences. This is instructive for approaching artists’ performance security. Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary

Art (2006) edited by Caroline Jones provides a model for addressing sensation across multiple registers, which lends particular focus to the project as it attends to the senses through an examination of art and technology. Jones’s claim that our senses are always mediated—whether through the air or the microphone—is informative for addressing the sensorial work of media and the artworks encountered in this dissertation. Jones’s assertion that embodied experience is not just about individual experiences but also that bodily experiences fundamentally inform how we think is crucial for demonstrating the pervasive ways security acts through and on the body.

Examining security through sensory encounters demands understanding the senses both relationally and in terms of process. Tim Ingold’s emphasis on the senses in relation to the world expresses a productive mode of attending to the senses. His work provides rich examples of what it means to inhabit the world of the senses and to research sensorially. Douglas Kahn’s insightful rethinking of transduction affords a distinct way to conceptualize how security machines might be sensed, facilitating an understanding of security beyond intended circuits and mechanisms. Attending to perception as a dimension of being within the environment and perception as an active process, Ingold and Kahn extend an understanding of the senses beyond that of retrospective cultural signifiers. In other words, sensation is not only something that is given meaning in society, but it is experienced even before that meaning is attributed. 21

The importance of the senses for society and for bodies translates to the importance of the senses in relation to security. Peterson articulates the work of sensation in forming social relations: that “sensory attunements organize sociabilities”8 is particularly important for this study. Panagia’s investigation of the role the senses play in the formation of a democratic moment broadens the notion of a sensory encounter to include politics. This helps inform an understanding of security and sensory encounters in contemporary society. Panagia complements Peterson by treating the senses as a meaningful mode of political configuration. Understanding the political and social character of the senses is significant for sorting through what security means for actual people and what kinds of bonds it supports or restricts. In the Politics of Touch: Sense,

Movement, Sovereignty Manning employs a haptic approach that emphasizes the importance of the body and tactility in her analysis of dance, film, and the sovereign state. Manning’s discussion of security as a barrier for moving bodies proves indispensable for my project, and her text also serves as an overall helpful model for critically addressing sensation.

The burgeoning field of sensory ethnography contributes to existing sensory studies by advancing modes of research that take seriously multisensory ways of knowing and living in the world. Embodiment, the basis of an ethnographic experience, serves also as a crucial dimension of sensory research. In Doing Sensory Ethnography (2009), Sarah

Pink focuses on the interdisciplinary potential of sensory research and outlines strategies

8. Marina Peterson, “Sensory Attunements: Working with the Past in the Little Cities of Black Diamonds.” South Atlantic Quarterly 115, no. 1 (2016): 90. 22 for conducting sensory ethnography. While Pink lays out an approach to sensory ethnography, other authors have contributed to the field through original ethnographic work. Kathleen Stewart, Louise Meintjes, and Steve Feld provide rich examples of what it means to attend to the senses ethnographically as a critical practice and as a way of being in the world. This dissertation will build on the emerging field of sensory ethnography and significant elements of senses literature to highlight how security is sensed and made sense of by ordinary people and artistic encounters.

Space

Security is not only deployed across all different kinds of spaces, but is constructive of spatial realities, including the physical characteristics, spatial practices, social space, and how space is imagined and represented. Expanding on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial distinctions, I pursue security as a productive spatial force. Understanding the spatial manifestation of security and the spaces produced by security operations is essential for discussing security as a lived condition. To grasp security spatially, I draw on the work of Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau. Lefebvre’s The Production of Space

(1991) is a foundational text for the conceptualization of space, and two aspects in particular lend themselves to this study. First, Lefebvre claims that space is not a given, but rather a product of human activity. Security, in this light, may be cast as an active producer of space that is bound up in sociality—what Lefebvre refers to as spatial practices. Second, Lefebvre asserts that spatial practices are informed by how space is conceived and represented. Thus, security can be dealt with not only as a marker specific space, such as barrier, but as it contributes to the way bodies move through and occupy 23 space. Moreover, security actively influence how spaces are imagined and thus engaged.

This observation opens a path to think through the role security plays in shaping notions of space, the movement of bodies through space, and producing ideas about belonging.

Whereas Lefebvre provides a foundation for considering how security contributes to the production of space via spatial practice and modes of representation, Michel de

Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life offers a critique of the capitalist city that has specific implications for conceptualizing the activity of artists within space of security.

De Certeau sets up a relation between producer and consumer that destabilizes the power relation embedded in the capitalist city. He articulates a mode of agency within the domain of consumption, suggesting that through practice the capitalist system might be undermined. De Certeau’s emphasis on consumption as an active and creative process can productively be brought to bear on artistic interventions of security—for example, it helps to reveal how security can be appropriated in art.

Over the last decade, the intersection of art and geography has proven to be a prolific site of inquiry around the nature and meaning of space.9 Many artists and geographers have come to embrace each other’s fields. Notably, Nato Thomas and Trevor

Paglen’s Experimental Geography (2008) brought artistic and geographic perspectives to bear on a diverse array of artworks, capturing spatially driven artistic practices. Similarly,

9. See for example: Mogel, Lize, and Alexis Bhagat. An Atlas of Radical Cartography (2007), José Luis de Vicente, Honor Harger, and Josep Perelló. Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio waves (2011), and Hawkins, Harriet. For Creative Geographies: Geography, Visual Arts and the Making of Worlds (2014).

Paglen’s Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes (2010) blends his artistic practice and geographical research. Here, Paglen’s artwork casts light on the interworking of security and space through his exploration of hidden military geographies. Other publications have brought artworks together in relation to a specific topic. For example, Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves (2011), edited by José

Luis de Vicente, Josep Perelló, and Honor Harger, maps the spatial development of radio waves through artworks. Blurring clear distinctions between art and geography, these texts stand as rich models for probing the complexities of our spatial world.

Lastly, Mobility Studies is important not only for conceptualizing what security does but for understanding security spatially. Considering the importance of movement is crucial for understanding how security determines spatial configurations. While mobility is concerned broadly with spatial relations, it has particular purchase in the domain of security. Because security frequently involves the movement of people and things, texts from Mobility Studies and literature on transnationalism are helpful in conceptualizing how security manifests spatially. Tim Cresswell, John Urry, and Peter Adey in particular demonstrate that space is configured through processes of mobility, rather than being a static or fixed entity.

Methodology: Analysis and Fieldwork

To examine the role of the senses in contemporary security, I delved into the practice of security in everyday life through a three-pronged approach. Although described systematically here, these approaches overlap in time as phases were conducted simultaneously. The first part of the research consisted of selecting artworks. In this 25 process, I visited museums, searched databases, and attended lectures. After selecting an artist, I reached out to the artist and conducted interviews. This phase of the research culminated with analyses of each artwork. The second stage of the research involved accumulating security reports from interviews, journalists, industry magazines, and government documents. The third part of the research included conducting an ethnography of security at the Columbus Museum of Contemporary Art (CMA) in

Columbus, Ohio, and gathering several informal ethnographic accounts as I traveled and visited museums. In the formal and informal ethnographies, I employed a qualitative method that allowed me to focus more on the experience of security than on the data surrounding security. These three approaches provided opportunities to trace sensory aspects across multiple registers and from divergent perspectives, from which a broader set of themes emerged. In the body of the dissertation, material findings from all three approaches are intergraded thematically under the scope of a given chapter.

In this dissertation, I consider art to be a reflexive endeavor, a performative act, and a mode of construction that bears on the larger social field. Working against art as an autonomous object, this approach provides a way to think critically about the artworks in and of themselves as well as in relation to security. I interpret the artworks in relation to the themes of the dissertation through formal and contextual analyses of the works. This mode of analysis follows a series of questions: first, what does the artwork consist of, what is its medium? Second, how does the artwork aesthetically engage security? Third, what kind of security is at stake in the artwork? The artworks discussed in this dissertation reveal dimensions of contemporary security that often go overlooked. By 26 intervening in ongoing security practices, through their medium of choice—including photography, film, sound, performance, and installation—artists make aspects of security perceptible in new ways. Through dynamic encounters with security, the artworks act as conduits for thinking through issues surrounding security, perception, and materiality.

Finding and collecting accounts of security technologies, objectives, and experiences consisted of searching databases and media interfaces, while also conducting interviews. Studying an array of resources—including government documents and websites, news reports, journalistic accounts, and industry reports and magazines— reveals the importance of the senses in security. For example, the Department of

Homeland Security’s description of Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques

(SPOT) or a journalist’s experience of visiting the US/Mexico border provide two ways to understand the sensory work at play in security. In addition to reading security reports,

I also interviewed individuals about their experiences moving through security at the airport. These interviews were semi-structured and focused on the security encountered, the interviewee’s physical comportment in the airport, and how the experience made the person feel. Inquiring directly about travelers’ experiences with security corroborated other accounts I consulted during my research. Together, the various accounts of security helped to show the numerous ways security is involved with perception and the senses.

Ethnographic research also played a crucial role as it provided a way to examine security as it unfolds in everyday spaces. In the museum, I employed a method of participant observation and conducted semi-formal interviews with security guards, staff, and visitors. Using a variety of ethnographic tools, I analyzed how technological devices 27 and bodies carry out security, in what ways the senses and sensation are at play in security, and how security affects behavior and social relations within the space.

Observing the practice of security in the museum—as well as in other spaces such as the airport—contributed to my understanding of security as both intimate and public.

Adopting ethnography as part of my approach to the research questions helped move the project beyond the rhetoric of security—beyond the sanctioned justifications of government officials and security professionals—to focus instead on the various ways that security pervades everyday social spaces. Studying security as practiced within routine spaces brought unarticulated dimensions of security to the foreground. Indeed, fieldwork provided me with a way to investigate how security in ordinary social spaces relates to touch, sight, and sound, among other senses. Paying attention to security procedures and social relations has been instructive for not only unpacking sensory relations of security but also for examining underlying assumptions and recognizing the logic behind security practices.

Sensory ethnography informed the ethnographic dimension of the research. As sensory ethnography considers the senses from both phenomenological and social perspectives, it proved particularly valuable for this project. While I also used traditional ethnographic methods, my fieldwork was guided by sensory ethnography’s emphasis on embodiment and sensory attunement. Spending time in the museum allowed me to pay attention to the ways that security marks the space sensorially. At the CMA, I dedicated time to gaining an understanding of how bodies move through the galleries in relation to the artworks, security personnel, and security technologies. Participant observation also 28 entailed attending to sensory moments and paying attention to how visitors interacted with each other. After the preliminary fieldwork, I conducted interviews with security guards and visitors. Directed by my initial observations, the interviews were open-ended but structured enough to highlight the effects of security within the space. I asked visitors and guards about their experience in the museum and their perception of security, specifically as it involved their sensory perceptions. In the end, these informal interviews augmented the observation-based research and my embodied approach. While I conducted the bulk of the ethnographic work at the CMA, I also paid attention to security in other spaces, including airports and other museums. Over the course of research, I attended to moments of security in everyday spaces as it happened and emerged.

Considering specific sites—while also being open to security in daily life—provided both a concentrated study of security and a means of recording security’s ordinary affects.10

Considering the focus of this dissertation and the limitations associated with obtaining permission to observe the workings of security in an actively functioning space,

I was thankful for the rich site of inquiry offered to me by the Columbus Museum of Art.

Focusing on an art museum provided insight into how contemporary security operates in a space open to the public. Additionally, the museum offered a conceptual bridge uniting art analyses with ethnographic fieldwork. A kind of microcosm of security, the museum is highly appropriate for scrutinizing security, as it privileges specific things—art objects—and specific people—art visitors. Museums offer a unique space to think

10. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). 29 through questions about security, and artists have taken up this space as a space for social critique, as in the work of Fred Wilson and Andrea Fraser. In revealing the structure and limits of the museum, Wilson and Fraser critically underscore the museum as a political space of social significance. Their work identifies the museum as a place that reflects— rather than disrupts—everyday political and social configurations. Identifying the museum as an active site of social configuration builds on Matti Bunzl’s ethnographic work at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Marina Peterson’s ethnographic study of Los Angeles's Grand Performances, both of which focus on specific institutional practices in arts venues, while taking into account larger social structures at play in their focused sites.

Structure and Chapter Summaries

The dissertation is organized into the following chapters: 1) Desert to Drone:

Visibility Conditions; 2) Eyes on the Street: Embodied Security; 3) Entering the

Museum: Screening Visitors; 4) Securing the Border: Sensing Everything; 5) Waves in the Air: Transducing Security. Beginning and ending with air, the body of the dissertation creates a kind of pendulum from macro-level to micro-level and then back out again.

From the militarized air of the desert, the study moves to the street and the café, explores security in the museum, travels to the border, and returns to security in the air via the electromagnetic field. The movement between chapters echoes the movement of security back and forth across diverse spaces to emphasize security’s spatiality. Ordering the chapters in this way also accentuates the pervasive condition of security and its imperviousness to physical limits. 30

Chapter One: Desert to Drone: Visibility Conditions

Chapter 1 begins with an analysis of artist/geographer Trevor Paglen’s photograph Reaper in the Sun (2013). In Reaper in the Sun sight converges in conflictual manner. The luminosity of the sun verges on destruction; neither the scene nor the eye can bear the sheer intensity of the light. The appearance of the Reaper is counter to its technological promise: to extend sight to the farthest, most remote, areas without being seen. And the coupling of the weaponized drone and the Nevada sun challenge the geographical limits of the “War on Terror.” For these reasons, Reaper in the Sun serves a point of departure to examine the role of vision in the security state. Taking Paglen’s photograph as an opening, I examine the conditioning of sight in relation to the sun, drones, and the militarization of the American Southwest. These essential features of the photograph provide the structure of the chapter. First, I address the sun as the ultimate embodiment and limit of visibility. Second, I inquire into what it means to see a drone, as in Paglen’s case, and what drones see, what Daniel Greene has called “drone vision.”

Third, I examine the desert as a site of shifting visibilities. In particular, I look at different moments of US military activity and the kinds of visibilities they generated. In short, I argue that seeing hidden military activities and installations as situated in the terrain, the air, technologies, and bodies reveals that they are not neutral, happenstance, or homogenous. By taking account of the tangible, the lived, the sensed, and the material, I work against abstract notions of sight to underscore seeing as a dimension of the security apparatus that reaches out across spaces and bodies in a relational and situated way.

Whereas many analyses of war and visuality focus primarily on images of war, this 31 chapter teases out phenomenal, material, and embodied moments of seeing in relation to the security state.

Chapter Two: Eyes on the Street: Embodied Security

In 1961, Jane Jacobs argued that being able to watch the happenings in neighborhood streets would contribute to the safety and vitality of a city: “there must be eyes on the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.”11 This chapter challenges Jacobs’ assertion by arguing that contemporary versions of eyes on the street—such as closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems and campaigns like “If You See Something, Say Something™”—produce unwelcomeness and suspicion rather than vitality and diversity. The elevation of sight as a primary mode of security exemplifies Foucault’s analysis of techniques of power, captured in his critique of Jeremy

Bentham’s Panopticon. To suss out the intrumentalization of vision by security, the chapter begins by summarizing some of the ways the theoretical model of the Panopticon has contributed to the study of CCTV and surveillance studies broadly. In recognition of this history, I track the prevalence of security in everyday spaces by tending to the body, a body that is made of flesh, alive, and situated in the world. I argue that contemporary security is embodied, which is to say that security happens in and through the body.

Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on phenomenology and the body, Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblage, as well as other literature on embodiment, the chapter traces ways the body is caught up in security through an

11. Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of American Cities (New York: New York. Vintage Book Edition,1992) 35. 32 analysis of three artworks: First, I examine how Jen Urso’s walking project Unwelcome

Map operates as a register of the larger security environment. I then turn to Tania El

Khoury’s performance of suspicion in her piece Jarideh, which draws attention to the role of ordinary bodies in the implementation of security. Next, I consider James

Briddle’s interactive sculpture Surveillance Spaulder as it highlights the ubiquity of security cameras on the streets of London and challenges the cameras’ relationship to the body. In the end, I ask what happens to liveliness, welcomeness, and anonymity in the streets and other public spaces when security is directed at bodies and bodies are directed by security.

Chapter Three: Entering the Museum: Screening Visitors

The museum entrance has long been more than a portal to exquisite collections, gift shops, and cafés. The entrance signifies a shift from the exterior world where abrupt sounds, smells, sights, temperatures, and textures transpire, to the interior confines of the museum, where hushed voices, measured steps, safe distances, gentle lighting, and controlled temperatures are meant to evoke contemplation. In this chapter, I examine the museum as a site of security. More than just safeguarding precious objects, contemporary museum security is being reshaped in relation to economic and political forces— specifically, by the rise of an experience oriented economy and anxieties over terrorism.

As museums market themselves as being “for everyone,” this chapter raises the critical question of whether museum security works in service of this goal or in opposition to it.

To unpack the ways in which museum security is changing, I explore how security is effecting spatial and sensual aspects of the museum. To this end, I argue that security 33 delineates the terms of openness and sociability, and that already exclusionary processes are being intensified under the pretext of security. The chapter begins by stepping into the museum. Drawing on the contrasting experiences of entering the Louvre—located in the heart of Paris—and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art—located in the Ozark mountain region of the United States—I explore what we can learn about museum security in a bustling European city and a rural American one, ultimately asking why security differs in these distinct cases. Next, I explore how security, discipline, and spectatorship intermix in the museum by attending to the role of the senses in the museum, and the changing roles of security guards. Last, I examine how museum security fits within and forms a part of broader security networks. I draw on ethnographic work conducted at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) in the spring and summer of

2016, and visits to the Louvre and Crystal Bridges in the spring and summer of 2017.

Chapter Four: Securing the Border: Sensing Everything

As previous chapters demonstrate, security is not bound to a single place. Instead, security is taken up at multiple sites simultaneously: in desert military installations in the

American Southwest, along city streets and cafés all over the world, and in local or international museums. Nonetheless, this chapter considers the context in which security is arguably the most aggressively and explicitly carried out: the border. It is the border— the physical limit of the nation-state and its ports of entry—that has been most dramatically transformed in the era of counterterrorism. The chapter first looks at border security along the Mexico/US border as engaged in Simparch’s border installation

Rodadora Frontera (Border Tumbleweed) (2014) and David Taylor’s photographs 34

Camera Room, New Mexico (2007) and Seismic Sensor, Texas (2007). It then moves to a discussion of the airport as an international border through an analysis of Roxy Paine’s

Checkpoint (2014) and Tanja Ostojić’s Misplaced Women? (2015). To address the sensory emphasis of security at these two sites, the chapter also draws upon government documents and websites, news reports, journalistic accounts, and industry reports and magazines. Bringing together this diverse set of materials, I argue that, under the auspice of homeland security and counterterrorism, security has been relentlessly extended across territories, technologies, and bodies to create an ultrasensitive security matrix. Moreover,

I argue that borders and airports most clearly represent security’s desire to bring everything to the sensible surface: including tracking the vibrations of footsteps near the

US/Mexican border and employing electronic noses to smell travelers’ clothes and belongings.

Chapter Five: Waves in the Air: Transducing Security

Security is more than sleek surfaces and smart weapons. Security signals populate the air and animate devices; security, in fact, is energetic. This chapter moves away from the ground to focus on security as it manifests in the invisible electromagnetic field. The chapter opens by taking account of the electromagnetic spectrum through a discussion of the ether and the discovery of Hertzian-space in the 19th century. I then turn to electromagnetic waves in contemporary security and how artists have made imperceptible signals tangible through processes of transduction. Specifically, drawing upon Douglas

Kahn’s writing on transduction, I analyze how Benjamin Gaulton’s video installation

2.4ghz (2010-ongoing), Christina Kubisch’s composition Security (2005), and Walead 35

Beshty’s photographic series Travel Pictures (2006) provide ways of sensing and thinking about security that populate the spaces we inhabit and move through. By taking up the electromagnetic spectrum—which mobilizes contemporary security machines—I explore an aspect of security ordinarily unperceived and unnoticed, but which is increasingly becoming a feature of the air. Operating below the range of ordinary human perception, the securitization of the electromagnetic spectrum is a powerful and immersive tool that brings objects, people, and spaces into relation. Transduction then opens a way to understand this relationality of the artworks to security, and also poses challenges to the Greenbergian understanding of the medium. Building on this discussion of medium, I end the chapter by considering how Jennifer Gabrys’ notion of an expansive medium provides a way to think of security as atmospheric.

Conclusion: Security Toward Other Ends

The final chapter draws out the sensual and spatial thrust of the dissertation providing a brief summary of the main arguments in each chapter. From there, I examine

Pavilion Zoom (2015), a collaboration between artists Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and

Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Operator#17 (I only wish that I could weep), by artist Walid

Raad, as examples of artworks that redirect security technologies to alternative ends. In closing, I discuss what a sensory engagement with security affords/contributes to thinking about security at large. 36

CHAPTER ONE: DESERT TO DRONE: VISIBILITY CONDITIONS

Reaper in the Sun (2013) by artist/geographer Trevor Paglen hangs formidably on a large dividing wall in the contemporary wing of the Columbus Museum of Art.1 From afar the photograph looks like a color field painting, reminiscent of the work of Mark

Rothko or Agnes Martin. A diffused white orb dominates the center of the composition, gradually radiating outward into a soft yellow hue and then into a light blue-green along the edges, excluding the bottom where light purple swatches push upward. Standing in front of the glass covered 68” × 81½” print, my own reflection, as well as those of other visitors in the gallery, disrupt the subtle composition. It takes refocusing the eyes to see past the reflective surface enlivened by breathing bodies. With proximity, the content of the photograph begins to materialize beneath the sheet of protective glass. No longer an abstract orb set against a color field, but a sun saturating a desert landscape. The sun’s intensity obliterates the horizon allowing the ground to melt into the sky. Only a subtle trace of a distant mountain range can be glimpsed through the sheer magnitude of the light. With the emergence of a landscape a figure in the sky also appears. No bigger than a speck on Paglen’s lens, or an insect caught in a windowpane, the figure, suspended right beside the brilliant sun, is barely visible. The figure is a drone, a Reaper. This tiny, almost imperceptible, drone appears to be on the verge of escaping the heat of the sun or

1. Trevor Paglen is an American artist who is known for his interdisciplinary practice that includes, among others, image-making, sculpture, investigative journalism, writing, and engineering. He holds an MFA in art from the Chicago Art Institute and PhD from University of California Berkley. For more information, see http://www.paglen.com/ and https://art21.org/artist/trevor-paglen/. 37 being swallowed-up in its intensity. Caught eternally by the photographic process, what would have only been glimpsed briefly, like a fleeting reflection in the glass, radically transforms the image from a minimalist landscape into an exercise of the politics of seeing.

In Reaper in the Sun sight converges in a conflictual manner. The luminosity of the sun verges on destruction; neither the scene nor the eye can bear the sheer intensity of the light. The appearance of the Reaper is counter to its technological promise: to extend sight to the farthest, most remote, areas without being seen. And the coupling of the weaponized drone and the Nevada sun challenge the geographical limits of the “War on

Terror.” For these reasons, Reaper in the Sun serves as a point of departure to examine the role of vision in the context of the United States’ security state. Taking Paglen’s photograph as an opening, I examine the conditioning of sight in relation to the sun, drones, and the militarization of the American Southwest. These features of the photograph provide the structure of the chapter. First, I address the sun as the ultimate embodiment and limit of visibility. Second, I inquire into what it means to see a drone, as in Paglen’s case, and what drones see – what Daniel Greene has called “drone vision.”

Third, I examine the desert as a site of shifting visibilities. In particular, I look at different moments of US military activity and the kinds of visibilities they generated. In short, I argue that seeing hidden military activities and installations as situated in the terrain, the air, technologies, and bodies reveals that they are not neutral, happenstance, or homogenous. By taking account of the tangible, the lived, the sensed, and the material, I work against abstract notions of sight to underscore seeing as a dimension of the security 38 apparatus that reaches out across spaces and bodies in a relational and situated way.

Whereas many analyses of war and visuality focus primarily on images of war, this chapter teases out phenomenal, material, and embodied moments of seeing in relation to the security state.

Seeing into the Sun

While Reaper in the Sun provides a rare glimpse of an elusive unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), the photograph also places the viewer—caught staring at the sun—in a seemingly vulnerable situation. As the directive “don’t stare at the sun” is frequently repeated, most proceed cautiously around the burning sun with their eyes. By positioning the sun at the center of the composition, Paglen inverts this directive. To see the Reaper hovering slightly below and a little to the right of the blazing light, one must dismiss the inclination to look away; instead, the viewer must directly turn their gaze to the sun.

Although the photographic mediation shields the physical eye from intensity and danger of the sun, its magnitude in the photograph accentuates its power. The sun is the single greatest source of light, bringing the world into visibility; yet it also has the capacity to destroy sight: sometimes temporary, sometimes permanently. Reaper in the Sun enacts this paradox as the sun brings the drone into visibility while it erases the physical environment. Moreover, this paradox highlights the condition of photography and the limits of human sight. 39

In 1829 Belgian experimental physicist Joseph Plateau felt the intensity of the sun upon his retinas as he stared directly at the sun for over 25 seconds.2 Plateau was left blind for several days after conducting the experiment. More than a test gone awry, his encounter with the sun exposed the eye’s vulnerability to light. Plateau recovered from the initial damage, but his experience was incorporated into the history of optics. Indeed, as Tim Ingold remind us “seeing is an experience of light.”3 The 17th and 18th centuries witnessed a plethora of experiments and gadgets designed to understand the phenomena of vision. During these two centuries, Gregory Lynall writes, “an array of optical inventions appeared that could be employed to generate intense heat from the sun’s rays.”4 Lynall describes these Victorian devices as putting the sun to work. “If the sun’s rays could be focused by an instrument and put to work on material substances,” he writes, “the image of light as a projectile prominent within optical discourse could be understood as a real proposition rather than a rhetorical ruse, transforming metaphor into identity.”5 Thus, it was during this time that the sun became a vital aspect of understanding vision and manipulating images. The 19th century continued this visual enterprise with the invention of the kaleidoscope, the stereoscope, the phenakistiscope, the stroboscope, and eventually the camera. The application of such devices, Nicholas J.

2. Guy Verriest, “Life, eye disease and work of Joseph Plateau,” Documenta Ophthalmologica 74, (1990): 11. 3. Tim Ingold, “Worlds of sense and sensing the world- a response to Sarah Pink and David Howes,” Social Anthropology 19, no. 3 (2011): 314. 4. Gregory Lynall, “‘Bundling up the Sun-Beams’: Burning Mirrors in Eighteenth-Century Knowledge and Culture,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 4 (2013): 477. 5. Ibid., 481. 40

Wade explains, extended both the “scope of visual art and visual science.”6 These inventions and experiments not only advanced understandings of the phenomenon of sight, as Jonathan Crary has demonstrated, but offered a new arena for visual manipulation. The ability of many of these devices to manipulate human perception foreshadowed the invention of cinema. The “precision of technology,” according to Tom

Gunning, radically revised modes of “representation and narration.”7 While these devices contributed to scientific and phenomenological understandings of sight, the camera rose above other gadgets and became the dominant visual mechanism and medium of the 20th century.

As Reaper in the Sun resonates with radiation, the sun recalls the very condition of the medium. The light that floods the composition references the history of the photography while flexing its capacity. Stepping away from Paglen’s photograph, the drone disappears and the landscape recedes into washes of color. More than just becoming an abstraction, however, the near erasure of the desert alludes to the medium’s inception in light. Indeed, the history of photography is a history of experiments in light.

From the earliest camera obscuras in the 1st century BCE to the discovery of photosensitive chemicals in the 15th century to the explosion of photography in the 19th and 20th centuries, light has been the essential factor. For Joseph Niépce the sun played such an important role that he called one of his early photographic methods heliography:

6. Wade, “Philosophical Instruments and Toys,” 102. 7. Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (2012): 497. 41

“sun drawing.”8 The development of photography hangs on the presence and intensity of light. Indeed, light is found in the medium’s etymology: photo meaning light and graphy meaning to write or draw, taken together photography means to draw with light. The sun at the core of Paglen’s photograph enacts this essential relationship, and goes even further to expose light as a source of fragility. By directing the camera toward the sun, Paglen reminds us that the sun can as easily bring a scene into existence as it can destroy it.

8. Dennis Karwatka, “Joseph Niepce and the First Photograph,” Tech Directions 67, no. 1 (Aug. 2007): 12. 42

Figure 1. Trevor Paglen, Reaper in the Sun. 2013. C-print, 68 × 81.5 in. Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio. From: The Columbus Museum of Art, https://www.columbusmuseum.org (accessed October 2, 2017).

The intensity of the sun in Reaper in the Sun challenges the legibility of the photograph and its spatial coherency. Photography’s capacity to depict spaces, events, and people realistically has often positioned it as a mimetic tool with an evidentiary appeal.9 More than creating a likeness or good representation, the ease by which

9. Peter Geimer, “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm,” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 8. 43 photography could render a realistic space helped fold the medium into a specific epistemological sphere. Photography continued the work of the camera obscura by flattening the exterior world into a two-dimensional surface, but took the next step by fixing the image. Photographic images also corresponded to the rules of linear perspective invented during the Renaissance, a way of depicting space grounded in certain humanistic conceptions. As Holly A. Getch Clarke writes, “understood as an ideological structure, perspective perpetuates a system of beliefs about the innate coherence and authoritative controllability of an anachronistically conceived unified space.” 10 The organization of the picture plane according to the parameters of linear perspective ushered in more than a specific style of representation. Linear perspective also harbored a new kind of spatial logic that extended outward from the picture frame to affect the organization of space more broadly. As Henri Lefebvre articulates, “the vanishing line, the vanishing-point and the meeting of parallel lines ‘at infinity’ were the determinants of a representation, at once intellectual and visual, which promoted the primacy of the gaze in a kind of ‘logic of visualization’. This representation, which had been in the making for centuries, now became enshrined in architectural and urbanistic practice as the code of linear perspective.”11 Lefebvre shows how the ordering of space according to linear perspective did not stop at the image’s edge but was taken up in the

10. Holly A. Getch Clarke, “Land-scopic Regimes: Exploring Perspectival Representation Beyond the 'Pictorial' Project,” Landscape Journal 24, no. 1 (2005): 50. 11. Lefebvre, Henri, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith, Production of Space, (Oxford, OX, UK; Cambridge, MA., US: Blackwell, 1991), 41. 44 construction and arrangement of buildings, and the placement of trees.12 Linear perspective became not only the dominant means of representing space but constructing lived spaces of inhabitance.

Reaper in the Sun undermines the coherent space of linear perspective; where a vanishing point might be, where parallel lines might converge, instead, lies the sun. One can imagine tracing the sun’s rays back to the burning core, in a manner that resembles the lines of linear perspective, but the sheer intensity of the sun dissolves the ground and overwhelms the scene, leaving nothing stable to trace. Linear perspective contributed to the invention of landscape, as vistas and horizons attest, but Getch Clarke notes that there are “phenomena peculiar to landscape that resist representation in perspective: its large enveloping scale and continuity of ground plane which resist unified description.” 13 The force of the sun can be thought of as one such phenomena, disrupting the convention of linear perspective and obliterating coherent space. The ramifications of this resistance do not only visually affect the scene but also how the image might be used, what discourse it fits into. To function in different discourses, Rosalind Kraus explains that an image is subjected to different requirements. For example, to count as geological data there needs to be a “coherent recession along an intelligibly horizontal plane retreating towards a definite horizon,”14 and that features in the image must be “grounded, coordinated,

12. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 78. 13. Getch Clark, “Land-scopic Regimes,” 50. 14. Rosalind Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View,” Art Journal 42, no. 4 (1982): 312. 45 mapped.”15 Rather than offer a scientific image, Reaper in the Sun presents a moment in which the ground has evaporated in the heat of the sun. A moment in which space and sight emerge as precarious.

Between seeing and blindness, the liminal state that Reaper in the Sun furnishes evokes a work by the Romanticist painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. Like Paglen’s photograph, a nearly blinding sun visually dominates Turner’s painting Regulus (1828, reworked in 1837). Well known for depicting human activities within unfolding natural phenomena, Turner portrays a busy seaport illuminated by the setting sun. Cutting across both sky and sea, the painted sun appears to be on the verge of eclipsing the entire port.

The force of the sun overpowering human activities and episodes is at the crux of the painting. Turner renders the sun almost to a point of rupture, exploiting the conditions of the light. Like Paglen’s photograph, Turner plays with the phenomenon of light in order to query larger physiological and political questions surrounding vision.

Turner’s striking composition, according to the Tate Museum, would have been recognizable to viewers when it was first exhibited in 1828. Regulus “echoes,” the text announces, “of a famous seaport by the seventeenth-century painter, Claude Lorrain, in the Uffizzi gallery in Florence.”16 Lorrain, a French painter well known for his idealistic landscapes, had painted several Mediterranean seaports before, even portraying a setting sun in the background. But the likeness of Regulus to Lorrain’s paintings is only cursory

15. Krauss, “Photography’s Discursive Spaces,” 312. 16. “Joseph Mallord William Turner, ‘Regulus’ 1828, Reworked 1837,” Tate, accessed September 6, 2016, http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-regulus-n00519. 46 and not grounded in the substance of Turner’s painting, only in the attributes of the scene.

Turner’s subject is not the scene, as in the mise-en-scène of the composition, or an idyllic seaport or a historical record. Rather, the saturated light that illuminates and disguise the seaport is the focus of Regulus. The visual components of the painting seem on the edge of losing their definition. In the bottom right corner, groups of people populate the shore.

In the opposite corner boats with men departing, or arriving, can be spotted, but the penetrating light seems to threaten their existence as well as those who gather at the shore. Buildings pushing back into space toward the scorching sun dissolve in the brilliant haze. In 1837, Turner further accentuated this effect when he reworked the painting by adding even more white to the canvas.17 The consuming light seems to be on the brink of erasing the entire composition. A moment where light becomes absolute and variation, detail, and solidity completely disappear.

17. Jonathan Crary, “Spectral,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art 2013, ed. Caraline A. Jones. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006.), 209. 47

Figure 2. Joseph Mallord William, Regulus.1828, reworked 1837. Oil on canvas, 35.2 x 48.7 in. Tate Britain, London. From: Tate, http://www.tate.org.uk, (accessed October 2, 2017).

Within the liminal quality of Regulus multiple temporal moments are encapsulated. After its namesake, the painting revolves around the story of Marcus

Atilius Regulus, a Roman political leader and general who was captured by

Carthaginians, during in the First Punic War. Subjected to torture and eventually to death, in the painting Turner eschews episodes of Regulus’ demise, placing us, as Jonathan

Crary explains, “in the position of Regulus” while also depicting Regulus as ghostly figure dwarfed beneath the saturated buildings.18 Before Regulus’ death, “his eyelids

18. Crary, “Spectral,” 209. 48 were cut off, assuring that he would be permanently blinded by the e North African sun.”19 The episode, although more brutal, recalls Plateau’s 1829 experiment and prefigures Paglen’s Nevada sun. In all three incidents, the electromagnetic radiation of the sun exposes the paradox of visible light; unrestricted light is also a source of visual destruction. Left staring at the sun, Crary poses that our perspective is Regulus’ “last incandescent moment before the extinguishing of his visual world.”20 Turner, and Paglen after him, are dealing with the breaking point of sight, the moment when the very thing that makes sight possible destroys it.

The sun not only embodies the obliteration of sight, but the logic of the state. For

Turner, the effects of light were also a way to question the projection of the state. Crary powerfully argues that Regulus is compelled by Turner’s fascination of the “forces of heat, light, and energy,”21 and the “phantasmal nature of social and political world—a world that had cultivated his [Regulus] self-annihilating behavior and the delusions of duty and public virtue.”22 Thus, the visual crisis unfolding in Regulus also signals a crisis in the phantasmal state. Understood this way, it is both the sun and the state that leaves

Regulus blind. The marriage of the phenomenal, the physiological, and the sociopolitical is what sets Turner’s painting apart from Lorrain’s work and aligns it with Paglen’s photograph nearly two centuries later.

19. Crary, “Spectral,” 207. 20. Ibid., 209. 21. Ibid., 207. 22. Ibid., 210. 49

Although separated by time, content, and media, Reaper in the Sun visually alludes to Regulus. Most immediately, the works share in the overwhelming force of the sun each presents. Ironically, Paglen has said that he was thinking of another Turner painting when he shot the photograph. While out in the desert framing the drone, Paglen had Turner’s The Angel Standing in the Sun in his mind, a painting that depicts the

Archangel Michael appearing on the Day of Judgement in a radiant glow of light.23 But it is Regulus, despite the name, that seems to be a more rigorous complement. Crary argues that Regulus is a “delirium of over-exposure,”24 and here, we could easily substitute

Reaper in the Sun. The sense that “there is no method of fixation or arrest”25 is epitomized in Paglen’s photograph as the light from the sun denies the drone and the terrain from fully emerging. The drone appears like Regulus’ ghostly figure on the stairs, present but barely there. In addition, unlike Regulus, Reaper in the Sun offers no accumulation of paint to hold onto, only the flatness of the photosensitive paper. The effect of light on the scene is accelerated in the case of the photograph, due to the very conditions of the medium. Rendered through light not pigment, the sense of over- exposure does not only suggest the limit of sight, but also usher to the limits of photography. While both painting and photograph draw attention to the phenomena of light and the physiology of seeing, through a shift in media and context Paglen directs this moment toward the ghostly operations of the US military.

23. “Power & Perspective: Trevor Paglen,” Art21.org, last modified March 27, 2017, https://art21.org/watch/extended-play/trevor-paglen-power-perspective-short/. 24. Crary, “spectral,” 210 25. Ibid. 50

Desert Visibilities

While offering a rare glimpse of a US military drone over the Nevada landscape,

Reaper in the Sun fits within Trevor Paglen’s modus operandi. Particularly, the photograph resonates with his ongoing series Limit Telephotography, which involves photographing clandestine military operations in the US. By employing powerful telescopes, Paglen brings secret activities into view that the unaided eye is incapable of seeing.26 While pursuing a doctorate in geography at Berkley in the early 2000s, Paglen became aware of huge areas of restricted land spread out across the American

Southwest.27 What began with sifting through government archives in a basement, evolved first into excursions into the desert and then into a series of photographs and publications, Limit Telephotography, which centered on “obscure facilities associated with ‘black’ or classified military projects” in California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, and

New Mexico.28 Over the next decade, the desert became a critical site of research and artistic production for Paglen, involving countless treks into the arid terrain. The appearance of unmarked buildings, planes, and vehicles in the secluded landscape of the

American Southwest, brought into view by Limit Telephotography, signals the far-flung and little-known geography of the US security state. Moreover, these photographs offer moments in which the logic behind the security state might be glimpsed.

26. Trevor Paglen, “Limit Telephotography,” Trevor Paglen, accessed August 29, 2017, http://www.paglen.com/?l=work&s=limit 27. Jonah Weiner, “Prying Eyes,” The New Yorker, October 22, 2012. doi: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/22/prying-eyes. 28. Trevor Paglen, “Limit Telephotography,” 19. 51

The photographs in Limit Telephotography do a kind of double work: they simultaneously grant and limit access to hidden military operations. Photographed at incredible distances with a telephoto lens, designed for the night’s sky, Limit

Telephotography brings secret activities into view but never fully into reach. The photographs hold the viewer at a visual distance that limits their ability to distinguish the very thing that they at first seem to reveal. Turning the telephoto lens parallel to the earth’s surface gives the photographs a painterly quality. This has led many to compare images within the series to abstract paintings of the 20th century.29 The painterly semblance of the series is an effect of seeing through the atmosphere. Between Paglen’s camera and his subject, heat waves ripple and rise, water evaporates, while other particles swirl creating a mirage like effect. Thus, despite magnifying clandestine activities, Limit

Telephotography does deliver a robust and detailed survey of these hidden military sites.

Paglen’s fuzzy buildings, vehicles, and people convey as much as they conceal. The photographs’ lack of transparency keeps them from fully fulfilling an evidentiary role. As

Karen Beckman explains, the duality of Paglen’s images question “the role such evidentiary photographs play in the contemporary political landscape.”30 Beckman credits the evidentiary failure of Paglen’s photographs to their aesthetic form, but interprets this failure positively as it affords a rethinking of the function and role images in

29. See Rebecca Solnit, “The Visibility Wars,” introduction to Trevor Paglen’s Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, (New York, N.Y.: Aperture, 2010) 7. 30. Karen Beckman, “Telescopes, Transparency, and Torture,” Art Journal 66, no. 3 (2007): 62. 52 contemporary politics. Despite the cogency and importance of this line of thought, to see the aesthetic dimension of Paglen’s photographs as separate from their subject is a mistake. As Jacques Rancière tells us, the partitioning of the sensible is the work of both aesthetics and politics.31 Panagia contends, “[partitions of the sensible] suggests that our modes of perceiving the world, of sensing the presence of others, are parsed; that as subjects of perception, human beings are partial creatures variously divided. A partition of the sensible thus refers to perceptual forms of knowledge that parse what is and is not sensible, what counts as making (i.e., fabricating) sense and what is available to be sensed.”32 It is in the aesthetics of Paglen’s photographs that the coupling of the desert and military operations surface. The fuzzy quality of the images that distorts buildings draws attention to the material conditions of the desert environment that hides US military operations.

The Southwest has proved to be an ideal site for secret, and sometimes not so secret military operations. The low population and substantial sizes of Nevada, New

Mexico, and Utah offer the optimal conditions for carrying out clandestine activities and covert installations. The terrain is not only used for testing, training, facilitating, and running missions but also as a buffer zone. In his analysis of Limit Telephotograph,

Henrik Gustafsson explains that the photographs show their “shortcomings and measure the secrecy — the physical extent of the buffer-zone and the act of pushing the black

31. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010), 36. 32. Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 6. 53 world from public view.”33 The physical expanse of the land, thus, functions as a layer of secrecy – vast miles of desert terrain bar unaided eyes. The problem of seeing, or even photographing, these classified military bases is not resolved through magnification. On the ground, the sheer distance first bars the eye, as one is unable to make sense of aberrations on the horizon or in the terrain. Once aided, the eye must still contend with the difficulty of seeing through the air. In his introduction to Limit Telephotography,

Paglen voices this predicament: “Between Earth and Jupiter (500 million miles away)

...there are about five miles of thick, breathable atmosphere. In contrast, there are upwards of forty miles of thick atmosphere between an observer and the sites depicted in this series.”34 In a way, Limit Telephotography reproduces the difficulty of fixing the camera on these elusive sites, leaving the viewer to grapple with the air and its visual effects.

Paglen brings military outposts closer with the use of a telephoto lens, in effect shrinking the physical distance between the viewer and the military installation—the buffer zone. But as the works included in Limit Telephotography attest there is a second buffer at work in the desert that distorts and challenges certainty even when things are bought close, the air. The air is notorious for evading serious scrutiny; as Timothy Choy explains, “air is left to drift … neither theorized nor examined, taken simply as solidity’s

33. Henrik Gustafsson, “Foresight, Hindsight and State Secrecy in the American West: The Geopolitical Aesthetics of Trevor Paglen,” Journal of Visual Culture 12, no. 1 (2013): 157. 34. Trevor Paglen, “Limit Telephotography,” Trevor Paglen, accessed August 29, 2017, http://www.paglen.com/?l=work&s=limit. 54 lack. There seems at first to be no reason not to let it. When solidity is unconsciously conflated with substance, when only grounding counts for analysis, air can only be insubstantial.”35 Intentionally or not, by photographing across the surface of the earth at long distances, Paglen’s photographs make evident the materiality of the air. In this way, the land is a dimension of security that blocks access to military installations miles and miles in advance of any physical structure.

Visibilities shift in the desert due to wind and heat; dust storms and mirages change the landscape, even if only momentarily. Paglen’s photographs “are dominated,” as Thomas Keenan explains, “by the haze of all that air between the camera and the object, by the sheer fact of remoteness.”36 While the photographs that make-up Limit

Telephotography draws attention to hidden military installations, this is not what is most prominent about the series. Rather, the haze of the air, as Keenan insists, is the dominating character of these photographs. Despite bringing the presence of military activity into view by magnifying distant scenes, the camera cannot penetrate all the matter in the air. Choy writes, “air is an aggregate; a mixture of gases, a suspension of solid (particulates) and liquid (aerosols) in a gaseous medium.”37 The air can be incredibly dense. In the desert, on sweltering or gusty days, the thickness of the air can play tricks on the eyes. Heidi Fearn and Anne M. Arroyo explains that the “effects of the

35. Timothy Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” (presentation, Berkeley Environmental Politics Colloquium, San Francisco, CA, 2011): 11. 36. Thomas Keenan, “Disappearances: The Photographs of Trevor Paglen,” Aperture, no. 191 (2008), 38. 37. Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” 4. 55 atmosphere are that stars appear to twinkle, images are blurred and fuzzy (appearing to fluctuate in intensity) and closely spaced objects cannot be discerned.”38 Drops of water hovering above the ground can distort the terrain and produce false images, or mirages.

Dust particles sweeping down from the sky can completely erase the horizon and cause white-out conditions. In Paglen’s photographs, the density of the air appears as a layer of security, particles and moisture blocks and obscures the very military installations that the photographs bring into view. By undermining intelligibility, the desert air shields military activities from unauthorized eyes, even when viewed or captured through a powerful telephoto lens.

Across the series of photographs, the air emerges as inexorably present. In some images, the air is so dense that it visually disrupts the solidity of the ground. In Open

Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV, for example, although the photograph is broken into three distinguishable areas or sections, these sections are not fixed (See Fig. 3). The ground appears to bleed into the base of the hanger giving the impression that it is just as airy as the sky above. On the other hand, the contours of the structure ripple across the photograph irrelevant of the linearity of the physical building. By creating moments in which the sky, the ground, and secret military sites merge, Limit Telephotography forces classified military activities to be seen in relation to the desert and the air. Following

Choy, these photographs provide a way to think more about the air, not simply as solidity’s opposite, instead they offer a way to think “about relations and movements

38. H. Fearn & A. M. Arroyo, “Seeing clearly through the atmosphere,” Contemporary Physics 39, no. 1 (2010), 49. 56 between places, people, things, scales.”39 The air, here, must be dealt with not in a vacuum, but in relation to the security state. Entangled with the secluded terrain and the atmosphere, Paglen’s photographs provide a way to think about the physical condition of the atmosphere as an extension of security.

Figure 3. Trevor Paglen, Open Hangar, Cactus Flats, NV, Distance ~ 18 miles, 10:04 a.m. 2007. C-Print, 30 x 36 in. Trevor Paglen, website. From: http://www.paglen.com, (accessed October 2, 2017).

39. Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” 9. 57

The fuzzy quality of the photographs, which renders the ground and the sky uncertain, does work upon security. In the haze, what is and is not security becomes unclear. The photographs present a security that is as much of the ground as the air, and in turn afford “an atmospheric sensibility.” 40 Marina Peterson writes that an atmospheric sensibility draws “together an entanglement of bodies, matter, and air.”41 An atmospheric sensibility is at work when “aircraft sound attunes us toward the sky,”42 as Peterson explains, or in the case of Paglen’s photographs, when the effects of the air attune us to the conditions of security. To make out distant military installations Limit

Telephotography forces the viewer to wrestle with the air. But even with recognition of buildings and vehicles the air remains, the air proves unsurpassable. Security appears as atmospheric; not restricted to structures, technologies, environments, or bodies, but to all of the above and their entanglement with the air.

The atmosphere has long been taken as either the gases that envelop a planet or the overarching tone or mood of a place, situation, or artwork. As Choy remarks,

“‘atmosphere’ is a term used commonly for denoting a generally shared sentiment or feeling.”43 More recently, however, the atmosphere has become a way to conceptualize pervasive processes that cross between these two spheres and extend beyond them.

Again, as Choy explains, air can function heuristically, encompassing “many atmospheric

40. Marina Peterson, “Atmospheric Sensibilities Noise, Annoyance, and Indefinite Urbanism,” Social Text 35, no. 2 (2017) 69. 41. Peterson, “Atmospheric Sensibilities,” 69. 42. Ibid. 43. Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” 1. 58 experiences, among them dust, oxygen, dioxin, smell, particulate matter, visibility humidity, heat, and various gases.”44 Air is an active force that is experienced all the time and in a plethora of ways. Attending to the atmospheric, Derek McCormack refers to “the sense of a happening in process…like the storm outside.” 45 But more than just denoting a meteorological phenomenon, the concept of “atmospheric things,” he writes, “designates the sense of the shape of forces as they make a felt difference across and within bodies, both human and non-human.” 46 The air is not just the air out there, but the air that pervade us: tricks the eye, obscures a scene, or causes shortness of breath. Air is embodied: experienced by bodies that are shaped by air. Or in Choy’s words, “it is something embodied that engages with humans through bodily practices.”47 Here lies one of the major contributions of Limit Telephotography: the air that blocks vision and helps hide clandestine activity in the American Southwest is not something that one must get past or work through in order to see what is out there, the air is already imbricated in the military operations and in the practice of seeing. The air has been mobilized as a dimension of security and in turn an extension of the security state. This might also be taken up in relation to pollutants in the air emitted by the long military presence in the desert. “air’s poesis, the coproductive engagements between people and air…[is] always already enmeshed in webs of social and cultural practice. The smell, breath, wind,

44. Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” 12. 45. Derek McCormak, “Atmospheric Things and Circumstantial Excursions,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 4 (2014): 607. 46. McCormak, “Atmospheric Things and Circumstantial Excursions,” 607. 47. Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” 24-25. 59 weather, typhoon, air conditioning, air pollution, height, verticality, science, sound, oxygen, smoking. The tactility of the atmosphere,”48 Choy elaborates. Limit

Telephotography provides a way to think of the land and the air as active forces in secret military operations by making their hiddenness material and ultimately more acute.

The current, and prolonged, occupation of the American desert by the US military demonstrates the government’s internalization of perceived threats. In the desert, the perception of national threat became an incredibly productive force, from artificial forests during the Cold War to the construction of mock Afghanistan towns for combat training in the War on Terror, or the Creech base where pilots fly drones over the Middle East.

This productive force shows a proclivity to treat a potential threat as the basis for limitless recourse. In the War on Terror, where threat is everywhere, preparedness is everything. This everywhere predicament has led to what Joseph Masco identifies as a preemptive war,49 in which the possibility of a threat warrants action. Paglen poses this as a visual problem and through his work suggests that visibility is an essential pillar of contemporary security, or as Paglen’s title asserts, invisibility.

Militarization of the American Southwest has not always been a matter of invisiblity. During the WWII, the first atomic bomb was developed and detonated at the

Trinity Site in New Mexico. From there on, the desert became a staging ground for a wide range of military operations, including test sites, air bases, and military

48. Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” 25. 49. Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014): 77. 60 compounds.50 Initially, desert operations were not withheld from the public. Rather, as

Masco has shown, in the 1950s the government made it a priority to keep the public visually educated and invested in military experiments. For example, in the testing of nuclear weapons at the Nevada Test Site. Visual illustrations provided the American public with images of the destructive power of nuclear weapons seen within quotidian scenes of domestic and public life. These illustrations were produced and circulated with a particular function in mind—Cold War nation building, as Masco discusses.51 Masco gives a critical analysis of the visual media, both still and moving images, produced during Operation Upshot Knothole, a project in which the government first imported, and then planted, individual ponderosa pines in order to create an artificial forest to test the blast of a nuclear weapon on a forest environment.52 In the middle of the desert, this manmade forest was created for two purposes: first, for the testing of weapons. Second, a stage for which destruction and public anxieties could play out. In the height of Cold War anxieties, Nevada served as the testing site for all things nuclear. A concerted effort was put forth to grasp the efficiency, power, and effects of nuclear bombs.53 And make these effects visible to the American people. Masco has shown the extent to which Nevada was transformed into a staging area for the arms race and counter-communism drills that both anchored the security state of the Cold War. While this history has become less visible in

50. David Darts et al, “Scopic Regime Change: The War of Terror, Visual Culture, and Art Education,” Studies in Art Education 49, no. 3 (Spring 2008), 204. 51. Masco, The Theater of Operations, 77-81. 52. Ibid., 80. 53. Ibid., 57-61. 61 the 21st century, a marker of this past lies in the ground – Nevada is the most nuclear bombed place on earth, stores the most nuclear waste, and in turn is also one of the most polluted places.54 While in 1950s the testing was well known and seen as necessary for the safety of the nation, in the 1960s many of these activities went underground due to public criticism.55 Going underground meant withdrawing from visibility and retreating into the vastness of the desert. It is this hidden, yet productive, military involvement that is the focus and substance of Limit Telephotography and Reaper in the Sun.

Drone Vision

Reaper in the Sun raises the question: how to reconcile the ghostly presence of a

MQ-9 Reaper in the Nevada sky? Over the past decade and a half, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles has proliferated across multiple sectors: military, industry, and entertainment. But the advancement of such technology and accelerated use is connected to the War on Terror. Abigail Hall and Christopher Coyne link the increased demand for drones first to the Gulf conflict and then to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq under the

War on Terror. “These conflicts,” they write, “coupled with the broader Global War on

Terror, created an opening for the expanded use of drones on an unprecedented scale.”56

However, despite their unprecedented use, the role and function of drones in the War on

Terror remains vague for most Americans.

54. Masco, The Theater of Operations, 48. 55. Ibid., 91. 56. Abigail Hall and Christopher Coyne, “The Political Economy of Drones,” (June 26, 2013): 14, available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2285820 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2285820. 62

The Reaper, and its smaller counterpart the Predator, are designed to not be seen.

They have been designed for maneuverability, duration, and most importantly seeing. In part, this explains the spectral impression of Reaper in the Sun, the uncanniness of seeing a Reaper over a domestic desert. The Reaper is supposed to deliver an ‘unblinking eye,’57 an unobstructed view of the ground through which targets can be defined and continuous surveillance obtained. These newest military drones fit within advancing military technologies of the 20th and 21st century, in which the US, in particular, has sought greater control and observation from the sky.58 Hailed for the visibility it is designed to deliver, the Reaper supplies real time footage of the ground from an aircraft that can loiter in the sky for over 30 hours. “Persistent presence,” Alison Williams explains,

“relates to the ability, or desire, to enable military forces to maintain a continual vision over a specific location and the concomitant ability of that force to attack that location from that continuously present military machine.” 59 The barely present drone in Paglen’s sky draws a stark contrast to the vision it embodies.

Organized around the principle of persistent presence and unblinking eye the

Reaper is a seeing machine. But as Williams argues, persistent presence is “also suggestive of a hidden, unseen threat, able to watch over a location, without being seen by those it monitors.”60 In other words, the Reaper is not only made to extend vision but

57. Williams, Alison, “Enabling persistent presence? Performing the Embodied Geopolitics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Assemblage,” Political Geography 30, no. 7 (2011): 386. 58. See Hall and Coyne, “The Political Economy of Drones.” 59. Williams, ““Enabling persistent presence?” 382. 60. Ibid. 63 paradoxically remain out of sight. Given the twofold visual mandate of military drones, not knowing where drones go, what they do, and what they make possible, seems if not an intended consequence, then at least a happy consequence of these machines. Again, the effectiveness of the Reaper is determined by its ability to furnish a detailed view of the ground while remaining unnoticed. In various modalities vision has been attached to regimes of power; we might think of colonial maps, the Panopticon, the photographic archives or even phrenology that supported the pseudoscience, as prime examples of visibility serving as a mechanism of control and domination. Or as Peter Adey et al point out, “the aerial viewpoints adopted and provided by the cartographers of state and empire established the systems of legibility that were central to the formation of modern forms of territorial power.”61 Amoore, has gone as far as to say that the visual has become the sovereign sense “that participates in the emergence of new forms of state sovereignty.”62

From this perspective the visual proclivity of drones is not necessarily surprising, but with their accelerated use over the past decade and a half, following Amoore, we might ask, what new form of state sovereignty do drones usher in?

Although terrorism did not begin with the 9/11 attacks, the event helped create the conditions under which new military and security technologies could be aggressively pursued and deployed under the umbrella of counterterrorism campaigns. The dream of an unmanned aircraft can be traced back to the beginnings of aviation, but since 9/11 the

61. Adey et al, “Introduction: Air-target Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality.” Theory, Culture & Society 28, no. 7/8 (2011): 176. 62. Amoore, Louise, “Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror,” Security Dialogue 38, no. 2 (2007): 220. 64 manufacturing and uses of drones has gone up exponentially.63 Drones have become an ideal tool in a war founded on unknown and unbounded threats. Shifting away from full- scale military operations, and to smaller engagements, has also proven appealing under criticism. By using drones, Daniel Greene explains, the Obama administration could

“bypass the legal battles and international political blowback of the Bush-era.”64 Beyond matching the demands of this new war, drones have become a favored means of military action for the precision and discreetness they are supposed to offer. While these serve as motivating factors in the expansion of military done use, they do not provide an understanding of how drones operate and the logic they are predicated on. In the rest of this section, I explore drones by inquiring into their visibility and the visibilities they supply. Using Paglen’s photograph as a point of departure, the section pursues two questions: first, what does it means to encounter a drone, and second, how do drones see?

In the Nevada desert, where drones are tested and crews operate drones around the world, the likelihood of seeing an UAV is heightened but not a given. Staring into the sun with a 4x5 format camera, Paglen is able to capture the Reaper, stop it momentarily from being engulfed by the visual intensity of the sun or disappearing into the desert haze. From the tiny speck of a drone present in the photograph, it is easy to wonder whether the Reaper could have even been spotted without Paglen’s equipment. The intensity of the sun, even in the photograph, seems to impress on the eyes and make it difficult to see. How long Paglen tracked the Reaper across the sky or the instant he first

63. Hall and Coyne, “Political Economy of Drones,” 14. 64. Daniel Greene, “Drone Vision,” Surveillance & Society 13, no. 2 (2015): 235. 65 caught sight of the dark figure can only be pondered while standing in front of the large photographic print. Yet, we might discern two things from the photograph: first, that seeing a drone might require attending to the sky closely, especially at the distance displayed in Paglen’s photograph. Second, that Paglen’s Reaper is only caught via the apparatus of the camera, which is capable of making visible that which would most likely be difficult to apprehend with the naked eye.

The spectral quality of Paglen’s photograph signals our limited knowledge of military operations. For many, especially those residing in the US, military drones only sporadically appear or reverberate in the ears. As mentioned earlier, this is partially why

Paglen’s Reaper is rendered ever so strange and fleeting. The photograph has a quietly jarring quality in the gallery that unfolds with the time spent staring at it. But encounters with drones, or other military aircrafts, in and around the Nellis Air Force Base in

Nevada are not entirely rare. From time to time aircrafts become visually, auditorially, or physically presence, in ways that disrupt or challenge their invisibility and ghostliness.

After trekking around with Paglen on one of his desert excursions, journalist Jonah

Weiner recounts, “the roar of a jet engine, or several, filled the valley, but the sky was an undisrupted blue.”65 While drones are absence from Weiner’s sky, the sounds of engines alert him to activities that he cannot identify. Rebecca Solnit’s description of encountering a military aircraft outside of the airbase is also less visually driven, “we were buzzed by a warplane that seemingly appeared from nowhere, as though it had

65. Weiner, “Prying Eyes.” 66 ripped open the sky, and then roared low over us with a sound so loud and visceral the term sound hardly describes how it invaded my body and the air around.”66 Such encounters are chilling for their force and abruptness, but for others seeing, hearing, or feeling the presence of a drone can become a matter of life and death. For those who get swept up in the persistent presence of the unblinking eye, the visceral and material effects are drawn out and lasting.

In places where daily life has come under the perpetual gaze of the Reaper, drones are spotted, heard, and felt. Considering the case of Momina Bibi, a 67-year-old grandmother living in North Waziristan, Afghanistan who was killed by a US drone missile, Greene has drawn attention to the experience of being targeted by drones. Greene argue that the supposed absence or invisibility of a drone only holds true within “the press release announcing the attack, not in the carrying-out of the attack and certainly not for its targets.”67 In the days prior to her death, Bibi’s grandson had noticed drones in the sky, “perhaps recognizing their silhouette or the low buzz,”68 perhaps similar to Weiner or Solnit’s experience, but altogether more lasting, disconcerting, and definite. Seeing a drone changes depending on where it is seen from. Through Paglen’s lens we are positioned, like him, at a distance and as such, we are given a privileged view. Although

Paglen’s Reaper might cause unease, as viewers our discomfort is caught up in the

66. Rebecca Solnit, “The Visibility Wars,” introduction to Trevor Paglen’s Invisible: Covert Operations and Classified Landscapes, (New York, N.Y.: Aperture, 2010) 7. 67. Greene, “Drone Vision,” 241. 68. Ibid., 237 67 uncertainty of seeing. This, while significant, draws contrast to the experience of being the focus of a drone. What Greene makes clear is that drones are real and material for those who are targeted by them, they do not exist as specters in the sky or techno- fantasies, they reverberate through the air and in the body, sometimes as sound and sometimes as missiles, as in the missile that hit Bibi’s body and the shrapnel that flew outward to strike her grandson and granddaughter, as well as other objects and animals in the area.69

More than an extended vision, drones bring legibility to the ground. The Creech

Air Force Base states that the Reaper “integrates an infrared sensor, color/monochrome daylight TV camera, image-intensified TV camera, laser range finder /designator, and laser illuminator. The full-motion video from each of the imaging sensors can be viewed as separate video streams or fused.”70 An impressive list of visual sensing capacities renders the Reaper as a seeing machine. The list suggests that the more data that can be collected the more detailed the image, the more visible a place is made, the better. Here, the Reaper is defined in terms of its visual capacities, but what does the Reaper’s visual aptitude make possible and how does it operate? Williams refers to the Reaper as an assemblage that blends humans and machines.71 Williams argues that the Reaper goes

69. Greene, “Drone Vision,” 237. 70. “MQ-9 Reaper Fact Sheet,” Creech Air Force Base, last modified September 2, 2015, http://www.creech.af.mil/AboutUs/FactSheets/Display/tabid/7069/Article/669890/mq-9- reaper-fact-s. 71. Williams, “Enabling persistent presence?” 883-84. 68

“beyond the limits of human endurance and sensory abilities.72 Of interest to Williams is connecting the unblinking eye to the blinking eyes of the pilot and crew stationed in

Creech. Addressing the material apparatus of drones, Greene also uses the term assemblage. Linking Bibi’s death to what Greene explains as “an assemblage built of satellites, cables, newspapers, secrets, servers, deserts, spies, cell phones, lawyers, and missiles” all of which come “together just-so at the point of the drone, leaving a dead grandmother in its wake.”73 Williams and Greene offer an embodied and material way of conceptualizing drones. Beyond sensors, the Reaper’s vision is dependent on an assortment of materials and actors. In this way, these authors demonstrate the fallibility of this vision. As Greene announces, the “apparatus fails regularly,”74 or as Williams puts it, “even though the vision technologies within the Reaper’s airframe enable the operators to see more than they could with the naked eye, it is still their eyes that are ultimately responsible for providing the final visual recognition of what the Reaper is ‘seeing’.”75

By reminding us that errors occur regularly in human hands, or eye, and machines alike

Williams and Greene put pressure on the “unblinking eye” of the Reaper and its detached vision.

In addition to exposing gaps in the smooth operation of military drones, Williams and Greene offer a way forward to understand the ambition of drone visibility. Williams’ conceptualization of the Reaper as a kind of prosthesis is helpful; “the Reaper’s sensors,”

72. Williams, “Enabling persistent presence?” 884. 73. Greene, “Drone Vision,” 237. 74. Ibid., 242. 75. Williams, “Enabling Persistent Presence?” 386. 69 she writes, “can zoom in to give a much sharper and closer image of the ground than would ever be available to a pilot of an inhabited aircraft, and night-vision and infra-red cameras enable the aircrew to see things that would be invisible to the naked eye.76 Here, the sensory features of the drone are expressed in relation to the eyes of the pilot or crew.

Like other kinds of optical devices, the Reaper extends the pilot’s capacity to see. It is an extension that affords the monitoring of foreign territories and entities, as well as domestic ones, from discrete places, such as Creech. For Greene, what he refers to as

“drone vision,” is “more than just the view seen from one Reaper’s cameras, it is the entire apparatus supporting that viewpoint and acting through it.”77 Again the Reaper is not comprehensive in and of itself, it is a contingent tool.

While the Reaper seems to embody the political desire to continuously see the ground, this desire is not restricted to drones. In his casting of “vertical security,” Peter

Adey argues that the ambition of the aerial perspective is tied to legibility. From the sky, the ground seems less messy. Elevation over the city, Adey explains, aims to “dispense with the sensibilities of the sensual so as to impose a visual regime of order onto disorder, grappling with a scale difficult to comprehend.”78 In a similar vein Amoore asks, “has vision come to be represented not only as the primary sense (more ‘reliable; and verifiable than touch, taste, smell, etc.), but also as, precisely, the sovereign sense – the sense that secures the state’s claim to sovereignty and legitimates violence on its

76. Williams, “Enabling Persistent Presence?” 386. 77. Greene, “Drone Vision,” 242. 78. Peter Adey, “Vertical Security in the Megacity Legibility, Mobility and Aerial Politics,” Theory, Culture & Society 27, no. 6 (2010): 54. 70 behalf?”79 While Adey is specifically addressing the role of helicopters in megacities, and

Amoore watchful visualities more generally, the dominance and extraction of the visual as a means of ordering the ground equally applies to military drones. “Central to this visual prosthesis,” Adey writes, “is the ability to ‘contain’, ‘contemplate’ and destroy.”80

More than seeing from above, “making legible” implies giving order to the ground. 81 For the Reaper legibility becomes the basis for decision making and actions. So, when we think of the Reaper loitering over foreign territories, or domestic ones, it is not only the visibility that the drone makes possible but what the visibility in turn makes possible, what order can be given to the ground and what action that order permits. Adey et al conclude that “the aerial viewpoint appears to be inescapably entangled in the very genesis of modern systems of control, and the coeval development of the target.”82

Control through continuous watching, or surveillance, that can at any moment turn into a target to be struck.

In this light, the Reaper might be thought of as a prosthesis that is not only capable of making any surface of the globe visible but a means of articulating order, order that… provides the basis for action and destruction. Amoore argues, “watchful modes of visuality, in their many guises, assure us that an image secures the presence of a rational observer.”83 But what is the substance of this “rational observer”? In Crary’s

79. Amoore, “Vigilant Visualities,” 217. 80. Adey, “Vertical Security in the Megacity Legibility,” 54. 81. Ibid. 82. Peter Adey et al, “Introduction: Air-target: Distance, Reach and the Politics of Verticality,” 176. 83. Amoore, “Vigilant Visualities,” 226. 71 essay “Techniques of the Observer” he exposes the complicated relationship between the experience of sight and the external world by examining 19th century optical devices. The rise of photography as the dominant medium was not due to the fact that it best replicated or engaged seeing. Rather, Crary explains that the camera was “an apparatus fundamentally independent of the spectator, yet which masqueraded as a transparent and incorporeal intermediary between observer and world.”84 While other optical devices of the period shared “the notion that perception was not instantaneous, and the notion of disjunction between eye and object,”85 the camera fixed a normative vision, which was detached from the physiological experience of seeing. Crary’s analysis challenges what visibility drones make possible and the rationality accredited to either the device or the observer, i.e. the pilot and crew. Seeing is not a pure translation of the exterior world, it is a mode of engagement that produces as well as receives. Even if the aerial view is predicated on omitting other senses in order to obtain a more reliable or comprehensive image, Crary reminds us that the notion of pure perception “depends on the denial of the body, its pulsing and phantasms.” 86 The dominance, or sovereignty, as Amoore argues, of the visual, may not only be unable to keep out the rest of the sensual world, but in and of itself appears flighty. Sometimes other senses bleed in; the body is not organized through a progression of senses but instead experiences multiple senses simultaneous, which sometimes results in synesthesia. Paglen’s photographs of military activity in the

84. Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” 35. 85. Ibid., 15. 86. Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” 35. 72 desert landscape begin to push against the dominance of sight and visuality. While being the product of visual technology, sight emerges as slippery and conditioned upon matter, matter that vibrates and percolates in front of Paglen’s camera and distorts physical features of the scene. The photographs included in Limit Telephotography and Reaper in the Sun, while bringing clandestine activities into visibility, do not present sight as absolute but as something that is situated, shaky, and embodied.

Conclusion

Reaper in the Sun provides an instant in which sight, under the magnitude of the sun, is on the cusp of breaking. But as the land dissipates a ghostly figure catches the evanescence of the scene and turns the instability of the moment into a question: what does it mean to see a Reaper in the sky? No bigger than a tiny scratch on the surface of the paper, the drone forestalls the image from slipping into abstraction. This is the import and the point of departure of Paglen’s photograph: seeing is physiological, material, and precarious. This conditioning of vision poses challenges to the deployment and use of drones in military surveillance and attacks. Whereas Reapers furnish aerial views that turn the lived ground into a legible surface, Paglen’s photographs asserts the fallibility of images and even more, the frailty of sight. However, it is not that the photographs fail to make the scene visible, on the contrary, Paglen’s photographs supply the viewer with an incredible degree of visibility, it is just not the kind of visibility that we are accustomed to. The photographs capture particles of water, heat, dust, and light in the air. The photographs capture the thickness that lies between Paglen’s lens and clandestine military activities. The photographs capture the buffer zones that disguise the persistent presence 73 of the US military in the desert landscape of Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and

California. These buffer zones of land and air ordinarily shield drone exercises from unauthorized eyes. The remoteness that the desert affords keeps domestic encounters with these military weapons limited and as such drones remain elusive and distant. However, for those who are subjected to their constant gaze or those who become the target of their missiles, Reapers are seen, heard, and felt in intimate and deadly ways. Asserting the embodied, material, and phenomenal condition of sight problematizes the vision of drones and the limits of the security state. Choy states, “thinking about the materiality of air and the densities of our many human entanglements in airy matters also means attending to the solidifying and melting edges between people, regions, and events.”87

Although visual technologies, like the Reaper, extend the visual field, providing the conditions for war-at-a-distance, sight is airy caught up in human entanglements.

87. Choy, “Air’s Substantiations,” 12. 74

CHAPTER TWO: EYES ON THE STREET: EMBODIED SECURITY

In her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) Jane Jacobs asserted that “eyes on the street” are vital for the vibrancy of a city. Fifty-five years after its publication, Robert Kanigel titled Jacobs’ biography: Eyes on the Street: The Life of

Jane Jacobs (2016). For Jacobs, eyes on the street entailed a kind of invested inhabitance, where people looked after the street and the comings and goings of both neighbors and strangers. Seeing the street was attached to a kind of safety, but with the liveliness of the city in mind, it was also connected to ideas of anonymity and conviviality. Bringing her experience of living in Greenwich Village to bear on other cities, Jacobs concluded that by turning toward the street, rather than away, safety as well as diversity could be promoted. Her charge that the streets needed tending to, was a call to residences and visitors, alike, to look after the city. Seeing the street still has currency today, but the contemporary emphasis on seeing does not carry the same caring for that Jacobs sought to promote.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched the counterterrorist campaign “If You See Something, Say Something™” in July 2010. The slogan has become a common refrain as it has been advertised, televised, and broadcast across the

United States. The slogan emphasizes the role of everyday citizens in the “War on

Terror.” Pedestrians and neighbors still play a role but that role has taken on a new emphasis; no longer derived from a kind of caring for, but instead from fearful anticipation. Seeing “something” is attached to a feeling of suspended suspicion, palpable and flexible, easily affixed to strange things and strangers. Eyes on the street is not only

75 the eyes of individuals, it is also increasingly electronic eyes and monitors that are capable of tracking and recording difference in cumulative fashion.

In 1996, Nicholas R. Fyfe and Jon Bannister stated: “Our lives are increasingly under the gaze of surveillance cameras as their use extends from the private spaces of shopping malls and banks, into residential spaces such as local authority housing schemes, and now into city centres.” And importantly, they conclude: “The diffusion of

CCTV surveillance is set to continue.”1 As Fyfe and Bannister predicted, the surveillance of everyday spaces by closed-circuit television (CCTV) and other electronic means has intensified since the 1990s. Additionally, since 9/11, it has taken on a new degree of urgency under the perceived threat of terrorism. While many scholars have discussed the spread of CCTV across urban space in relation to Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon in terms of the technical apparatus, in this chapter I take account of the proliferation of security in everyday spaces by focusing on the body.

Addressing the current state of surveillance, David Lyon asks: “If we simply start with new technologies or regulatory regimes we may acquire some sense of the scope of this phenomenon but will we understand it?”2 Taking heed of Lyon’s point, I attend to the embodiment of security. Specifically, how embodiment reveals security as it is lived and experienced every day. By tracking the prevalence of security in the public domain through the body, I argue that contemporary security happens in and through the body.

1. Nicholas R. Fyfe and Jon Bannister, “City Watching: Closed Circuit Television Surveillance in Public Spaces,” Area 28, no. 1 (1996): 44. 2. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge; Malden: Polity, 2013), 8.

Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on phenomenology and the body, Gilles

Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of assemblage, as well as other literature on embodiment, the chapter traces ways that the body is caught up in the unfolding of security. To get at the bodily conditioning and experience of security I consider three artworks: First, I examine how Jen Urso’s walking project Unwelcome Map operates as a register of the surrounding security environment as she moves through the streets of downtown Phoenix. I then turn to Tania El Khoury’s performance of suspicion in her piece Jarideh, which draws attention to the role of ordinary bodies in the advancement and manifestation of contemporary security. Next, I consider James Bridle’s interactive sculpture Surveillance Spaulder as it highlights the ubiquity of security cameras on the streets of London and challenges the cameras’ relationship to the body. In the end, I ask what happens to liveliness, welcomeness, and anonymity in the streets and other public spaces when security is directed at bodies and bodies are directed by security.

The Panopticon, Surviallance Cameras, and the Body

In 1791, the English social reformer Jeremy Bentham produced a diagram of a building that offered unprecedented surveillance over those that inhabited the space.

First, implemented in the design of prisons, the Panopticon was not limited to the penal sphere. Simone Brown writes, “Bentham imagined the Panopticon to be, as the name suggests, all-seeing and also polyvalent, meaning it could be put to use in any establishment where persons were to be kept under watch: prisons, schools, poorhouses,

77 factories, hospitals, lazarettos, or quarantine stations.”3 While the Panopticon was a regulatory instrument in its inception, it was Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish:

The Birth of the Prison that elevated it as an analytical tool for the critique of power. The

Panopticon, since Foucault’s seminal work, has been foundational to surveillance studies as a means of recognizing and analyzing forms of social control. Although, for some scholars, the model of the Panopticon has become worn and ill equipped for addressing the nuances of contemporary security, it continues to be instructive, even if not comprehensive. Because of the important role that the Panopticon has played in surveillance studies, I will briefly sketch some of the ways that Foucault’s writing on the

Panopticon has influenced interpretations and understandings of the securitization of everyday spaces. In this process, I will highlight how the body is implicated within technologies of power.

The radical expansion of CCTV systems in the 1990s became an urban phenomenon that was difficult to ignore by geographers, sociologist, and surveillance studies scholars. Although, as Chris A. Williams has pointed out, the use of public CCTV systems date back to the 1960s, the sheer quantity of cameras being installed in the

1990s, especially in the British context, drew extensive critical attention.4 Prior to the

1990s, security cameras were primarily confined to privately owned business and

3. Simone Brown, Dark Matter: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 33. 4. Chris A. Williams, “Police Surveillance and the Emergence of CCTV in the 1960s,” Crime Prevention and Community Safety: An International Journal 5, no. 3 (2003): 27.

78 government buildings.5 Many scholars likened the pervasiveness of CCTV surveillance systems in publicly accessible spaces, such as town centers, streets, malls, and stadiums, to the Panopticon. Popping up everywhere, Fyfe and Bannister would write that the new

CCTV systems met “Bentham’s principle that power should be ‘visible and unverifiable’.”6 Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong identified the asymmetrical power inherent in CCTV as being akin to the disciplinary technology of the Panopticon, in which not only is one being watched but also people must watch themselves. “Thus,” they write, “the power of surveillance is not merely that it is exercised over someone but through them and it is this subjective element of the operation of power which Foucault also wants to stress.”7 The interpretation of CCTV systems as an urban technology of discipline, or “technologies of urban rule” 8 as Roy Coleman and Joe Sim write, is a core component of the Foucauldian critique of CCTV. For Hille Koskela, urban video surveillance is nearly identical to the Panopticon, as both are technologies of power designed to solve a problem of surveillance. Just like the prisoner, she explains, people are controlled, categorized, disciplined, and normalized under the urban gaze of surveillance.9 Koskela surmises, “take a virtual walk with Foucault, around almost any

5. Fyfe and Bannister, “City Watching,” 37. 6. Ibid. 7. Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong, “Introduction: Power and Vision,” in Surveillance, Closed Circuit Television and Social Control, ed. C. Norris, J. Moran and G. Armstrong (Aldershot, England; Brookfield, Vt., US: Ashgate, 1998), 6. 8. Roy Coleman and Joe Sim, “‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’: CCTV Surveillance, Order and Neo-Liberal Rule in Liverpool City Centre,” British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 624. 9. Hille Koskela, “‘Cam Era’ – The Contemporary Urban Panopticon.” Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3 (202): 293.

79 major city within the Western world, and his ideas will make the point: the Panopticon is

‘present’ nearly everywhere.”10 These accounts demonstrate the efficacy of Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon in the literature of urban surveillance and security, as the

Panopticon has provided a way to critique advancing technologies and the accompanying power relations.

The rise and prominence of electronic information and data has posed challenges to the aptness of the Panopticon as an analytic model. To address social and technological changes, scholars have argued that a new model is needed. For Zygmunt Bauman, the loosening of space and power from anything solid has led to a post-panoptical condition in which, “power can move with the speed of the electrical signal—and so the time required for essential ingredients has been reduced to instantaneity.”11 The speed at which information is transmitted, stored, and exchanged has put significant pressure on the utility of the Panopticon as a framework of analysis. To account for this, David Lyon uses “superpanopticon,” after Mark Poster. He writes, “Bentham’s panopticon gives way to the electronic superpanopticon.”12 The social and judicial impact of digital information and interfaces is at the center of Gilles Deleuze’s short essay “Postscript on Societies of

Control,” in which he convincingly demonstrates some of the ways that disciplinary societies are being replaced by ones of control. “In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory),” he

10. Koskela, “‘Cam Era’,” 293-94. 11. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 11. 12. David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Buckingham, England; Philadelphia, PA: Open University, 2001), 108.

80 explains, “while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything—the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.”13 However, despite the endless modulation attached to signals and data, Jasbir Puar states,

“disciplinary containment—discursive, ideological, and spatial—is still very much in operation as a panoptic power player even while new grains of information, indeed, information that was once only superfluous or seemingly superfluous to circuits of domination, feed the epistemological will-to-know of control societies.”14 Puar’s assertion alerts us to the multiplicity of power and the persistence of discipline even in changing social orders and technological capabilities.

Simone Brown has expanded on the dominant model of the Panopticon, offering the slave ship as another instrument of disciplinary power, and elaborating upon the role of light as a technique of surveillance. As “small lamps worked to ‘extend to the night security of the day,’” in the design of the Panopticon, 18th century “lantern laws” in New

York City mandated black, mixed race, and indigenous slaves to carry lamps after dark.15

Similar perhaps to the ways in which lamps were used in the prison to illuminate prisoners’ bodies in the shadows, lanterns were used to illuminate black bodies moving along the streets at night. “We can think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark,” explains Brown, “a technology that made it possible for the black body to be

13. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59 (1992), 5. 14. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 115 15. Simone Brown, Dark Matter, 78, 25.

81 constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn, made knowable, locatable, and contained within the city.”16 Before surveillance cameras were considered “technologies of urban rule,”17 bodies were made visible on the streets, not because they were prisoners but because they were black. In addition, to complicating the history of surveillance, Brown stresses the importance of the body in the practice of disciplinary power. First, she asserts that “technologies of seeing” do not only discipline bodies but racialize them.18 Second, by exploring the role of luminosity as a technique of surveillance, Brown demonstrates that light—like watch towers, spaces of enclosure, and cameras—can be used to monitor and instruct bodies.

The illumination of the body, in the case of both the prisoner and the slave, is a reminder that the body is at the center of surveillance. The deployment of cameras across urban spaces is not motivated by a desire to bring the city itself into view, but as Lynsey

Dubbeld notes, to “observes bodies.”19 More than a tool that furnishes abstract visibility, illumination is phenomenal. If from the perspective of the observer, light brings bodies into visibility, for the observed, illumination plays out across and in the body, it is felt with a potentially blinding effect. Light is a marker that illuminates not only bodies but also the transition from sovereign to disciplinary power. Foucault’s description of the treatment of the criminal from one schema to the next demonstrates the shift in the role of

16. Brown, Dark Matter, 79. 17. Coleman and Sim, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” 624. 18. Simone Brown, Dark Matter, 25. 19. Lynsey Dubbeld, “Observing Bodies. Camera Surveillance and the Signiﬁcance of the Body” Ethics and Information Technology 5 (2003): 151.

82 light. Whereas it once was that the “more monstrous a criminal was, the more he must be deprived of light: he must not see, or be seen,”20 in the Panopticon, “the principle of the dungeon is reversed; daylight and the overseer’s gaze capture the inmate more effectively than darkness, which afforded after all a sort of protection.”21 Light as a technique of surveillance is a reminder that at the other end of the omnipresent all-knowing eye is the lived body. For Merleau-Ponty, words like ‘enclose’ and ‘between’ only hold meaning because they derive “from our experience as embodied subjects.”22 Enclosure means nothing without the presence of the body, and luminosity too would be likely to fall into meaninglessness if it did not relate in some way to the eyes seeing or the skin being seen.

“In space itself independently of the presence of a psycho-physical subject,” he writes,

“there is no direction, no inside and no outside.”23 Thus, technologies of power are not separate from the body.

Disciplinary power of the Panopticon is aimed at the body as it seeks to manage, regulate, and correct behaviors and movements. While for Stuart Walton, it is vision that

“decrees the panoptical surveillance of the Benthamite penal institution,” the Panopticon was aimed at the entire body.24 Indeed, as Foucault articulates, “the prison belongs to a

20. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 14. 21. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. by Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 147. 22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 236. 23. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 236. 24. Stuart Walton, In the Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling, (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2016), 110.

83 political technology of the body.”25 While Foucault discusses at length the ways that the body is disciplined and the making of “docile bodies” (subjected and practices),26 the body as a breathing and experiencing thing within the world is primarily left out of the equation. According to Merleau-Ponty, “The body is the vehicle of being in the world, and having a body is, for a living creature, to be intervolved in a deﬁnite environment, to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to them.”27 Being in the world, increasingly defined by securitization, means not only being at the focus of security but in relation to security in a lived and embodied manner. From this standpoint,

Tim Ingold writes, “the world emerges with its properties alongside the emergence of the perceiver in person, against the background of involved activity.”28 The embodied experience of security both aligns to and deviate from disciplinary codes.

Opening to Security: Walking the Streets

Hille Koskela has observed that “if one wanted to avoid being under surveillance it would be impossible to live in a contemporary city.”29 Although not limited to cities, security has become a fact of everyday life for most city dwellers. In 2001, the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), a group of technologists, and the New York Surveillance

Camera Project, an offshoot of the New New York Civil Liberties Union, created iSee, an

25. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30. 26. Ibid., 138. 27. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 94. 28. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2011), 168. 29. Hille Koskela, “‘Cam Era’ – the contemporary urban Panopticon.” Surveillance & Society 1(3): 292-313. (300).

84 interactive map that charted CCTV cameras in Manhattan. The nearly 2,400 cameras that iSee catalogued were selected for the spaces they were filming: “public space in the city, including cameras on buildings, ATMs and traffic lights.”30 Beyond drawing attention to the sheer number of cameras in the city, the interactive map allowed users to create routes around fixed cameras. Regardless of directness and efficiency, routes allowed users to move about the city uncaptured by CCTV. In addition to the interactive map, IAA produced a two-dimensional map, Routes of Least Surveillance (2001), with red dots indicating the location of cameras and green lines designating the “Paths of Least

Surveillance” (See Fig. 4). Writing on the experience of using the interactive map, journalist Erik Baard explains, “like water’s path of least resistance, a travelers’ ‘path of least surveillance’ can be so circuitous it transforms a walk of several blocks into an odyssey of miles.”31 With the intensification of surveillance cameras in public spaces,

“capturing our every move for observation by police officers and private security guards that often act with very little public or legislative oversight,” IAA claims that iSee, while it may be of interest to anyone walking the streets of Manhattan, is particularly useful for certain groups. They identify minority, women, youth, “outsiders,” and activists, as those

“who might legitimately want to avoid having their picture taken by unseen observers” as they have been shown to be disproportionately targeted.32 Routes of Least Surveillance

30. Erik Baard, “Routes of Least Surveillance,” Wired (2001). http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/news/2001/11/48664?currentPage=all. 31. Baard, “Routes of Least Surveillance.” 32. IAA Operative, IAA Field Operations Manual (Institute for Applied Autonomy, 2008): 39.

85 and the 2000 and plus cameras marked on the map predates 9/11 and the expansion of security cameras in the city after the attacks. What Pete Fussey and Jon Coaffee describe as the advanced of “technologies of urban surveillance” in the wake of 9/11.33 Following the attacks, Alex Mathieson, a marketing manager at the Sensormatic Security

Corporation, told Baard that iSee was “inappropriate,” and that now there will be “more surveillance than ever before in the United States.’”34 While industry experts recognized the futility of trying to avoid being captured by surveillance technologies, for others iSee and Routes of Least Surveillance draws attention to a mounting dilemma. As Margarida

Carvalho describes these maps target the evolving “climate of suspicion and fear that transverses the contemporary experience.”35 As she explains, this creates, “an ideological context for an expansive application of surveillance devices.”36Although Routes of Least

Surveillance does not provide a current image of the infrastructure of security in

Manhattan, the map does, nonetheless, highlight the prevalence of security cameras in the city and the difficulty of being outside of their gaze.

33. Pete Fussey and Jon Coaffee, “Urban Spaces of Surveillance,” in Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies 2014, ed. Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty, and David Lyon (London: Routledge, 2014), 202. 34. Erik Baard, “Routes of Least Surveillance,” Wired, last modified November 28, 2001, https://www.wired.com/2001/11/routes-of-least-surveillance/ 35. Margarida Carvalho, “Affective Territories,” Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation, no. 3 (2009): 9. 36. Ibid.

Figure 4. Institute of Applied Autonomy with Site-R, Routes of Least Surveillance. 2001. Steve Rowell, website. From: http://www.steverowell.com, (accessed October 2, 2017).

The suspicious city is at the core of Jen Urso’s piece Unwelcome Map (2011), which began with a simple walk.37 More than two thousand miles from New York, in a notably different city, Urso took to the streets of downtown Phoenix, Arizona to investigate the effects of security on the urban environment and what security might mean for those who inhabit or move through the space. One motivation for the piece was the configuring of suspicion by the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center. Urso explains, “I realized that a lot of what they had listed on this site as suspicious were actions that I normally took in the course of researching or performing an art piece.”38

The importance placed on ordinary individuals being vigilant, lead Urso to wonder exactly what kind of behavior and activities would be tolerated in the city center and in turn what kind of social space was produced.

Unwelcome Map is not your typical map; 2 inches wide and 10 feet long, the map is devoid of landmarks and topographical features. A thick pencil line is the most prominent detail of the map. There is nothing mechanical about the line. Although it visually dissects the white surface of the paper, it is not uniform or geometrically structured. Instead, the line is shaky and abrupt, appearing more like a crack in the surface of a rock or the earth, which changes direction in response to pressure. The most readily available information that the map provides comes in brief inscriptions, quickly

37. Jen Urso is an American artist based in Phoenix, AZ. Her works utilize interventions, performance, writing, drawing and video to explore persistence, change, compliance, language and authority. Her work typically takes place in the public via occupation, immersion and observation of movement and treatment of spaces. For more information, see http://jenniferursoart.com/. 38. Jen Urso, artist statement for “Unwelcome Map,” received from artist.

88 jotted down and marked by a small hatch across the line. With pencil lines between them the notes read:

washington & 7th ave camera camera no trespassing to parking lot someone watching me from a white van police headquarters camera no public entrance no trespassing, camera fenced in parking (with no trespassing sign) camera camera 2 cameras, not on me camera camera, camera dodge theater camera person watching me at traffic light. doesn't notice light turned green camera

The accompanying text describes aspects of the physical environment and conveys feelings of unease. The inscriptions help to ground the line by providing a kind of context, but this context is not of the downtown area as most maps would present it. For example, the note of “barbed wire fence to entrance of amtrack station no trespassing sign,” or “4th ave jail guarded entrance” fail to inspire welcomeness. Urso chose the downtown area because of the proximity of government buildings. Interested in the idea of being simultaneously vigilant and aware of one’s own potentially suspicious behavior,

Urso turned to her own bodily experience. In Unwelcome Map Urso attempts to transmit

89 her “internal feelings” and “experience in the space.”39 Rather than reproduce the urban terrain or an explicit route, Unwelcome Map connects movement to a series of uncertain and inhospitable encounters within the environment. Urso writes, “I stopped and would mark on the paper feelings of being unwelcome, suspicious or feeling suspicious of something else.”40 The map, thus, operates as a register of her experience of moving through the space.

Figure 5. Jen Urso, Unwelcome Map. 2013. Pencil on paper, 2 x 120 in. Joseph Gross Gallery, Tucson.

39. Jen Urso, artist statement for “Unwelcome Map.” 40. Jen Urso, “Unwelcome Map,” Jen Usro, last accessed September 16, 2017, http://jenniferursoart.com/project/unwelcome-map-2/.

The fragmented nature and subject of Unwelcome Map sets it apart from other kinds of maps. Rather than presenting a space to be read and used, Urso’s map emphasizes the bodily experience of moving through the city. This approach takes up what is ordinarily left out of conventional city maps. “We’ve become so accustomed to overhead, satellite or drone imagery,” Urso explains, “that we forget one has to be completely removed from the situation before being able to see that holistic view.”41 The holistic view which she refers to is that which is concerned with seeing the whole and giving it legibility. It is a way of seeing that flattens space and empties it of corporeal experience. Conversely, in Urso’s map the body takes precedence and is shown as entangled in the environment. Her notes of suspicion, security devices, and uncertainty, which mark the wobbly path through the city, renders Unwelcome Map different from the conventional bird's-eye view.

Taking the body as a site of inquiry, Urso shows how security does not only impinge, or press in, on the body but how the body speaks about security. For Merleau-

Ponty, “it is the body which points out, and which speaks.”42 The body is not merely surface to be imprinted upon but a subject, as Merleau-Ponty would say, which is in communion with the world and therefore, always refers to it. More than a representation of somewhere, Unwelcome Map offers an understanding of space through the body. Urso explains, “I was trying to move through without drawing attention to anything other than

41. Urso, “Unwelcome Map.” 42. Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, 230.

91 just my body’s presence.”43 Taking account of her body does not exclude the immediate environment, but opens onto it; opens onto physical barriers, encounters with others, and the technologies of security. The body is shown to be a site of register and site of security.44

If surveillance cameras capture, track, and record “our every move for observation by police and private security guards,”45 Urso’s recording of her own movement upsets this observation. The map does not lend itself to the evidentiary regime that is a part of the security apparatus. While the map is made of inscriptions, nothing can be fixed, it is idiosyncratic and self-reflexive, and therefore rendered useless to security.

However, by the same token, neither does the map fully capture the embodied experience. As Michel de Certeau states, “it is true that the operation of walking on can be traced in city maps in such a way as to transcribe their paths (here well-trodden, there very faint) and their trajectories (going this way and not that). But these thick or thin curves only refer, like words, to the absence of what has passed by.”46 The lived body— as it moves, breathes, senses, feels, and thinks—escapes the map. De Certeau writes,

Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing by. The operation of walking, wandering, or ‘window shopping,’ that is, the activity of passers-by, is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map. They allow us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is

43. Jen Urso, “Unwelcome Map,” Jen Usro, last accessed September 16, 2017. 44. For discussion of how sensation registers in the body see Davide Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 2. 45. IAA Operative, IAA Field Operations Manual, 36. 46. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkley: University of California Press, 2011), 97.

substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.47

Not only does the map miss the embodied experience of walking through the city – along sidewalks; across street; amongst others; beside buildings, walls, and fences; under bridges, signs, and awnings; against the hardness or softness of the ground; amidst the hot, sticky, cold, or damp air; in the stench or sweetness of smells – but for De Certeau the map might actively contribute to a process of forgetting and erasing the experience of being in the world, all in the service of legibility. Davide Panagia echoes the assertion that the embodied experience of walking is lost in the map, or more broadly, in representation, when he writes, “I consider sensation to be an experience of unrepresentability in that a sensation occurs without having to rely on a recognizable shape, outline, or identity to determine its value.”48 What we see in Unwelcome Map, however, is illegibility. It is fragmented, vague, and minimal, always only hinting at

Urso’s experience of walking. An activity that Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst describes as “an accomplishment of the whole body in motion, as much the work of the hands and lungs as of the feet.”49 The absence of a well-defined route in a clearly demarked space gestures toward the embodied experience rather than erasing it.

47. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97. 48. Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation, 2. 49. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, “Introduction,” in Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, edited by Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst (New York: Routledge, 2008), 2.

In the lack of details lies hints of the body in communion with the security environment. Although, as Merleau-Ponty notes, the experience of our body does not reveal fixed and objective things, but “an ambiguous mode of existing,”50 the body’s entanglement in the world provides a way to understand the unfolding of the world. Hand in hand with the increase of security technologies has been an increase in suspicion, leading some to call such devices “technologies of fear.” Roy Coleman, for example, writes, “Camera networks and the official discourse that surrounds them provide an indication of the increasing importance of ‘fear’ in the governing process.”51 In many ways, suspicion has been the flipside of robust security. A dynamic that often shores up security rather than challenges it: more security begets more suspicion, which begets more security. “So the threat of terrorism is used to limit the political use of public space,” as Peter Marcuse explains, “and is legitimated by the artiﬁcially induced insecurity that the present form of responses breeds.”52 The perception of threats, therefore, is fertile ground for more security, but security that in the end fuels more suspicion. Urso’s notes on the map speak to her experience of moving through the city and the way the body is open to the environment. “The world is not what I think,”

Merleau-Ponty states, “but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible.”53 In

50. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 230. 51. Roy Coleman, Reclaiming the Streets: Surveillance, Social Control and the City, (Devon, UK; Portland, Oregon, US, Willian Publishing, 2004), 224. 52. Peter Marcuse, “Security or Safety in Cities? The Threat of Terrorism after 9/11,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30, no. 4 (2006): 924. 53. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xviii-xix.

Urso’s case, this is a world not only defined by urban terrain but entangled with security and suspicion.

A Highly “Suspicious” Encounter

The assertion that “everyone has a role in security” is not a marginal position.

Anti-terrorist campaigns have attempted to bring all bodies into the security fold, as the now commonplace slogan “If You See Something, Say Something” attests. The extensive national security apparatus constructed after September 11, 2001 stresses the participation of everyday citizens. Susan Leigh Foster writes, “in the United States, especially since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, citizens have been exhorted to surveil one another, to assess any impropriety in appearance or non-suspicion engendered by these events has further docilized and alienated all those passing through public spaces.”54 Taking up this project, one post-9/11 New York City poster reads,

“There are 16 million eyes in the city. We’re counting on all of them.” With a grid of anonymous eyes hovering above the text, the poster explicitly casts New Yorkers’ eyes as an extension of the city’s security apparatus (See Fig. 6). In effect, such campaigns ask people to attune themselves to threatening objects, people, and events, instrumentalizing the public’s senses toward security ends.55 Orienting the body toward safety is not in itself all that new or surprising, as Josh Lauer has pointed out, “humans, like all animals,

54. Susan Leigh Foster, “Why Not ‘Improv Everywhere’?” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, ed. by Nadine George-Graves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 198. 55. For further analysis of the role of the senses in society see David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003).

95 are surveillance machines by the very nature of our sensory organs and self-preserving instinct.”56 And yet, in the case of national security projects in the US, as well as in the

UK and other European states, it seems necessary to ask, what are the senses being tuned toward, or perhaps more accurately against? The participation of everyday citizens in public campaigns against terrorism reveals that the body is not only the focus of security but it is also a means. Security is embodied on the streets of US and European cities and this holds importance, for, as Lauer explains, “embodied surveillance, by which we informally and unsystematically identify, classify, and monitor each other, is the root of all social control.”57 This embodied surveillance has been coopted into the discourse of counterterrorism.

56. Josh Lauer, “Surveillance History and the History of New Media: An Evidential Paradigm,” New Media & Society 14, no. 4 (2011): 570. 57. Josh Lauer, “Surveillance History and the History of New Media,” 571.

Figure 6. “If You See Something, Say Something,” Poster. Source: David Goehrin, New York City - Subway. 2007. Digital Image. Available from: Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/carbonnyc/2036270863 (accessed October 31, 2017).

The senses are put to work in security. In tracing the history of CCTV systems,

Williams describes the 18th century beat policeman as machine of surveillance: “He was to monitor a defined area, bringing it under his view, and reporting what went on to his superior officers. He was to pay particular attention to the category of people labelled

‘rogues and vagabonds’: strangers, and those with no visible means of support.”58 The role of the beat police officer serves as a reminded that turning bodies toward the project

58. Williams, “Police Surveillance and the Emergence of CCTV in the 1960s,” 27.

97 of security is not a new technique. However, the enlisting of “all” bodies under the umbrella of counterterrorism transforms ordinary people into surveillance machines ready report that which appears strange according to the security state. This embodied surveillance evokes Foucault’s concept of docile bodies. “A body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved,” wrote Foucault.59 But rather than treating the body as a mass, he explains the body is controlled by “working it [as] ‘retail’, individually; of exercising upon it a subtle coercion, of obtaining holds upon it at the level of the mechanism itself – movements, gestures, attitudes, rapidity: an infinitesimal power over the active body.”60 However, despite some overlapping, the security body is different than the docile body. While the docile body for Foucault was linked to the economy, “the efficiency of movements, their internal organization,” in a security regime driven by the threat of terrorism, the body is linked to an active state of vigilance.

Whereas discipline likely has a role in the shaping of the security body, the instrumentalization of the sensory body is shrouded in the idea of active participation and empowerment. Since the figure of the terrorist is ambiguous (see chapter one), those on the lookout for potential terrorists must be active, alert, and aware of everything in their surroundings. This idea is captured in a 2016 news article, “Las Vegas counterterrorism center sees spike in tips on suspicious activity.” In the article, the Las Vegas police captain instructs, “If something doesn’t feel right; doesn’t sound right; doesn’t smell

59. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Vintage Books Edition, 1995), 136. 60. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 137.

98 right; doesn’t look right,” contact authorities.61 It is unclear what constitutes “right” in relationship to the way things feel, sound, smell, or look; but it is clear that people should be turning their bodies to project of counterterrorism. The captain’s statement fits within

Department of Homeland Security campaign, “If You See Something, Say Something™” as is outlined on the website page:

Across the nation, we’re all part of communities. In cities, on farms, and in the suburbs, we share everyday moments with our neighbors, colleagues, family, and friends. It’s easy to take for granted the routine moments in our every day—going to work or school, the grocery store or the gas station. But your every day is different than your neighbor’s—filled with the moments that make it uniquely yours. So if you see something you know shouldn’t be there—or someone’s behavior that doesn’t seem quite right—say something. Because only you know what’s supposed to be in your everyday. Informed, alert communities play a critical role in keeping our nation safe.62

Everyone has a role in security we are told, and security must be taken up in everyday spaces—nothing is outside of suspicion—one must be vigilant even in the most routine moments and spaces. Homeland security is pursued not only through advanced technologies, but through the eyes, nose, ears, touch, and feel of those who move through and inhabit everyday spaces.

For Merleau-Ponty embodiment is more than an idea it is “in the flesh.”63

Meaning that it is realized through and within the body, not as a mode of contemplation

61. Ricardo Torres-Cortez, “Las Vegas Counterterrorism Center Sees Spike in Tips on Suspicious Activity,” Las Vegas Sun, last modified July 16, 2016, https://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/jul/16/las-vegas-counterterrorism-center-sees-spike- in-ti/. 62. “If You See Something, Say Something,” Department of Homeland Security, accessed September 24, 2017, https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something. 63. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Natural World and the Body,” in The Body 1999, ed. Donn Welton, (Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 168.

99 separate from ordinary bodily action. In the case of counterterrorist campaigns, where the body is put to work as means of security, security does work on the body. As Carrie

Noland explains, cultural conditioning is “inscribed on our muscles and bones”64 and that

“collective behaviors and beliefs, acquired through acculturation, are rendered individual and ‘live’ at the level of the body.”65 Embodiment is more than a matter of inscription, it is a process and it is lived. What is embodied already assumes lived experience according to Judith Butler.66 Security is, thus, manifest and felt through the body, as much as the body is also the focus of security.67

Like in the US, the body has been conscripted in counterterrorism campaigns in the UK. One such London Metropolitan Police terrorist awareness campaign is at the center of artist Tania El Khoury’s performance Jarideh.68 As El Khoury explains, “The piece was inspired by this police awareness campaign about how to spot a terrorist in a public space in London.”69 The campaign echoes those familiar to the US context such as the “If You See Something, Say Something™” campaign. The London Metropolitan

64. Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2009), 6-7. 65. Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 9. 66. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” in The Performance Studies Reader 2004, ed. Henry Bial (New York, NY: Routledge, 2004) 155. 67. For a discussion of embodiment and touch see Erin Manning Politics of Touch (2006). 68. Tania El Khoury is a Lebanese artist who works in London and Beirut. She creates interactive installations and performances, which has termed “live art.” El Khoury is currently working on a practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway, University of London. For more information, see http://taniaelkhoury.com/. 69. Tania El Khoury, e-mail message to author, May 11, 2016.

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Police website states, “The public play a vital role in helping the police and security services in fighting terrorism and are being encouraged to contact the confidential Anti-

Terrorist Hotline if they see any activity or behaviour they think is suspicious.”70 The campaign calls for not only the eyes of the public but their judgment in spotting and reporting suspicion. El Khoury used the document distributed by the campaign as part of her performance, asking “the audience to follow the police notes in order to find a potential terrorist in the room.”71 Although performed in various cities, it was first conceived in London and bears heaviest on the city. In London, El Khoury explains,

“security is being used as a means to surveille communities, oppress minorities, and keep the majority in state of fear, state dependence, and fear of others.”72 “London is also the place,” she tells me, “where messages are broadcasted in public transport inciting people to report any suspicious behaviour.”73 The focus that many counterterrorist campaigns place on others’ behaviors promote a suspicious sociality that identifies threat in the bodies of others.

70. “Counter Terrorism Campaign,” (my emphasis), Metropolitan Police, accessed November 20, 2016, http://content.met.police.uk/Campaign/counterterrorism2011. (My emphasis). 71. Tania El Khoury, e-mail message to author, May 11, 2016. 72. Tania El Khoury, e-mail message to author, September 25, 2016. 73. Ibid.

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Figure 7. Tania El Khoury, Jarideh. 2011-. Performance. Video still from video documentation. Tania El Khoury. From http://taniaelkhoury.com/jarideh/, (accessed October 2, 2017).

El Khoury inserts Jarideh into the public sphere where sociality and security overlap. Performed in a café, this live performance draws attention to the role of the performers and the role of others occupying the space. The piece is one of El Khoury’s

“one-on-one performances” that brings the audience into the performance as a collaborator, as El Khoury explains, and in this case into a secret meeting. The audience member, or “collaborator,” enters into the performance knowing that they are part of a performance but having limited knowledge of what will unfold, which initiated what El

Khoury defines as “a highly suspicious encounter.”74 El Khoury used the counter terrorist campaign to structure the performance. Specifically, the instruction of “how to spot a

74. Tania El Khoury, “Jarideh,” accessed September 24, 2017, http://taniaelkhoury.com/jarideh/.

102 terrorist in a public space in London.”75 The performance begins with the audience member looking around to find the most suspicious looking person in the café. The audience is supposed to spot the artist in the crowded space by her costume, inspired by

French spy films. While the costume sounds playful, the performance animates suspicion and distrust around others in public space. The site of the performance is just as important as the artist or her collaborator; the performance always “takes place in a busy café open to the public.” For El Khoury, the café provides a space to engage existing realities, drawing attention to everyday conditions by animating suspicion that is already present within the space.

The performance begins with the audience member searching for the most suspicious person in the café and concludes with a backpack being left in front of a

CCTV camera. From start to finish the performance actively engages suspicion. Although the audience member knows they are part of a performance, their knowledge is limited.

They operate on a need to know basis, which not only makes them more suspicious of others but also renders their own behaviors more suspicious to others within the context of the café. While El Khoury invites the collaborator to chew a piece of gum to lessen their suspicion, she also gives them a Lebanese newspaper to read with reports of real women resistance fighters and documents by the London Metropolitan Police. In the performance of suspicion, Jarideh potentially excites the security senses of both performers and those within the surrounding vicinities. A secret meeting in a café, with

75. Tania El Khoury, e-mail message to author, May 11, 2016.

103 voices whispering over London police documents and an Arabic newspaper, is exactly what the public is supposed be looking out for – where “seeing something” suspicious is a matter of identifying unusual behavior and questionable objects. In the performance of this piece, artist and collaborator, and by extension the public, inhabit a moment in which counter terrorism campaigns urge citizens to “say something.”

Attending to one’s own body and the bodies of others is a recurring feature of lived counterterrorism. But what of these bodies caught up in security, and the sociality that they engender? As the performance unfolds in opposition to the securitized body,

Jarideh points to the practice of a limited range of appropriate behavior that is instantiation in campaigns that urge people to tend the unusual, the odd, the out-of- placeness of a behavior, person, or thing, and their own bodily appearance and performance. Following Noland, this holds significance not only because there is the possibility of recognizing the meaning making practice, but because such “an awareness affords in turn the possibility of critical distance from the practice.”76 Recalling the docile body, the body at work in security might be thought of in terms of what Elizabeth Grosz calls the “preferred body;” a body “under control, pliable, amenable to the subject’s will.”77 But more than molding to the will of security, Noland’s emphasis on the body’s ability to sense its own conditioning offers a more intricate understanding of the security- body. Jarideh seems to afford the critical distance Noland articulates. By performing

76. Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 191. 77. Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion (New York, NY: Routledge, 1995), 1-2.

104 suspicion, El Khoury and her collaborator are already once removed from the ordinary habitus of the body under the demands of security, but even more importantly, drawing on Noland, each performer might sense their body performing suspicion in a way that allows them to distance themselves enough to recognize that non-suspicious behavior is not neutral but conditioned. The body’s conditioning, although often taken for granted, is experienced on the level of the body. Noland’s example of this is kinesthesia, which according to her, “is a unique sense in that it provides the subject with a greater awareness of both her own body and that of the other.”78 For a security that is directed at the body and works through the body, what becomes significant is the awareness the body has access to. In the process of conforming to the demands of security the body might sense its own conditioning and in turn be able to separate the experience from the inscribed cultural meaning. “If we can manage to separate ourselves momentarily from our semantic projects,” Noland writes, “not only do we hear the noise of the sound- clusters we call words but, more important, we seize the cultural organization of sound at the level of what it feels like, qualitatively, to produce it.”79 In the act of carrying out security we might see not unusual behavior but bodies moving through shifting light; we might sense the physical distance we put between us and others not as safety but emptiness; we may feel the strain of our eyes rather than the out-of-placeness of someone else, or we might see restrained gestures where we once saw neutral calm. “The senses

78. Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 13. 79. Ibid., 91.

105 sense themselves sensing; the eye sees itself seeing,” writes Stuart Walton.80 And in this sensing, I might for a brief moment, in Panagia words, “alter my disposition toward you.”81

CCTV on the Streets: Appearing on Film

On a street in Charleston, West Virginia, a young black boy tells a white woman:

“Bad people live on this street... that’s why they have a camera here.”82 The perception that security cameras are linked to bad people is a product of how they have been promoted and the images they circulate. Proponents of CCTV claim, according to Fyfe and Bannister, to deter “deviant behavior” and deliver “rapid intervention at any moment if something suspicious is detected.”83 But in practice, as Ray Surett explains, security cameras have “been more often applied to less serious behaviors akin to anti-social activities such as littering, public urinating, traffic control, drunkenness, parking violations, and public smoking.”84 The perception, thus, adheres to the justification of cameras while overlooking the general way they are used for social control. The aligning of bad people and cameras is also drawn out through the circulation of security images.

Surett situates this circulation within a “looping spiral of anxiety.”85 CCTV supply

80. Stuart Walton, In the Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling, (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2016): 85. 81. Panagia, The Political Life of Sensation, 7. 82. Anonymous Facebook post, April 28, 2016 83. Fyfe and Bannister, “City Watching,” 39. 84. Ray Surette, “The Thinking Eye Pros and cons of second generation CCTV surveillance systems,” Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management 28, no. 1 (2005): 156. 85. Ibid., 155.

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“images of crime,” that when circulated increase public anxiety, and in turn, “encourages public calls for further extension of CCTV systems that result in more crime events being captured on video” and higher degrees of anxiety about crime.86 Caught up in this loop is a narrow conception of security cameras and their public use.

The images produced by CCTV, and their circulation, helps explain the association of “bad people” with the presence of cameras, but looking up from the sidewalk, in the grocery store, in the mall, at the museum, at the bus or train station, and numerous of other places, leads one to conclude that if cameras are set up to catch bad people, then we are all bad. Day in, day out, security cameras are used to observe, record, and track bodies. Surette argues, “CCTV is bound up with a ‘master shift’ in the discourse of social control from a concern with the mind (and issues of motivation, thought and intention) to a concern with the body (and issues of observable behaviour).”87 From this perspective, it matters little what someone feels, thinks, or intentions might be, the camera invests in the way the body looks and moves within the monitored space. “It could therefore be said that at the most mundane level, and aside from all the other things that it does,” Lynsey Dubbeld writes, “CCTV observes and possibly records bodies, bodily activities, and embodied behaviours.”88 While the parallel movement of one’s body across security screens as they move through the city might go unnoticed, the body is of particular focus in the security image. With cameras, operators

86. Ray Surette, “The Thinking Eye Pros and cons,” 155. 87. Fyfe and Bannister, “City Watching.” (42). 88. Lynsey Dubbeld. “Observing bodies,”151.

107 can focus in on bodies, accessing whether a person is well-kept or disheveled, in a group or alone, and the movement and physique of someone’s body: their limbs, their gait, their stature.

On average, a person moving through London is caught on CCTV cameras 300 times a day.89 This statistic fits within the UK context where, “British citizens have become one of the most electronically surveilled populations in the world.”90 While the

UK might be the most electronically surveilled, the increase of security cameras is not unique. During the expansion of the national security apparatus in the US, following

September 11, more than 4,600 new cameras were installed in Manhattan.91 One justification for security cameras is the ability it gives operators to spot and identify

“unusual behavior” taking place in public and private spaces. Lyon and Haggerty argue that “observing, recording, and analyzing selected characteristics in order to predict future behaviour” is a kind of profiling.92 The way the body moves across the screen is thus not a mere occurrence of transition, not only a means of tracking from here to there or identifying someone’s whereabouts, but instead a sequence through which at every moment there is the possibility to see deviancy, abnormality, “suspicious behavior”.

89. “CCTV: Does it work?” BBC News World Edition, last modified August 13, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2071496.stm. 90. Surette, “The Thinking Eye,” 155. 91. The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater, 207-208. 92. David Lyon and Kevin D. Haggerty, “The Surveillance Legacies of 9/11: Recalling, Reflecting on, and Rethinking Surveillance in the Security Era,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 27, no. 3 (2012): 295.

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The movement of the body within and across the screen is vital as it is one basis through which behavior is measured. In “Techniques of the Body” Marcel Mauss demonstrated the way ordinary bodily actions are temporally and socially specific. For example, the way one walks, at least partially, is shaped by the context they learned to walk in. Of importance, here, is the designation of “unusual behavior” through the apparatus of the cameras. What appears suspicious on the live monitor or in the recorded footage may simply be a deviation from what is considered normal within a given context, or by those viewing the image. For Sunanne Wigorts Yngvesson, what is seen through the camera is “related to whatever we are already looking for.”93 Which is to acknowledge that the camera fails to secure an objective image. Even if someone is not committing a crime, if they fit a certain profile or behave a certain way they may appear suspicious on the monitor screen.

The scrutiny of the body as it moves across the screen or inhabits the security frame demonstrates that the body is of central concern for security. However, despite this focus, the physical presences of cameras often slip into the background of the built environment and thus go unnoticed or overlooked. James Bridle’s Surveillance Spaulder

(2013) offers a way to sense the cameras dispersed throughout the urban terrain on the level of the body.94 A spaulder is a medieval piece of armor that covers the shoulder and

93. Sunanne Wigorts Yngvesson, “To See the World as It Appears: Vision, the Gaze and the Camera as Technological Eye,” in Invisibility Studies: Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture, ed. Henriette Steiner; Kristin Veel (Oxford, UK; New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2015), 276. 94. James Bridle is a British artist is an artist, writer, journalist, and technologist. Bridle currently lives and works in Athens, Greece. His artistic works consist of

109 is designed to protect the “wearer from unexpected and unseen blows from above.”95

Like the original, Bridle’s armor is designed to wrap around the shoulder, but its function is somewhat different. Rather than acting as a protective layer, in the typical way, the

Surveillance Spaulder alerts the wearing to the presence of security cameras by, as Bridle explains, “a tap on the shoulder.” The spaulder contains a CCTV detector that isolates infrared light, which is commonly deployed in CCTV cameras through a 730nm bandpass filter. When the infrared light passes through the filter an electrical current is sent to a pair of transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation pads attached to the wearer’s shoulder. The electrical current shocks the body, causing the wearer to twitch as they pass by surveillance cameras emitting infrared light.

Bridle’s piece has been credited for giving the wearer a way to sense the presence of security cameras in public, even those that are not immediately visible to the eyes.

Robison Meyer explains that Surveillance Spaulder acts as a reminder that “We pass under surveillance cameras every day, appearing on perhaps hundreds of minutes of film.96 While the surveillance spaulder may indeed alert the wearer that they are crossing the visual path of a camera, the feedback loop that Bridle initiates through the spaulder’s

installations, performances, interactive pieces, video, and print media. For more information, see http://jamesbridle.com/. 95. Robison Meyer, “The New Armor That Lets You Sense Surveillance Cameras,” The Atlantic, last modified December 13, 2013, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-new-armor-that-lets-you- sense-surveillance-cameras/282335/. 96. Robison Meyer, “The New Armor That Lets You Sense Surveillance Cameras,” The Atlantic, last modified December 13, 2013, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/12/the-new-armor-that-lets-you- sense-surveillance-cameras/282335/.

110 sensors undermines the premise of the camera as either a tool of pure observation or a disciplinary presence. In video footage of the artist walking through London wearing the armor, every time he passes beneath security cameras, installed on the sides of buildings and lamp posts, his left shoulder jerks up in response to the electrical current emitted from the cameras above. This relay of signals through the body can be thought of kinesthetically. Formally referred to as “muscular sense,” kinesthesia is the “sensation of movement transmitted to the mind from the nerves of the muscular, tendinous, and articular systems.”97 Fixing the infrared sensors to the body complicates this transmission from the nerves to the mind. The movement of the wearer’s body is linked to the external presence of the cameras. This linking cuts across the “the boundaries between brain, body and world,” in Tim Ingold’s words.98 As he writes, “perception is not an ‘inside-the-head’ operation, performed upon the raw material of sensation, but takes place in circuits.”99

Again, while this is supposed to alert the wearer to the cameras they pass under and their everyday appearance on hundreds of minutes of film, in tuning the body electromagnetically to the camera, the body is not only sensing the cameras but also responding to them— linking the kinesthetic experience of the wearing to the security cameras. In this way, Surveillance Spaulder allows the wearing to perceiving security in a new way.

97. Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 9-10. 98. Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment ( New York: Routledge, 2011), 244. 99. Ibid.

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Figure 8. James Bridle, Surveillance Spaulder. 2013-. Performance. Video still from video documentation. James Bridle. From: https://vimeo.com/81324457, (accessed October 2, 2017).

The idea that the body would respond to a security camera is not radical in and of itself. One of the motivations for installing security cameras is that it will encourage people to act differently in the mere presence of cameras, harking back to Foucault’s analysis of the Panopticon. Thus, the camera’s influence upon the body as a mode of deterrence or disciplinary feature relies on a kind of responsiveness. The introduction of the surveillance spaulder, however, changes the mode of responsiveness and corrupts the security image by causing the body to appear unusual across the security screen. If the very presence of the camera causes the odd movements of the body, then how are unusual movements to be scrutinized? One can imagine this operating as a kind of feedback loop, the camera affects the movement of the person as it is visually capturing and then potentially picks up on the unusual movement as suspicious. Under these circumstances, whatever objectivity the camera is thought to possess is completely subverted. While

112 wearing the spaulder, the camera would be both the cause and the register of the questionable behavior. If surveillance cameras are interpreted as a continuation or an extension of disciplinary power, then spaulder undermines the very efficiency of the technology. The true revolution of the Panopticon was not that the guard in the watchtower obtained total vision of the prisoners, but that the prisoner, under the sheer possibility of being seen, would correct, regulate, and discipline herself. The efficiency of the technology is not the watchman at the perceiving end of the apparatus; it is the internalization of the apparatus by the prisoner to the extent that he reproduces it in his very body, in his postures, in his gestures, in practice, in the flesh.100 It is the embodiment of the apparatus that makes it efficient. Bridle’s spaulder, under the gaze of the camera, renders the body, and consequently security, inefficient.

Rather than internalizing the security gaze, in Surveillance Spaulder, the body is temporarily coupled with the camera. Surveillance is still embodied, but it is on the electromagnetic level; rather than a docile body waiting to be disciplined, the body becomes a circuit within a security assemblage. “Assemblage” for Deleuze and Guattari is a way to address the body as more than organ and open it to “circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity.”101 As the body can be attuned to the project of security, the body can also be plugged into security assemblages.

100. For essays on touch and its relation to knowledge and subjectivity see Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth D. Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). 101. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 160.

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Surveillance Spaulder does not only undermine the disciplinary power of the camera by render the body strange under its gaze, but reveals that security is an assemblage of diverse forces, materials, and bodies coming together.

Jane Bennett describes assemblages as “living, throbbing confederations that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them from within…they are not governed by any central head: no one materiality or type of material has sufficient competence to determine consistently the trajectory or the impact of the group.”102 Bennett’s description of assemblages resonates with the contemporary state of security and adds to Marc Schuilenburg’s analysis of securization. As Schuilenburg describes, “it is increasingly the case that a multiplicity of actors are brought together to organize security in different sites.”103 The notion of assemblage both complements and complicates this assertion, as Bennett points out there is not central authority but instead a confederation of materials and forces. Here, securitization is extended not only to actors but states, pressures, and flows, creating new couplings and circuits of security that at any moment can come into existence. Bridle’s armor garment allows wearers to plug into the security environment in an unexpected and spontaneous way that momentarily draws attention to the pervasiveness of security and disrupts its aptitude.

102. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010) 23-24. 103. Marc Schuilenburg, trans. George Hall, The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk, and Social Control (New York: New York University Press, 2015) 23.

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Conclusion

While the body is as much a site of security as the street, it is not only the focus of suspicion but also an extension of security. Counterterrorist campaigns aim to bring all bodies into the security apparatus by attuning their senses to what is conceived as threat.

David Howes asserts, “Sensation is not just a matter of physiological response and personal experience. It is the most fundamental domain of cultural expression, the medium through which all the values and practices of society are enacted.”104 Sensation can be infused with social values. When it comes to the subject of terrorism, it is not enough to have cameras everywhere. We all need to watch, we need to sense the threat before it even materializes, anticipate, and attend to bodies and objects that might be hiding dangerous things. Security is embodied, but as Noland explains embodiment is

“that ambiguous phenomenon in which culture both asserts and loses its grip on individual subjects.”105 The bodies’ role in security might produce seepages that move beyond the project of security, as we’ve seen with the art of Tania El Khoury, Jen Urso, and James Bridle. The extension of security through bodies opens the opportunity to become viscerally and physically aware of security and, for these artists at least, provides a pathway to explore, stall, and disrupt the pervasiveness of contemporary security.

104. David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), xi. 105. Noland, Agency and Embodiment, 3.

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CHAPTER THREE: SECURING THE MUSEUM: TERRORISM, EMBODIMENT,

AND THE ECONOMY

On a trip to the National Gallery, a week after the Westminster terrorist attack in

March 2017, the museum’s main entrance, the Portico Entrance, was closed to all visitors. In 2016 the National Gallery welcomed over 6 million visitors.1 Of these visitors, many began their journey at the Portico Entrance. Virtually unaltered from the original 1838 facade, the grand entrance offers a pristine example of British neoclassical architecture. As its name denotes, the Portico protrudes from the rest of the building, offering a porched area that is accessed by winged staircases. Lined with Corinthian columns that support an entablature, which bears the inscription: “THE NATIONAL

GALLERY,” and a large pediment above, the Portico Entrance has become an iconic symbol of the museum and its renowned collection. The entrance also provides direct access to Trafalgar Square, a public square in Central London that commemorates the

British victory over France and Spain in the naval Battle of Trafalgar. More than just an historic monument, the square has become an energetic space, regularly hosting street performances and food venders, and at other times parades and protests. According to the museum, Trafalgar Square was selected as the site for the National Gallery because “it

1. Javier Pes, José da Silva, and Emily Sharpe, “Visitor figures 2016: Christo helps 1.2 million people to walk on water While the Whitney breaks the hold of New York’s Met and MoMA” Art Newspaper, last modified March 29, 2017, http://old.theartnewspaper.com/reports/visitor-figures-2016/christo-helps-1-2-million- people-to-walk-on-water/

116 was considered to be at the very centre of London.”2 But on that day, in the wake of a devastating attack less than a mile away, the Portico Entrance was barred to all visitors.

Instead, visitors were ushered past the grand entrance to a smaller set of revolving doors in the Sainsbury Wing, which is located on the northern side of the square, away from the busy center. While for some this might be considered an appropriate response, or of little consequence, such actions speak volumes about the current state of museum security. The immediate and total rerouting of visitors, in response to a heightened national terrorist threat, highlights the way some museums have been folded into the broader security context; acting as part of a proactive security front. The fine-tuning of the museum to perceived terrorist threats has the potential to remake the museum.

Many of the first art museums trace back to the private collections of monarchs, the quintessential example being the Louvre, but during the 20th century powerful capitalists, such as Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Frick, and nation states went about collecting art, building institutions, and displaying artworks. Reasons for founding museums included philanthropy, preservation, nation building, and cultural capital. As museums became the place to see valuable objects and celebrated artworks, security became a common concern. However, even though security has long been an important factor in the handling and exhibiting of artworks, the presence of security in museums is currently changing. Many museums are becoming robust sites of security. The exclusionary effects of the museum have received academic attention, most famously by

2. “About the Building,” The National Gallery, accessed July 7, 2017, https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/history/about-the-building?viewPage=1.

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Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel in The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their

Public. But museum security has generally gone untheorized by scholars.

With a heightened awareness of global terrorism, the notion of soft targets has become mainstream. Hotels, railway stations, cafes, theaters, concert halls, hospitals, and cultural centers “epitomize the definition of soft target,” according to Glenn McGovern.

“If history is any teacher,” he writes, “it is clear that terrorists overwhelmingly strike soft targets.”3 Museums have not been left out of this ever-growing category of risky sites. As centers of culture, museums are one site among many being affected by expanding security measures. The overlap of culture and security makes museums key sites for understanding the securitization of everyday spaces and exclusionary processes.

Moreover, following Sharon MacDonald, “the contradictory, ambivalent, position which museums are in makes them key cultural loci of our times.”4

This chapter takes up museum security by examining the ways in which security is being reshaped, and in turn, how security is shaping the contemporary experience of museums as visitors’ movement and ways of being within the museum are configured around security. Additionally, I argue that as museum security has increasingly become a part of the broader security environment, museums offer rich sites for inquiring not only into the effects security has on the museum but as examples of where social space/public

3. Glenn P. McGovern, “Securitization After Terror,” in Encyclopedia of Transnational Crime & Justice, ed. Margaret E. Beare (Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications, 2012), 371. 4. Sharon MacDonald, “Introduction,” in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, Ed. Sharon MacDonald and Gordon Fyfe (Oxford, UK; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), 2.

118 good and security are being intertwined. Furthermore, by looking closely at museum security other external factors contributing to the current state of museums come into focus. The effects that changes in museum security might entail is poignant considering that most museums promote themselves as being “for all” and “everyone.” The critical question that emerges is: does museum security work in service of this goal or in opposition to it? To tease out some of the dominant forces shaping contemporary museum security, and assess their spatial and social consequences, this chapter begins by stepping into the museum. I consider two museums that offer different manifestations of security: I examine the experiences of entering the Louvre in Paris and Crystal Bridges

Museum of American Art in Northwestern Arkansas. Whereas the Louvre provides an example of security in a bustling European city, Crystal Bridges offers insight into security against a rural backdrop in the United States. Next, I explore how security, discipline, and spectatorship intermix in the museum by attending to the role of the senses in the museum, and the changing roles of security guards. Last, I examine how museum security fits within and is a part of broader security networks. For these sections,

I draw on ethnographic work I conducted at Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) in the spring and summer of 2016, which included interviews with security guards, staff, and visitors, and participant observation. Additionally, I draw on personal accounts, and media coverage of museums.

Entering the Museum: Geographies of Tourism and Terrorism

The museum entrance is more than a portal to collections and cafés. The entrance has long signified a shift from the exterior world where abrupt sounds, smells, sights,

119 temperatures, and textures transpire, to the interior confines of the museum, where hushed voices, measured steps, safe distances, gentle lighting, and even temperatures embody contemplation and control. Bourdieu and Darbel understood this shift to signal the museum’s “difference to everyday life.”5 However, they did not celebrate this distinction; they argued that while for some it created a sense of belonging, for others, it created “a sense of exclusion and arbitrary devaluing.”6 Since Bourdieu and Darbel, the accusation that museums are elitist has become a familiar critique. To counter this perception, many museums have become more oriented toward visitors and education.

And yet, despite efforts to make the museum a space that welcomes visitors of diverse background and socioeconomic standings, when it comes to museum security, the changes underway threaten to undermine these efforts. The strengthening of security in and around the museum—in effect, turning the museum into a site of security—has the potential to intensify exclusionary processes. Today, more than designating a break from everyday life, the museum entrance is just as likely to signal a space of security. And often, it is at the entrance that security most directly engages visitors. Although museum security is not standardized, and as discussed later can take various forms, the perception that museums should communicate a visible security presence has been on the rise. This notion is clearly articulated by a newly hired safety director at the Indianapolis Museum of Art: Whereas before, the director explains, “you felt a sense of being completely

5. Paul Jones and Suzanne MacLeod, “Museum Architecture Matters,” Museum & Society 14, no. 1 (2016): 210. 6. Jones and MacLeod, “Museum Architecture Matters,” (210).

120 unopposed by anyone and barely scrutinized by anyone…now a visitor pulling into the lot off West 38th Street might see a patrol car parked on the circle drive in front of the building.”7 Or take for example that it is now a standard procedure at the British Museum to guide all visitors “through crowd-control barriers into a marquee outside the main building where security guards check every bag.”8 Narrowing in on this threshold or transitory space, I examine how one moves from exterior to the interior of the museum, and where in the exterior/interior configuration security shows up, or has been inserted.

Here, I draw upon my visits to the Louvre and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in the spring and summer of 2017. Placing these distinct museums in relation to one another, with drastically different manifestations of security, I tease out shared structuring forces. In the end, I argue that differences in security across these museums have less to do with a different conception of security than their geographic contexts. In other words, security may emerge differently and yet still retain its core logic. Moreover, those different iterations of museum security might tell us more about what is at stake.

The Louvre, Paris, France

A swarm of bodies congregates around Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Mona Lisa.

This has become a familiar scene with more than eight million people viewing the

7. McLaughlin, Kathleen, “Museum Revamping Security strategy,” Indianapolis Business Journal 31, no. 34 (2010): 3. 8. Gadher, Dipesh, “Museums put on alert for Isis suitcase bomb.” The Times & The Sunday Times, last modified February 19, 2017, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/museums-put-on-alert-for-isis-suitcase-bomb- 3wk0h6b3n.

121 artwork each year.9 Despite the fact that the painting was recently relocated to its own wall in the Salle des Etats room in hopes of making it more accessible to more people, it is difficult to obtain an unobstructed view of the artwork. The crowd moves with no organization, no line, just a kind of frenzy of bodies amassing in front of the petite 16th century painting. Visitors move with the force of others, jostling back and forth slowly toward the iconic portrait in hopes of snapping a shot of the renowned artwork. But even for those who reach the front of the crowd, they are held back from the glass covered 30” x 21” painting by two layers of stanchions. While images and written accounts reveal the frenetic energy around the iconic work, less frequently is the mall at the Louvre’s doorstep accounted for. Buttressing the world’s largest museum, and former French palace, is a high-end shopping mall.

After a new entrance was completed in 1989, consisting of the Louvre Pyramid, work began on the underground shopping mall: Carrousel du Louvre. Lying beneath the

Louvre’s main courtyard, the mall physically precedes the museum. Entering from either of the Galerie du Carrousel entrances, which flank the Arc de Triomphe, one descends below the light powdery dirt into a spacious labyrinth of department stores and expensive boutiques. Like the metro, the parking garage, and the Rue de Rivoli entrances, this method of accessing the Louvre weaves visitors through polished marble corridors and glistening store fronts. Although the mall now acts as a conduit in which visitors trickle

9. James Zug, “Stolen: How the Mona Lisa Became the World’s Most Famous Painting,” Smithsonian, last modified June 15, 2011, http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/stolen-how-the-mona-lisa-became-the- worlds-most-famous-painting-16406234/.

122 in from various entrances, the mall was not the driving factor in the initial construction.

Instead, the underground parking lot took precedent and herald the mall. “Tired of having tourist buses jamming the streets on both sides of the museum, the government decided it needed an underground parking area.”10 Remedying the traffic problem opened a way forward to resolve the Louvre’s dilemmas: the installing and de-installing of tents in the courtyard for the regularly hosted fashion shows. An underground mall, connecting the new parking area to the museum, offered a space that could be “tailored to the fashion industry.”11 And as Lianne McTavish explains, revenue was “a consideration in the construction of the commercial area” as the mall had the potential of appealing to more visitors.12 Moreover, the prime real estate meant that the Louvre could collect revenue from leasing the space. While the Carrousel du Louvre has indeed become a lure for some visitors, it has also become just another part of the Louvre experience, regardless of one’s desire to shop. Most guides recommend visitors enter the museum through the

Carrousel to avoid the long lines outside of the glass pyramid. This route is often presented as the most efficient. Although descending into the mall allows visitors to bypass long wait times outside the main entrance, the mall does not grant unchecked easement.

10. Alan Riding, “A Shopping Mall at the Louvre? The French Say, Bien Sur.”” The New York Times, last modified April 19, 2000, http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/19/arts/a-shopping-mall-at-the-louvre-the-french-say- bien-sur.html. 11. Riding, “A Shopping Mall at the Louvre?” 12. Lianne McTavish, “Shopping in the Museum? Consumer Spaces and the Redefinition of the Louvre,” Cultural Studies 12, no. 2 (1998): 176.

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While visitors may choose the mall over the queue, they do not bypass security.

“No matter where you enter, you have to go through a security check.”13 Stepping into the Carrousel du Louvre, visitors are immediately confronted by a security guard.

Security guards and bag checks, for those who regularly visit museums, have become part of the transaction of entering, but at the Louvre when one enters the mall one encounters security. Although this may not be that surprising to some visitors, as a New

York Times article notes, “most visitors think of the Carrousel as part of the museum,” it speaks to the state of the museum.14 Indeed, the museum itself has been somewhat rattled by the mixing of the premiere cultural center and shopping center. As the article explains, the conceptual merging of the two spaces “makes the Louvre a little nervous.”15

However, despite any discomfort, the fact that one must go through security before entering the mall, reinforces the idea that the mall and museum are not merely in proximity with one another, but are indeed intertwined.

While the annoyance of navigating the line at the main entrance has been linked to security, it is not security—in and of itself—that leads many to recommend avoiding the pyramid, it is the prospect of waiting; of time being stalled, that visitors wish most to avoid. As one website puts it: “If the security lines into the glass pyramid look very long, try going in the Carrousel du Louvre, which can be accessed off the Rue de Rivoli or by

13. “Best Ways to Enter the Louvre, Paris,” Paris Travel Planner & Guide, accessed September 24, 2017, http://www.francetravelplanner.com/go/paris/museums/gettinginlouvre.html. 14. Riding, “A Shopping Mall at the Louvre?” 15. Ibid.

124 going down the external stairs to either side of the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel.”16

Security only becomes bothersome to visitors when they get caught up in it, i.e. standing in lines or having items confiscated. Because the lines are normally shorter and visitors are granted quicker access to the interior, security at the mall entrances is generally seen as unproblematic. In this way, security at the mall entrances have become normalized and have lost visibility. In 2000, about a third of visitors reached the Louvre through the mall.17 And as the New York Times article states, “in the public opinion polls frequently commissioned by the museum, the main complaint is not about over commercialization.

It is that the lines to get into the Louvre are still too long.”18 For many the mall has become a happy alternative to long security lines, but this embrace is more telling than might be expected. At the pyramid, stanchions guide visitors to a security guard through a series of switchbacks; at the mall, a succession of storefronts, and the ebb and flow of meandering shoppers, guide visitors to the museum. In both cases visitors’ bodies are paced, tempered, and slowed, before officially entering the museum. Whereas the hassle of security is measured by the wait, time spent in the mall goes unrecognized.

The mall acts as a filter before visitors reach the sanctified museum. In this way, the mall performs a similar role to security but in a manner that is much more acceptable to most visitors. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s concept of the parergon, McTavish compares the mall to a frame: “The marginal location of the Carrousel du Louvre is

16. “Best Ways to Enter the Louvre, Paris,” Paris Travel Planner & Guide. 17. Alan Riding, “A Shopping Mall at the Louvre?” The New York Times. 18. McTavish, “Shopping in the Museum?” 174.

125 structurally similar to that of the parergon…existing neither inside nor outside of the artwork, but, like the frame that surrounds a painting, providing the necessary limitation that enables the ‘centre’ or ‘main subject’ of the work to become visible.”19 Again, while the mall might seem peripheral to the museum, the Carrousel du Louvre has become an essential component of the Louvre that reinforces rather than detracts from the status of the museum. Although the positioning of the mall is somewhat different from the main entrance, its presence is not completely negated. Entering through the iconic glass pyramid, the mall is presented as an alternative to the museum, providing visitors with the coveted sense of consumer choice. In the end, the mall is present in some capacity no matter which route one takes to reach the museum. As McTavish accounts while conducting research, “moving back and forth between the collections and the food court eventually led to my realization that the consumer area crucially informed my understanding of the Grand Louvre and the works within it.”20 The mall is difficult to shake, even if only experiencing it as a transitional space on the way to the Mona Lisa.

Security is often presented as unequivocally good, but as Lucia Zedner points out

“there has been relatively little enquiry into the impact of this activity upon basic public and private goods.”21 The securitization of the Carrousel du Louvre raises questions about the space of the mall/museum. An ongoing challenge to museums has been the accusation that they are exclusionary. Aware of this critique, museums have taken

19. McTavish, “Shopping in the Museum?” 174. 20. Ibid., 173. 21. Lucia Zedner, “Too much security?” International Journal of the Sociology of Law 31, no. 3 (2003): 157.

126 measures to assuage this perception. “In recent years,” Kevin Coffee writes, “this discourse has turned on the specific practices of the museum organization; what objects it chooses to collect, the presence or absence of specific interpretations and how those interpretation are framed, how it reaches out to underserved communities or potential users, and the ergometrics used to determine effective design or architecture.”22 And yet regardless of this kind of reform, security threatens to undermine or negate any progressive steps being taken within the museum. Which is to say, despite the inclusivity of the staff, the diversification of collecting and exhibiting practices, or the fitting of the museum to the movement of bodies, if security discourages, or outright blocks, certain groups before even stepping inside of the museum, or acts as a mechanism of discipline once one enters, then it makes little difference the degree to which a museum has diversified itself.

The bundling of the mall and the museum under security has the potential to further accelerate exclusionary processes. When it comes to the securitization of malls,

Malcolm Voyce observes that exclusionary practices reinforce “middle-class consumers and their involvement in shopping and recreation.”23 Moreover, by granting access to those who align to the ‘appropriate shopping public,’ i.e. the middle-class consumer, and excluding those who are perceived as antagonistic toward that public, a certain set of

22. Kevin Coffee, “Cultural inclusion, exclusion and the formative roles of museums.” Museum Management and Curatorship 23, no. 3, (2008): 261. 23. Malcolm Voyce, “Shopping Malls,” Journal of Sociology 42, no. 3 (2006): 278.

127 behaviors and groups are normalized within the space.24 Drawing on Susan

Christopherson’s concept of consumer citizenship, Voyce argues that the mall, as a substitute for public space, creates limited kinds of participation and belonging based on the act of consuming.25 At the Louvre, the more ready one is to embrace the space of the mall, the more quickly they are granted entrance. But of course, as Voyce points out, being ready may not only entail a willingness to submit oneself to the mall but exhibiting the appropriate attributes: etiquette, habits, and outlooks. In similar vein, Marina Peterson has shown how the privatization of public space produces a limited kind of citizenship.

By focusing on the everyday use of a space, Peterson argues that privatized public space provides a certain kind of citizenship formation, and therefore a certain kind of public.26

While many people use the Carrousel du Louvre as means to access the museum, the space is made for consumption. Subsequently, belonging within the space is contingent on consuming or at the very least exhibiting the potential to consume. As Voyce contends, “shopping areas are reserved for shoppers only and that consumption is the basis of citizenship.”27 Indeed, consumption is the desired form of participation within the space, those who simply use it for transit are only tolerated, and those who appear antagonistic to it must be excluded. To be clear, those that belong within the mall,

24. Voyce, “Shopping Malls,” 280. 25. Ibid., 280. 26. Marina Peterson, “Patrolling the Plaza,” Urban Anthropology 35, no. 4 (2006): 359. 27. Voyce, “Shopping Malls,” 282.

128 according to the kind of participation that is permitted, are not political subjects, or even national ones, but consuming subjects.

One way of promoting the appropriate kind of visitor involvement, i.e. the appropriate kind of subject, is by controlling the space and those who are afforded access.

Therein lies one of the basic functions of security at the Carrousel du Louvre: filter visitors. An attack on February 3rd, 2017, helps reveal this ordinarily overlooked process.

On the stairs leading down to the mall an Egyptian man charged at a soldier with two machetes after he was told “he could not bring his bags into the mall.”28 According to news reports, “he was refused entry into the iconic museum’s underground shopping mall” because of the man’s two backpacks.29 Authorities feared that the backpacks contained explosives, but upon inspection found only spray paint. In many ways the quick handling of the situation by police and soldiers, which ended in the man being shot and apprehended, was considered a success; no casualties or serious injuries had incurred, besides those that the man suffered, and no artworks had been damaged by the spray paint. Indeed, the incident lent legitimacy to the securing of the mall and tightening security measures across the Louvre and the city. But it also brought something else into focus. Peterson writes that “the invisibility of normative citizenship is made visible

28. Rory Mulholland, “Louvre Terror Attack: Egyptian Man, ‘Who arrived in France shot five times after attacking soldier with a machete’,” Telegraph, last modified February 3, 2017, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/03/paris-knife-attack- louvre-evacuated-police-reportedly-shoot/. 29. “Soldier shoots machete-wielding suspected terrorist at Louvre Museum in Paris,” New York Daily News, last modified February 3, 2017, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/soldier-guns-suspected-terrorist-louvre- museum-article-1.2963238.

129 through actual and potential threats to the order of the public space.”30 Understood through this rationale, the incident provides more than an argument for the securitization of the mall, it makes evident latent processes working to include some and exclude others.

Those that belong in the mall, and by extension the museum, are those that appear in line with consumerism. “Citizenship is shown not to be unambiguously the realm of universal rights,” Aiken and et al write, “but rather something that is bifurcated along particular lines, often invisible to those who are considered global citizens, while being not only visible but visceral for those who are its excluded ‘crimmigrant bodies’.”31 The categorization of the incident as “terrorist in nature” draws attention to the way some are automatically linked to terrorism, while others are automatically excluded. As the

Egyptian man may have been acutely aware, even before his confrontation with soldiers, the everyone that the museum is for is not all encompassing. Certain bodies are considered suspect for the associations that they carry. The way someone looks and behaves is symptomatic according to the discourse of counterterrorism. But the way someone looks has also served as the ground from which belonging in the museum has long been determined; as Tony Bennet describes, “if the institutions of the public sphere comprised places in which its members could assemble and, indeed, recognize themselves as belonging to the same public, this was only because of the rules which

30. Marina Peterson, “Patrolling the Plaza,” 359. 31. Aiken, Sharryn, David Lyon, and Malcolm Thorburn, “Crimmigration, Surveillance and Security Threats: A Multidisciplinary Dialogue: Introduction,” Queen's Law Journal 40, no. 1 (2014): viii.

130 excluded participation by those who – in their bodily appearance and manner – were visibly different.”32 The threat of terrorism gives urgency to already formulated process of belonging and exclusion based on appearance. The machete incident suddenly brought attention to others’ suspicion. As one news report accounts, a second person was also arrested near the Louvre because he was “acting suspiciously,” but appeared not to be linked to the attack.33

Terrorism is one of the dominating frames through which security is justified and perpetuated, but terrorism has never been outside of other sociopolitical considerations.

Terrorism intersects with the economy. First, coverage of the Louvre attack highlights that security is being driven not only by the fear of terrorism but also by economic anxiety over the loss of tourism. Second, that anti-terrorism security does not stop or start at the entrance to the museum, or in this case the mall. At the Louvre, along with many other major museums, one witnesses the encroachment of a proactive security force.

More than a protective infrastructure, security is becoming increasingly anticipatory, hoping to exclude those who might be dangerous before the potential is acted on or even realized. This is one of the tenets of counter-terrorism, acting preemptively and spotting suspicion even in its nascent form. Whether an intended goal or not, the primacy of security in the museum carries intimidation and the announcement that the museum really is not for all. Security at the Louvre’s entrances, both mall and museum, filters bodies

32. Tony Bennet, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, and Politics (London, UK; New York, US: Routledge, 1995): 28. 33. Rory Mulholland, “Louvre Terror Attack.”

131 granting access to the “desired public,” as Peterson would say, and barring the undesired public. Similar to David Lyon’s suggestion that electronic surveillance disproportionately affects those who are already marginalized, security at the Louvre goes unnoticed by those who are the desired public. The ease through which visitors typically move through the Carrousel du Louvre entrances, again, helps to normalize the presence of security at the mall and fold the mall into the museum.

With fewer visitors and bookings since the attacks of 2015, tourism in France overall has been down. When it comes to the Louvre, one of the greatest tourist attractions in Paris, since 2015 the number of visitor has fallen 15%.34 “A drop in foreign tourism in Paris after a series of terrorist attacks continues to have an impact on the

Louvre’s attendance, but the museum still tops our survey with 7.4 million visitors in

2016 (down from 8.6 million in 2015).”35 While obviously someone wielding machetes presents a potential danger, how does something get counted as terrorist act as opposed to a criminal act? The Louvre is already not for everyone as it is not free. Security acts as what Sally Merry deemed as a “new regulation mechanism” which “exclude[s] people rather than trying to reform them.”36 The logic goes because it can be difficult to reform those who fall outside of the consuming public—especially, if their lifestyle appears as diametrically opposed to what is being sold—exclusion is easier and more efficient. To

34. Alissa J. Rubin and Aurelien Breeden, “Assailant Near Louvre is Shot by French Soldiers,” New York Times, last modified Febraury 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/world/europe/louvre-paris-shooting-soldier.html. 35. Pes, da Silva, and Sharpe, “Visitor Figures 2016.” 36. Voyce, “Shopping Malls,” 280.

132 consume one must have disposable capital or at least credit, and for those who fall outside capital and credit there is no easy reform. “This meant creating spaces that appeared safe to urbanites by removing people who looked dangerous or activities that seemed to reveal social disorder such as homeless people or abandoned trash.”37 The problem is twofold: first, that the museum is being further fused to consumerism, and second, that those who do not align to the desired shoppers may not only be excluded from the mall but consequently from the museums as well.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, United States

While the experience of entering the Louvre, the world’s largest museums at the center of a bustling European city, is shaped by security, consumerism, and the physical magnitude of the built environment, entering Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art could not feel more different. At the edge of a parking lot a concrete path stretches out into the woods. Following the path down, one passes various life-size bronze animals, a stream, where children play in the pooling water, and one of James Turrell’s famous

Skyspace pieces. The path is well maintained, making it easy to keep an eye out for animals, alive or bronze. At the bottom of the ravine, the woods open to an impressive view of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The museum is located about a mile from downtown Bentonville, Arkansas, and is surrounded by one-hundred-and- twenty-acre of wilderness. Reaching the museum via the well-kept path of the “Art

37. Sally Engle Merry, “Spatial Governmentality and the New Urban Social Order: Controlling Gender Violence Through Law.” American Anthropologist 103, no. 1 (2001): 16.

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Trail,” brings visitors to the museum’s Southern Entrance. Unobstructed by ticket lines or security checks, one can be standing in front of a John Singer Sargent painting within a matter of seconds after stepping into the building.

The name of the museum is derived from a nearby natural spring and the two bridges that architect Moshe Safdie incorporated into the design of the building.38

Grounded in a vision that combines art and nature, the museum is intended to facilitate an appreciation of the two in relation to one another: “The mission of Crystal Bridges

Museum of American Art is to welcome all to celebrate the American spirit in a setting that unites the power of art with the beauty of nature.”39 Positioning the museum as a kind of sanctuary where art and nature are celebrated and coalesce has functioned as the official discourse of the museum. The strategic saddling of high culture and nature manifests not only in the museum’s robust collection and physical locale, rural northwestern Arkansas, but in the design of the complex. The physical characteristics of the museum contributes to the coupling of culture and nature that the museum strives to exemplify. Marrying industrial features, such as glass, concrete, and wire suspensions, with a spring fed pawn at its center, the museum has constructed an image of being both a premiere art center, on par with other major institutions, and a unique attraction that is and of the region.

38. “About Crystal Bridges,” Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, http://crystalbridges.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Crystal-Bridges-Overview-4.21.16- 1.pdf. 39. “About Crystal Bridges.”

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The relative ease through which one can enter the museum, the fluidity between the natural and built environment, and the fact that there is no admission fee for the permanent collection sets Crystal Bridges apart from many other museums. Moreover, these factors seem to support the museum’s claim that it is for “everyone.” I will argue, however, that Crystal Bridges’ security is based on shared set of assumptions—which align with rather than counter security at other museums—thereby setting a limit to the museum’s proclaimed inclusivity. In the spatial rendering of inclusion and exclusion,

Peterson outlines, “use regulations, the built environment, and security surveillance tactics are some the primary means of marking relative inclusions and exclusions.”40 In terms of use, while some may take to the trails that surround the complex, for most visitors, the museum offers a standard viewing experience. This experience entails, as

Rolf Steier et al describe, “hushed social interactions, with exhibitions designed to encourage individuals walking reflectively from artwork to artwork, gallery to gallery, constructing meaning through observations and perhaps talking quietly with friends or family about curated displays.”41 In short, like most museums, Crystal Bridges encourages the aesthetic contemplation of art, and nature. Conversely, the built environment deviates a bit more from the typical museum. The folding of the built environment into the landscape, albeit a manicured one, gives Crystal Bridges an air of openness and flexibility that seems to oppose the museum as an enclosure or container.

40. Peterson, “Patrolling the Plaza,” 359. 41. Rolf Steier, Palmyre Pierrouxa, and Ingeborg Krange, “Embodied interpretation: Gesture, social interaction, and meaning making in a national art museum.” Learning, Culture and Social Interaction 7 (2015): 28.

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Security too seems to contribute to the museum’s openness as visitors can freely enter the museum without encountering a security guard or having their bags checked. There is, of course, the occasional security camera mounted in the corner or on a pole outside but for the most part the museum’s security presence is low-key, and unobtrusive. To summarize, although the intended use of the museum is the standard model of contemplation, i.e. limited to a certain kind of participation/involvement, the openness of the built environment and the relaxed security presence suggests that the museum does offer a more inclusive environment/space. At stake in these factors, as Peterson asserts, is the defining and creation of “a public and its other.”42 Therefore, while it is tempting to link the physical openness of the museum and its relatively low security presence to

Crystal Bridges’ overall inclusivity, stepping away from the museum and examining instead its position within the region and those that come to visit the museum reveals that the museum does indeed have a public and its other.

Crystal Bridges has become a full-fledged tourist attraction drawing in tourist and art enthusiast from around the region and beyond. Located in the northwest corner of

Arkansas, the museum stands out for its rural setting and its robust collection. Many have credited the museum with bringing a substantial art center to an otherwise overlooked region of the “Natural State.” The magnitude of the museum within the region has not been lost on visitors, as social media reviews demonstrate. One visitor writes, “Amazing museum! Hard to believe we have such an amazing resource right here in Arkansas and

42. Peterson, “Patrolling the Plaza,” 359.

136 completely free of charge thanks [to] contributions by our Arkansas industry leaders.”43

Another visitor writes, “The best art museum in the [M]idwest. Don't get me wrong it is

‘World Class’. Devoted to American art, with a world class permanent collection and traveling installations you would never expect to see in Arkansas.”44 But as John

Wilmerding, one of the museum’s board members, remarks, ‘Like it or not, Alice

[Walton] envisions this as a destination point.’45 Crystal Bridges is a site of “pilgrimage for art enthusiasts,” Rebecca Mead writes in The New Yorker.46 While Bentonville has undergone substantial growth over the past decade, it has yet to become a bustling urban center.47 Instead, the city is a mixture of tourist attractions, strip malls, and small-town living, which is reflected in the museum’s visitors. Alice Walton the founder of Crystal

Bridge, and heiress to the multinational retailing corporation Wal-Mart claims that her

“ambition is to create a viewing space for art in which everyone feels welcome.”48 While

43. Suzanne Jones, comment on Google Map “Grystal Bridges Museum of American Art,” April 2017, https://www.google.com/#q=crystal+bridges+museum&lrd=0x87c91a14c433925b:0xad2 60359e45b143b,1,&spf=1499445775969. 44. Beaver Lake Bonner, comment on Google Map “Grystal Bridges Museum of American Art,” June 2017, https://www.google.com/#q=crystal+bridges+museum&lrd=0x87c91a14c433925b:0xad2 60359e45b143b,1,&spf=1499445775969. 45. Rebecca Mead, “Alice’s Wonderland: A Walmart heiress builds a museum in the Ozarks,” The New Yorker, last modified June 27, 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/27/alices-wonderland. 46. Ibid. 47. “About Bentonville,” The City of Bentonville, http://www.bentonvillear.com/about-bentonville. 48. Michael Leja, “Grystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Ark.,” Art Bullintin 94, no. 4 (2012): 654.

137 appealing to the community of Bentonville, Crystal Bridges is more than anything a destination site that brings group and visitors into the museum.

Before Crystal Bridges rose up as an attraction within the region, Bentonville was famous for being home to the first Wal-Mart in the nation. Unsurprisingly, it is this lineage that both the town and the museum are part of. Crystal Bridge is the brainchild of

Alice Walton. Providing the vision and the initial collection, Walton and the Walton foundation have been the financial backers of the museum. In discussing the sponsorship of cultural institutions by corporations, Emma Mohony explains, “the most valuable aspect of cultural sponsorship to a business or corporation is the manner in which it enables the donor to construct a socially acceptable identity through a process of image transfer.”49 This kind of transfer can be identified in the review quoted earlier – the museum is directly linked to the generosity of corporations. But even more than a good public relations strategy, Mohony writes that sponsorship can be valuable to business as

“it grants them [access] to the political apparatuses of state power and the means therein to turn the cultural capital they have amassed into political power.”50 In 1991, Walton was instrumental in Congress approval of the construction of a four-lane highway connecting Bentonville with Oklahoma City, to the west, and with Little Rock, to the east. And in 1998, she spearheaded the construction of the Northwest Arkansas Regional

49. Emma Mohony, “Opening Spaces of Resistance in the Corporatized Cultural Institution: Liberate Tate and the Art Not Oil Coalition,” Museum & Society 15, no. 2 (2017): 128. 50. Mohony, “Opening Spaces of Resistance,” (128).

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Airport.51 While these activities preceded the construction of the museum, they highlight

Walton’s political influence and desire to turn first Bentonville, and later Crystal Bridges, into a tourist destination.

Exclusion, as discussed earlier, is frequently achieved through either a limited range of uses, the physical environment, or the implementation of security. In the case of

Crystal Bridges, the museum’s regional isolation, outside of a metropolitan area, is the grounds upon which inclusion and exclusion are hashed out. The museum’s public is made of those who have the economic means to travel to the region, whether by highway or jet plane, primarily affluent tourist, and art enthusiast. The museum’s other is the same as the Louvre’s: those that potentially pose a threat to the values and ethos of the institution. Here, the difference lies in the fact that Crystal Bridges is outside of the urban center that has become associated with danger and risk.

The museum’s locale allows it to present itself as fully open and inclusive because its geographical isolation already insures a level of exclusion. In their study of museums, Bourdieu and Darbel write,

Statistics show that access to cultural works is the privilege of the cultivated class; however, this privilege has all the outward appearances of legitimacy. In fact, only those who exclude themselves are ever excluded. Given that there is nothing more accessible than museums and the economic obstacles that can be seen at work in other spheres count for little here, it seems quite justified to invoke the natural inequality of ‘cultural needs’. However, the self-destructive nature of this ideology is obvious. If it is indisputable that our society offers to all the pure possibility of taking advantage of the works on display in museums, it remains the case that only some have the real possibility of doing so.52

51. Mead, “Alice’s Wonderland.” 52. Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel. The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 37.

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What Bourdieu and Darbel make clear is that by ignoring socioeconomic realities, exclusion, whether institutional or social, can be pinned to individual choice. In the case of Crystal Bridges, by ignoring mechanism of exclusion based on socioeconomic standings, an image of inclusion and openness can be maintained. To take Crystal

Bridges’ seemingly minimal security as an indicator of the museum’s openness and inclusion is to overlook the socioeconomic and sociopolitical exclusion that comes from the museum’s physical isolation.

Guarding the Museum: Engaging Visitors, Spotting Suspicion

Security guards have become a fixture of the art museum. In many museum, guards are found stationed throughout the premise: at entrances, in galleries, and common areas like atriums, cafes, and courtyards. Often, guards can be spotted standing, or sitting, in room after room stoically watching over artworks and visitors. At times, these figures have gone unrecognized, and at others, they have been associated with an underlying intimidation of museums. Artist Fred Wilson’s 1991 installation, Guarded View, drew attention to this often-overlooked position and the bodies that have historically filled this low-level and low-paid position. The work is comprised of four black headless mannequins dressed as museum security guards. The mannequins’ sport uniforms that correspond to those worn at the Museum of Modem Art, the Metropolitan Museum of

Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Jewish Museum in New York. By bringing the guards into view, latent power dynamics are also exposed. Kim Kanatani and Vas Prabhu write that Guarded View is “a powerful reminder that those who protect

140 works of art are frequently underrepresented in those very same museum collections.”53

While the division between artistic representation and those who stand watch over museum galleries has not been bridged, since Wilson’s piece the museum guard has come under revision. The protection of artifacts, objects, and artworks, has long served as the primary duty of museum security guards, but under economic and political pressures this role has diversified. The changing nature of security guards is evident in their shifting roles and their structuring. Here, I map out two broad directions in which museum security appears to be heading: first, I explore the rise of a trendy new cool and casual security guard, which I call Security Genius, and draw out the ways in which this new guard is related to shifts in museum funding and the economy writ large. Second, I examine the securitization of the museum guard, which I call Museum Security Officer after the TSA’s Transportation Security Officer, specifically the aligning of museum security to national interests and the war against terrorism.

Security Genius

To stay relevant and attractive to visitors in an attention-grabbing market, museums have undergone a kind of facelift, making the museum appear more user friendly and welcoming. The emergence of the “visitor-centered museum,” for Roy

Balantyne and David Uzzell, is linked to rising economic competition.54 This new focus

53. Kim Kanatani and Vas Prabhu, “Artists Comment on Museum Practices,” Art Education 49, no. 2, (1996): 29. 54. Roy Balantyne and David Uzzell, “Looking Back and Looking Forward: The Rise of the Visitor-centered Museum,” Curator: The Museum Journal 54, no. 1 (2011): 87.

141 on the visitor’s experience is also affecting security. By taking account of practitioners in the field we can see how this shift is changing security. I trace the trendy new security guard through media reactions to security at the Broad museum in Los Angeles, and my ethnographic research conducted at the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA). Opening in

2008, the Broad offers a museum that recently went through the process of envisioning its security from the ground up. On the other hand, the CMA, which can be traced back to

1878, serves as a good example of an older museum re-envisioning what it wants security to be.

In a New York Times article, author Robin Pogrebin describes “A New Kind of

Security Guard.” Unlike the “blank-faced employees in blazers who guard museum galleries [and] are likely to tell you not to stand too close to the paintings, not to touch the sculptures, not to take flash pictures,” the Broad security guards are different, writes

Pogrebin.55 These guards, which go by the title of visitor services associates, are outgoing and attempt to engage museum visitors, and, according to Pogrebin, this visitor friendly guard is a not actually unique to the Broad, across the board contemporary museums have sought a new kind of security model in their galleries. The New York Times article explains in the case of the Broad, the museum “took a page from the retail world, namely

Apple stores, in which sales employees roam the space with remote, handheld devices,

55. Pogrebin, Robin. “A New Kind of Security Guard: Know-It-Alls in the Best Way,” New York Times, last modified March 15, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/17/arts/design/a-new-kind-of-museum-guard-know-it- alls-in-the-best-way.html

142 rather than ring up customers at a conventional checkout counter.”56 The fashioning of museum guards after sales employees transfers most immediately in the guards’ physical comportment, rather than being stationary and reserved, guards become mobile and available to visitors. At Apple, individual employees’ jobs are associated with particular roles in the store. The description for a Specialist and Genius are particularly enlightening when it comes to the new museum security guard:

Specialist Transform Apple Store visitors into loyal Apple customers. As a Specialist, you help create the energy and excitement around Apple products, providing solutions and getting products into customers’ hands. Always curious, you stay on top of news about products and initiatives, ready to apply your expertise in customer interactions.

Genius Use your problem-solving and people skills to ensure swift resolutions to technical problems of every kind. As a Genius, you provide insightful advice and friendly, hands-on technical support to Apple customers in need. You also educate your team members about products, while independently keeping your own technical know-how up to date.57

The Apple store employee, as the above descriptions illuminates, sells products by being friendly, energetic, and full of useful information concerning the topic at hand and plethora of other things a customer didn’t even know they needed to know. Like the

Apple Specialist or Genius, the new museum guard is ready and excited to engage visitors about the artwork in the museum and all sorts of other things. However, whereas the Apple employee strives to create brand loyalty, the new guard attempts to secure the

56. Pogrebin, “A New Kind of Security Guard.” 57. “Jobs at Apple,” Apple Store, accessed October 20, 2017, https://www.apple.com/jobs/uk/retail.html.

143 museum by being interactive and entertaining. At the Broad, guards “are just as likely to volunteer information about, say, that Ellsworth Kelly canvas,” Pogrebin explains, as

“places to go in the neighborhood after you leave the museum. Walt Disney Concert

Hall? The restaurant Otium? The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels?”58 A guard at

CMA tells me that his job recently changed – now he is encouraged to talk to visitors and know about the exhibitions. The change is welcome, he says, it helps pass the time and it has provided him with a new understanding of art. Another guard describes the way the changes in the position have changed the way security is handled: “Now, if I see someone standing too close to an artwork, I approach them and ask them what they think about the piece.”59 Engaging visitors first rather than just reprimanding is the new visitor-centered motto of museum security. This new approach at the Broad was covered in a Morning

Edition episode shortly after the museum opened: “At the 5-month-old Broad Museum, guards aren’t just there to protect the beautiful and provocative art. They are there to engage with visitors — talking and teaching about the artworks.”60 At the Broad these new security guards are officially called Visitor Services Associates and at CMA they are called Gallery Associates. The renaming of these positions signifies the shift in roles, but one could go a step further and call them security specialist or security genius after the

Apple model. With a friendly demeanor and helpful information always on hand the job

58. Pogrebin, “A New Kind of Security Guard.” 59. CMA field notes. 60. Susan Stamberg, “Avant Guard: At LA's Broad Museum, A New Approach To Protecting Art,” NPR Morning Edition, last modified February 23, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/02/23/467681344/avant-guard-at-las-broad-museum-a-new- approach-to-protecting-art.

144 description of these new museum security guards mirror initiatives taken in the corporate sector, specifically Apple, but also broader changes in the economy.

Funding crises currently restructuring museums is one of the driving forces in the re-envisioning, and renaming, of museum security guards. Balantyne and Uzzell explain that museums are “being altered by decreases in government funding for formal and informal post-school education; a focus on the visitor as ‘client’; the rise of informal mass education within the ‘experience economy’; and altered perceptions of the role and place of museums in supporting growth in the tourism sector and demonstrating value in serving local communities.”61 The recasting of the visitor as client is evident of the modeling of security after the corporate sector. In the experience based economy the customer always comes first. While on the one hand, visitor-centered security seems to be less intimidating, it is worth asking what is being sold and has security been transformed.

The response to changes in museum security has been positive, as the New York

Times and Morning Edition pieces demonstrate, but security in and of itself has not been dramatically altered. The perception that this new approach to security is vastly different than more traditional models is deftly captured in the Morning Edition piece: “In the museum mecca of Washington, D.C., gallery guards wear cop suits and immobile faces.

The Broad guards have no uniforms — they wear black clothes, bright red lanyards and big smiles. They schmooze about the art and the building, and politely keep visitors from

61. Balantyne and Uzzell, “Looking Back and Looking Forward,” 88.

145 getting too close to the work.” 62 Despite the sharp contrast drawn between a more traditional security model and the new visitor-centered approach, guards, or Visitor

Services Associates or Gallery Associates, are still monitoring visitors’ behaviors, movements, and conversations, the difference is that rather than standing back, they are stepping in; engagement is a new kind of security tactic.

SVOT: Screening Visitors by Observations Techniques

If economic pressures are one major force pushing changes in the traditional role of museum security, another is the fear-based rhetoric surrounding terrorism. As discussed in previous sections, museums have become a part of the anti-terrorist landscape. Whereas theft and vandalism once dominated museum security, now terrorism, safety, and risk are at least as important. In many museums, the securitization of the museum is evident in the number of guards, police officers, or soldiers, as in the case of the Louvre, and in the observable use of security equipment or technology. For example, on entering the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, visitors are guided through a security check that entails walking through a metal detector and having bags x-rayed, which comes very close to the experience of airport security. But perhaps the most telling attribute when it comes to the museum’s recruitment into the arena of counter terrorism is the rationale that animates security personnel and technology.

One of the greatest museum heist of the modern period occurred in 1990 at the

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts. Thirteen artworks were

62. Stamberg, “Avant Guard: At LA's Broad Museum.”

146 stolen which together amounted to approximately $500 million. While the whereabouts of these artworks remain unknown and the theft continues to serve as a lesson in museum security, today security at the Gardner is equally concerned with terrorism. Of course, this is not unique to the Gardner, but the museum provides a compelling example of the way Homeland Security is being mapped onto the space of the museum. The modeling of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s security after Homeland Security is best captured in the current Director of Security’s own words and professional experience. In 2005,

Anthony Amore became the Director of Security at the Gardner. Beyond being a best- selling author, for his books “Stealing Rembrandts” (2011) and “The Art of the Con”

(2015), Amore played a significant role in the development and implementation of new security measures at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). Under the TSA, as the Assistant Federal Security Director for Inspections at Logan International Airport in Boston, Amore was instrumental in the adoption of new security techniques following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Taking the advice of Israeli Intelligence, Amore helped put several new measures into practice, including most notably the SPOT program,

“Screening Passengers by Observations Techniques,” as he accounts:

Immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Israeli security consultants offered a number of important suggestions for improving security at Logan Airport. However, I would submit that the most valuable post-9/11 security initiatives implemented at the airport were the result of a close working relationship forged between officials from the Massachusetts Port Authority (Massport, the governing body that runs Logan Airport), the Transportation Security Administration, and the Massachusetts State Police. Perhaps the best

147

example of the collaborative effort is the implementation of the ‘‘Screening Passengers by Observations Techniques’’ (SPOT) program.63

Rachel Hall traces the genesis of SPOT to the enlistment of Rafi Ron, the former director of security at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, and Paul Ekman, a behavioral psychologist, known for his research on the facial cues of deception.64 In conjunction with TSA, Massachusetts Port Authority, and Massachusetts State Police, these two men helped stage a trial run of what was first called “Behavior Pattern

Recognition Program,” at Logan. By the end the program, what became SPOT looked different from its Israeli counterpart. Hall explains, “by comparison to the Israeli system, the SPOT programme relies more on visual observation of passengers from a short distance away and eliminates the mandatory one-on-one interview.”65 While I deal with

SPOT more thoroughly in later chapters, what is critical here is the impact SPOT had on

Amore. Despite the major critiques the program has faced—including being scientifically flawed and racially biased—Amore claims SPOT was and is an effective security measure. He states, “I truly believe it is an essential layer of security in the airport environment, as it has been proven effective and is a great motivator for guard personnel.” 66 The usefulness Amore identifies in SPOT is not limited to aviation and travelers. Whereas in the airport, SPOT is directed toward passengers, applied to the

63. Noah Charney, “Q&A with Two Innovative Security Directors Dennis Ahern and Anthony Amore,” in Art and crime: Exploring the Dark Side of the Art World, ed. Noah Charney (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2009), 127. 64. Rachel Hall, “Unwitting Performances of Transparency Monitoring the travelling public, managing airport affect.” Performance Research 16, no. 2 (2011): 99. 65. Hall, “Unwitting Performances of Transparency,” 99. 66. Charney, “Q&A with Two Innovative Security Directors,” 128.

148 museum, the focus could be visitors. Amore argues that not only does observational techniques offer an effective screening method in museums but “behavioral observation training makes for a more engaged guard, and helps to eliminate the monotony that can come with being stationed in a gallery for an extended period of time.”67 The suggestion that SPOT, or programs like SPOT, should be adopted by museums neatly sums up the desire to replicate Homeland Security in the context of the museum.

While Amore may be one of a few who are calling for the implementation of observation screening techniques in the museum, he is not alone in seeing terrorism as a major threat to museums and the need for a robust, diligent, and proactive museum security force. In a New York Times article chronicling the lives of museum security guards, one guard, a former soldier, expresses the need for constant vigilance at museums. He argues that, despite being more peaceful, working as a guard is more difficult than in the military because at least there ‘you knew who your enemy was.’ At the museum, ‘Everybody who comes through the door is a threat,’ and as the article writes “visitors to museums tend not to advertise themselves as terrorists.”68

Professionals in the field, like Amore and the guard above, give voice to the perceived threat of terrorism waiting at museums doorsteps. Furthermore, as practitioners these

67. Charney, “Q&A with Two Innovative Security Directors,” 128. 68. Daid Wallis, “Varied Duties, and Many Facets, in a Guard’s Life,” New York Times, last modified March 23, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/arts/artsspecial/museum-guards-on-life-beyond-the- galleries.html.

149 perspectives provide evidence of the way museum security is being reoriented and fitted toward the project of counter-terrorism.

Sensing Security in the Museum

While serving as a place to house and exhibit art, museums unfold as sites of heightened embodiment. Indeed, as Jones and MacLeod argue the museum is not an

“inert container,” but a space of production, contingencies and implications that are constantly in process and evolving.69 In the Columbus Museum of Art (CMA), the practice of seeing, touching, and moving are taught, rehearsed, and corrected. While the multimodality and embodied spectatorship has been studied in relation to the production of meaning,70 here I examine where security and spectatorship overlap and inform each not to produce meaning but to produce appropriate or ideal bodies, disciplined; “docile” in Foucault’s term. Moving through the museum, I examine how security is worked through the senses in the context of the museum, specifically vision.71 The modern museum exemplifies a space in which seeing is upheld as the dominant mode of

69. Paul Jones and Suzanne MacLeod, “Museum Architecture Matters,” Museum & Society 14, no. 1 (2016): 208. 70. Dimitra Christidou and Sophia Diamantopoulou, “Seeing and Being Seen: The Multimodality of Museum Spectatorship,” Museum & Society 14, no. 1 (2016): 12- 32. 71. For discussion of art history and ocularcentrism see Jenni Lauwrens, “Welcome to the revolution: The sensory turn and art history,” Journal of Art Historiography, no. 7 (December 2012): 1-17.

150 sensing.72 Louise Amoore’s claim that the visual has become the sovereign sense is animated in the museum in the performance of visitors and gallery associates alike.73

Signs that read, “PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE SCULPTURES” are posted through the retrospective of Melvin Edwards’ work in the special exhibition galleries.

While serving to protect the artwork and visitors, which seems appropriate considering

Edwards’ barbwire pieces, these signs reminds viewers what sense is suitable and which is not. Touch is kept under tight watch, control, and discipline in the museum. Once a body has entered the museum, the museum works to cultivate tactful bodies. “Tact,” Erin

Manning writes, “embodies this injunction that challenges me in advance to have known how and when I should or should not touch.”74 For Manning tact is the rival of the possibilities of touch—restrained, predictable, expectable—safe. More than a matter of politeness or social capital, tact limits political participation. “If security implies a certain stopping,” states Manning, “or at least stalling of the body, and if tact is complicit with this abeyance of the body, tact would have to be juxtaposed to what the body can do

72. For the role of the senses in 18th and 19th century museums see Constance Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” Journal of Social History, (summer 2007): 895-914. Also for a discussion of contemporary museums expanding visitor engagement through touch, see Fiona Candlin, “Don't Touch! Hands Off! Art, Blindness and the Conservation of Expertise,” Body & Society 10 (2004): 71- 90. 73. For a historical perspective on the social importance of touch see Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 74. Erin Manning, Politics of Touch (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 134.

151 through a politics of touch.”75 In the tightly delimited use of touch and the securing of tact, the museum insists on the containment of the body.

In the main galleries and exhibition spaces, gallery associates tend closely to the movement of bodies through the spaces, especially in proximity to the artworks. The disciplinary aspect of the museum is not entirely surprising. By watching and paying attention to the movement and behaviors of visitors, the associates try to anticipate and divert any visitors from getting touchably close to the art. The introduction of interactive galleries and creative spaces within the museum further accentuates the import of knowing how and when to touch.

While in the main exhibition spaces seeing as the appropriateness sense is constantly reinforced, touch becomes the basis of the interactive galleries where “hands- on activities” and “play” are rehearsed. The division between the two spaces is somewhat striking and demonstrates that knowledge of what is appropriate will help visitors move between the two seemingly opposed environments. While crafts and games invite children and adults to feel their way through creative exercises and puzzles, in the rest of the museum, where art should be looked at and contemplated, touch is tightly restricted76.

These sensory restraints, Constance Classen writes, “[are] generally expected to govern the behavior of museum visitors.”77 Before entering the Special Exhibition Gallery, a

75. Manning, Politics of Touch, 135. 76. For a discussion of the museum in relation to the scopic regime see Kevin Hetherington, “Museums and the Visually Impaired: The Spatial Politics of Access,” Sociological Review 48, no. 3, (2000): 444-463. 77. Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” 895.

152 woman says to the three children at her side, “you, you, and you, listen to me, do not

TOUCH anything!” Again, in a way this seems reasonable, hand smudges on the glass covering Reaper in the Sun would make seeing the photograph more difficult, but the implications of this withdrawn seeing are worth considering, particularly as they overlap and inform security in the museum.

Standing on one of the walkways that dissect the atrium, a gallery associate tells me that his job is to pay attention to the environment, looking out for large bags, kids, and the proximity of visitors to artwork. Paying attention, for him, means watching and anticipating the movement of visitors. Similarly, another associate described his job as

“watching the space,” watching for touching, photography, and safety. In the words of another associate, his primary job was to monitor the galleries – stand back and observe, and if necessary reminds patrons not get too close. “Touching is our main sense when we don’t understand something,” the associate told me, “security has to deny that sense.” In order to sustain the dominance of the visual, as separate from the other senses, Amoore states, “the vigilant and watchful mode must occlude the possibility of seeing differently.” More specifically, she writes, “it must say ‘look, but don’t touch.’”78 This is the reality of the museum. Seeing cannot involve other sensory faculties, it is restricted to the eyes and the distance that eyes have come to connote. CMA is surely not unique in reinforcing and securing the visual experience of the museum. In fact, compared to some other institutions the CMA seems more relaxed, changing the security guards to gallery

78. Louise Amoore, “Vigilant Visualities: The Watchful Politics of the War on Terror,” Security Dialogue 38, no 2 (2007): 223.

153 associates and not requiring them to wear uniforms signals a conscious move by the museum to make a more welcoming environment. But despite the changes in security the visual dominance of the museum has not been altered. Seeing is what is appropriate in the museum and the associates see to it that seeing is enforced.

Two photographs from a recent trip to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at

Cornell University demonstrate how visual cues help guide the visitor’s senses and support the persistence of vision. “NO FLASH PHOTOS” and “DO NOT TOUCH” under crossed out icons of a black camera and a white hand, set the parameters of what kind of engagement visitors should have. A nondescript black footprint, also crossed out, visually delineates where is not acceptable to stand or be. Although these signs are seemingly innocuous, like those at the CMA, they offer uncritical compliments to what

Amoore has termed “watchful politics.” As she writes, “touching the image would in some way expose the elevated fiction of a purely visual experience.”79 Thus, she argues, sustaining the impression of the purely visual experience, must always involve prohibiting of touch.80 In the typical museum, we are asked to contemplate works of art, to reflect on their meanings, implications, and physicality, but our experience of such works is confined to the visual. As Classen states, “Artefacts for the most part are only to be seen, not felt, smelt, sounded and certainly not tasted.”81 Contemplating with one’s

79. Amoore, “Watchful Politics,” 223. 80. Ibid. 81. Classen, “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum,” 895.

154 hands, or any other faculty besides the eye, is prohibited. Unless the artwork invites it, we are constrained to the visual domain.

Figure 9. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. Photographs by Nils Seiler (2016).

Security Structure: Assemblage

Rather than being defined as a “bastion of cultural treasures that can be viewed within an ahistorical and neutral setting,” which “is coded as different from that of the everyday exterior world,”82 the contemporary museum is entangled in and reflective of external processes. This relationship allows the museum to be thought of as a kind of a homology that can bear on other sites of security. Homologies, according to Baz

Kershaw, allow diverse things to be linked together through shared structures.83 One example is the human hand to the bat’s wing; although at first appearing different,

82. McTavish, “Shopping in the Museum?” 174. 83. Baz Kershaw, “Performance as Research: Live Events and Documents,” in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 27.

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Kershaw explains that the structure of the bones in the hand are very similar to the bat’s wing. Of course, this is the biological example but it is informative. The structure of security at the museum can be taken as a homology to other security sites. Thus, looking at museum security might reveal aspects of security in other contexts or underlying principles of security across different institutions and spaces.

With a request to access the monitoring screens of the security system, I was put in contact with the Director of Facilities and Security. When we sat down at the metal table in the courtyard, the director asked how he could assist me. I explained that I was hoping to see how the security camera system operated within the museum. He replied,

“well that’s not gonna happen.” The museum, as the director informed me, is no different from any other institution in terms of security, besides the fact of the art. While hoping to gain a better understanding of how the cameras function within the space and their interworking with people, having access denied was a reminder of the secrecy of security at any scale. As in the case with closed-circuit television (CCTV) systems, “who controls and has access to the video images generated” is often a point of contention and concern.84 For example, David Bilson, head of security and visitor services at the British

Musum, asserts, “security was an important factor in the design for the new facility.” 85

He goes on to explain, “in fact, we upgraded security substantially because of the nature of that building...It integrates all the modern technology of cameras, alarms, access

84. Surette, “The Thinking Eye,” 155. 85. Ann Longmore-Etheridge, “Museum of the World and the World,” Security Management, last modified January 1, 2017, https://sm.asisonline.org/Pages/A-Museum- of-the-World-and-for-the-World.aspx.

156 control, and now the new radio system.’”86 Security, here, is not an afterthought or added consideration but is a guiding factor in the physical architecture of the building. The

“authoring of space” is shaped according to the ideals and principles of security.87

With my camera bag resting beside my chair, the director began to tell me about the three-tiered system of security in the museum. The gallery associates positions had recently changed, no longer were they security guards, they were now gallery associates.

Armed with more knowledge of the art and casual wear, associates are now encouraged to engage patrons before reprimanding them, to start a conversation to deter inappropriate behavior. In this new role, the gallery associates do not only extend the eyes of security, which they do do, but they are also charged with providing a good experience for visitors.

At first, the impression was given that the gallery associates were a substitute for an older form of security, but as I sat outside the museum talking with the director it became clear that the older, harder, form of security had not been replaced. Rather, its visibility had been withdrawn. The face of security in the museum might have changed, but the seriousness of the former security remains. The persistence of the older security is captured in the schema and the status of security in the museum. Security is structured around a three-tiered model: first, there are the gallery associates; second, there is the floor security staff, “Public Safety Officers;” and last, there are control room operators.

The gallery associates are at the forefront of the process occupying the most exterior level of security and engaging with patrons regularly. The middle tier is occupied by a select

86. Longmore-Etheridge, “Museum of the World and the World.” 87. Jones and MacLeod, “Museum Architecture Matters,” (209).

157 few who provide an “authoritative presence” within the museum. On one encounter, I asked a well-dressed man in a black suit and hat if he was a gallery associate, he replied,

“NO, I am security.” At the core, behind the scenes, are the operators monitoring security cameras as well as other sensors installed throughout the museum. This is similar to the model of security at the Broad, as Joanne Heyler, the Director of the museum, describes,

“we have a state-of-the-art security system that includes security guards whose sole job is traditional security,” and she continues, “we have cameras everywhere.”88 While the

CMA Director of Facilities explained that security is balanced at every level with consideration to the experience of patrons, security becomes progressively more serious and less open and friendly moving from the outer tier to the inner workings.

The three-tiered model reveals the security at work underneath the museum’s friendly gallery associates. Similarly, the status of security is not open. The director would not disclose the exact number of cameras or what they were directed at, but he did inform me that the museum has the capability to see the entirety of the museum. While security cameras help bring the space of the museum into a visual whole, “the camera does not see,” as Sunanne Wigorts Yngvesson explains, “rather, it is used for seeing or watching – an apparatus is a prosthetic in an Aristotelian sense; as an extension of the experience and capabilities of the body.”89 Security cameras are used to visually access

88. Stamberg, “Avant Guard: At LA's Broad Museum.” 89. Sunanne Wigorts Yngvesson, “To See the World as It Appears: Vision, the Gaze and the Camera as Technological Eye,” in Invisibility Studies: Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture, ed. Henriette Steiner; Kristin Veel (Oxford, UK; New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2015), 274.

158 the entirety of the museum by supplying a collage of the whole, but what is the whole of the museum seen through security cameras? For Merleau-Ponty a thing itself is none of its appearances, the thing always extends beyond the image or perspective given and is therefore always partial.90 Security strives to overcome the deficiency of a perspective by acquiring more cameras and giving cameras the ability to pan, tilt, and zoom. In the museum operators watch the monitors for anything that “doesn’t look right.” There is a kind of anticipation involved in watching. Close attention is paid to bodily mannerisms and a “heightened awareness of extending the body.” With proximity to the art, visitors’ movements are closely scrutinized. Objects can extend the body in dangerous ways.

Bags, books, and pens are things to look out for as most people are “unaware of their surroundings.” The museum maintains security presence 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The director explains that since 9/11 people know to expect security, and that “each and every one of us has a part of impacting security” simply by learning to pay attention.

In the early years of security cameras, cameras were placed in the “geographical area that contained the most essential organs of the state.”91 While securing the state’s symbolic and critical infrastructure has not been forgotten, security no longer seems extremely concentrated within specific areas; rather it is dispersed throughout society, through different levels and degrees of authority. No longer are state arteries the predominant focus, nor is the state the sole perpetrator. Security is also carried out by

90. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 67. 91. Chris Williams, “Police Surveillance and the Emergence of CCTV in the 1960s,” 28.

159 commercial, public, and private entities, creating a situation in which multiple securities often overlap one another in any given area. At CMA, for example, multiple entities have a security presence that helps shape a larger matrix within the neighborhood. Security in the city, or densely populated areas, is being pursued at various levels and at times it snaps into focus as a larger security assemblage. “Assemblage” for Deleuze and Guattari is a way to address the body as more than organ and open it to “circuits, conjunctions, levels and thresholds, passages and distributions of intensity.”92 For this discussion, assemblage affords recognition of various components and layers of security coming together (as discussed in chapter two). One day the director of facilities and security spotted a man in his underwear standing on one of the museum lawns. He alerted other security entities in the neighborhood as well as the police. Various security entities in the neighborhood tracked the man’s movement across the lawn and down a back street.

Before the police had arrived, they had him surrounded. “Linking security creates a powerful force,” the director says, that is more extensive than the police. The event of a man traversing the grassy lawn of the museum in his underwear exposes the assemblage of security in the immediate area.

Conclusion

The question of who museums are for has been a point of contention from their inception. At the birth of the museum in the 18th century, the museum came to symbolize

92. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 160.

160 the rise of democratic principles while simultaneously offering the Bourgeois a way to distinguish themselves “from raucous manners of the general populace,” as Tony Bennet has explained.93 From the beginning, the museum has been pulled in contradictory directions, opening to some, closing to others. Museum security has evolved out of a perceived need to protect artworks, incrementally becoming more robust as threats manifest. Over the course of the 20th century, security primarily advanced in response to high profile heists, such as the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911 from the Louvre and the more the $500 million worth of art stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner

Museum in 1990. Linked to these extraordinary events, museum security has progressed, for the most part, uncritically. The general acceptance of museum security, excluding visitors’ annoyance with wait times, has supplied a space in which security has become deeply engrained in all aspects of the museum. In this space, security has been extended beyond the protection of objects; security in the museum is about screening and filtering visitors, the monitoring of bodies, and the discipline of corporeality and the senses.

Manning writes, “In disciplinary narratives of security, sense is secured in the name of territorialized reason. Even in a globalized world, we can not overlook the manner in which narratives of security continue to configure our understandings of what it means to live in time and space.”94 The disciplining of the senses in the name of security is also a securing of the senses, in Manning’s words, a securing that produces certain ways of being in the world. David Howes writes, “Every domain of sensory experience is also an

93. Tony Bennet. The Birth of the Museum, 28. 94. Manning, Politics of Touch, 158.

161 arena for structuring social roles and interactions.”95 In the museum, disciplining not only works to preserve artifacts but structures ways of sensing and being—and what kind of sociability might emerge.

Economic and political pressures are orienting contemporary museum security.

This is evident in the molding of security after a customer-experience model and counterterrorism. Although in some cases this might translate into being greeted with a big smile, changes in museums security hold the potential to accelerate processes of exclusion. In other words, contemporary security can be seen as contributing to “unequal social relationships and the politics of inequality” already present in museums.96 In addition to the issues that accompany reproducing security from other sectors, such as the airport, the neutrality around museum security affords a site in which security practices might be tested, producing a kind of laboratory for security in a routine space. But rather than being internally focused, contemporary museum security is entangled in external processes, like counterterrorism and the economy, and the broader security environment, including the police force, the military, and neighborhood watch.

95. David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), xi. 96. Paul Jones and Suzanne Macleod, “Museum Architecture Matters,” 208.

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CHAPTER FOUR: SECURING THE BORDER SENSING EVERYTHING

Just east of El Paso, a short jaunt from Interstate 10, sits the Marcelino Serna Port of Entry. The port is home to Rodadora Frontera (Border Tumbleweed), a permanent sculpture created by Steve Badgett and Matthew Lynch under their collaborative project

SIMPARCH, a contraction of the phrase “simple architecture.” 36 feet high, 20 feet wide, and 26 feet deep, the piece is architectural in scale but offers no space for inhabitance.

Nine long steel bars support a three-dimensional web-like cluster of smaller intersecting metal rods. The sum of the rods forms an irregular shape that appears almost to be floating. Along the edge of the amorphous structure, truck mirrors jut out in all directions and catch the shifting light throughout the day. While the play of light and the intricacy of lines produce a seemingly abstract and benign sculpture, taken in relation to its context the piece provides insight into the contemporary conditioning of border security.

In the Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX a robust sculpture hangs above the checkpoint. Bell Tower is an artwork by Mark Bradford that was installed in 2014 in conjunction with the newly renovated terminal. Made of aluminum, paper, and worn sheets of plywood, the sculpture resembles a jumbotron from some unlocatable time— where information or entertaining images perhaps once appeared—but now only fragmented sections of pigment remain. In its proximity to security screening, Bell

Tower, like Rodadora Frontera, offers a counterpoint to airport security. Taken together these artworks serve as markers of an evolving security apparatus that is present along the

United States international border and at its ports of entry.

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This chapter begins with these artworks as they open onto two sites in which security is arguably the most aggressively and explicitly carried out: the border and the airport. It is security at the border—the physical limit of the nation-state and its ports of entry—that has been most dramatically transformed in the era of counterterrorism. Under the auspice of homeland security and counterterrorism, security has been relentlessly extended across territories, technologies, and bodies to create ultrasensitive security apparatuses. While both the border and the airport are sites defined by the movement and flow of people and goods, I argue that contemporary security at these sites is about registering the body through sensory apparatuses. In the context of the border, it means making the ground sensitive to the presence of illegal migrants, while at the airport, this means making the body more transparent. The first section is dedicated to border security and its interlinked system of sensors, Border Patrol agents, and control centers. To draw out the kind of security at work in this system, I turn to Rodadora Frontera (Border

Tumbleweed) and Deleuze and Guatteri’s concept of the rhizome. The section also considers how David Taylor’s photographs Seismic Sensor, Texas (2007) and Camera

Room, New Mexico (2007) afford entry into the security apparatus. In the second section,

I turn my attention to the sensory work of airport security through an analysis of Roxy

Paine’s Checkpoint (2014) and Tanja Ostojić’s Misplaced Women? (2015). To address the sensory emphasis of security at these two sites, the chapter also draws upon ethnographic encounters, interviews, government documents and websites, news reports, journalist accounts, and industry reports and magazines. From tracking the vibrations of footsteps near the US/Mexico border to employing electronic noses that can penetrate

164 travelers’ clothes and belongings, at these two sites security’s desire to bring everything to the sensible surface is revealed.

Sensing Border: Weeds, Devices, Bodies, and Animals

In the original proposal of Rodadora Frontera (Border Tumbleweed), which was presented to the Art in Architecture Program of the US General Services Administration

(GSA), the sculpture went by another name: Metallic Cluster. In fact, Steve Badgett and

Matthew Lynch tried out multiple names during the designing and planning of the piece, including “Commerce Nebula,” and “Intermodel Internodal.”1 But at the end of the day,

GSA found “Metallic Cluster” to be undesirable for its “potential connotations,” Badgett explains, specifically as it might be connected to “incendiary devices.”2 “Rodadora

Frontera (Border Tumbleweed)” was selected as a seemingly neutral title with harmless associations. However, despite the genesis of the artwork’s title, the physical attributes of the piece and the referent of the tumbleweed becomes a powerful marker of border security.

1. SIMPARCH, “Rodadora Frontera (Border Tumbleweed)” sketches and notes, from Steve Badgett. For more information about SIMPARCH, see http://www.simparch.org/. 2. Steve Badgett, e-mail message to author, August 23, 2017.

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Figure 10. SIMPARCH, Rodadora Frontera (Border Tumbleweed). 2014. Steel, fasteners, truck mirrors, 36 x 20 x 26 ft. SIMPARCH, Tornillo-Guadalupe U.S. Port of Entry, Tornillo, Texas. From: http://www.simparch.org/rodadora-frontera/.

The tumbleweed evokes the desert: dusty roads and dry winds cutting across mesas, but along the US/Mexico border the tumbleweed is also caught up in the unfolding of security. First, in an ecological way: as miles and miles have been marked by either a fence or wall the movement of tumbleweeds have been limited along the border. The second way that the mobile plant has interred into security is via the bodies of illegal migrants. While physical barriers stop the weeds from being carried away with the wind, disguising one’s body as tumbleweed has become strategy for crossing the border unseen. As an article in The Dallas Morning News reports: “among the blowing sand and scrub brush that marks the El Paso sector of the U.S.- Mexico border, from

West Texas through New Mexico, a number of immigrants have attempted to blend into

166 the landscape by turning themselves into human tumbleweeds, rolling slowly across dusty roads-some with actual weeds attached to them for camouflage.”3 Unlike many other plants, a tumbleweed is all of the plant except the root system. Tumbleweeds are defined, as their name implies, by their extensive movement. Although some tumbleweeds get tripped up by stretches of physical the border, it is being carried by the currents of the wind, indifferent to territorial divides, that migrants attempt to capture by becoming-tumbleweed. “A becoming is not a correspondence between relations,” state

Deleuze and Guattari.4 Becoming, they explain, “concerns alliance” and “is the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation.”5 Tumbleweeds carry migrants across the border, and migrants carry tumbleweeds, not because of filiations, as Deleuze and Guattari assert, but because of a momentary alliance between human and weed: tumbleweed becoming-migrant and migrant becoming-tumbleweed. “Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further,” write Deleuze and Guattari of the wasp and the orchid.6 Becoming weed

3. Alfredo Corchado, “Immigrants' Desperate Ruses Keeping Agents Alert at U.S., Mexico Border.” Dallas Morning News, (Dallas, TX), June 10, 2003. 4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 237. 5. Ibid., 238. 6. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateau, 10.

167 deterritorializes the migrants body. But as The Dallas Morning News article details this deterritorialization and alliance is often short lived under the surveillance of the border:

‘Whenever we see what looks like tumbleweed, the first thing we try to determine is which way the wind is blowing,’ said Agent Caleb Vidaurri. ‘Sometimes the wind blows one way, and the tumbleweed blows the other. You know something's not right.’7

A body can be reterritorialized; a migrant can stop becoming-tumbleweed and become illegal migrant again in the middle of the desert. Becoming-tumbleweed is one strategy among many that migrants have adapted in response to changing border security and its robust arsenal. “In terms of technology,” one Border Patrol agent told journalist Tod

Miller, “the capability of what we have acquired since 2004 is phenomenal.’”8 According to the agent, at the disposal of Border Patrol are: “377 remote video surveillance systems,

195 local video surveillance systems, 305 large-scale nonintrusive inspections systems,

75 Z Backscatter vans, 261 Recon FLIRs, more 12,000 sensors, and 41 mobile surveillance system trucks.”9 This number of devices and the sensing capabilities they afford, is exemplary of current border security at the US/Mexico border, just as invested in detecting and capturing illegal migrants as blocking them.

SIMPARCH’s “Border Tumbleweed” resonates formally with the dried desert shrub, but in the place of malleable branches and protective thorns there are metal rods and truck mirrors. In its form and materiality, the sculpture reflects most critically upon

7. Alfredo Corchado, “Immigrants' Desperate Ruses Keeping Agents Alert at U.S., Mexico Border.” 8. Todd Miller, Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security, (San Francisco, California: City Lights Publishers, 2014), 39. 9. Ibid.

168 the contemporary border security. The metal tumbleweed departs from the dominant aesthetics of the border—the clear delineation of space—most commonly expressed by the border wall. The arrangement of rods and reflective mirrors produce a space organized around connections; metal bars zigzag back and forth through the air carving lines across the piece and creating points of intersection and departure. The sculpture is rhizomatic. Deleuze and Guattari offer the subterranean stem as radical alternative to the linear and dualist model of the tree in Western thought. “In contrast to centered (even polycentric) systems with hierarchical modes of communication and preestablished paths,” they write, “the rhizome is an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states.”10 There is no center of Rodadora Frontera—no core, no hierarchy—only lines and connections that could be added ad infinitum. The sculpture is rhizomatic, contemporary border security is rhizomatic: an expanding system of connections that links remote areas, devices, and agents together through evolving capabilities and multiple centers. But as a rhizome, border security also can be deterritorialized.

The intersecting lines of Rodadora Frontera produce a penetrable space that is amplified by the reflective mirrors. These formal qualities stand in opposition to the way that security and the border are discussed and imagined in contemporary politics. The wall has become a conflated dimension of the border, operating as a kind of synecdoche

10. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateau, 21.

169 for the entire security apparatus and national security at large. Where the wall exists, it is disruptively jarring. Artist, journalist, and activist have long been drawn to the sheer abruptness of the border wall, its ability to interrupt natural flows and interactions.11 The disruptive presence of the wall along the US/Mexico border continues to be symbolically and aesthetically compelling—as well as socially and ecologically important—but to understand border security solely through the wall misses the evolving technological reality of the border, and a form of security that is aimed at detecting and capturing as much as blocking unauthorized entries. SIMPARCH’s sculpture echoes the interconnectivity that contemporary border security is dependent on.

The creation of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) by the Department of

Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003 gave a single agency control over the nation’s boundaries and ports of entry. Under the perceived threat of terrorism, the border has been imagined and presented as the first line of defense by powerful government agencies such as the DHS and CBP. A CBP promotional video illustrates this line of thinking. After visually alluding to the attacks of September 11th, 2001, and other terrorist acts, a narrator informs the audience that “the United States is under constant threat, physical and economic by those who wish to harm the nation and its way of life.”12 In the short video the United States is cast as a target in a world that has become a “more

11. See “On the Border,” The Atlantic: (2013), and “Cut in Two: Travels Along the US-Mexico Border a Photo Essay,” The Guardian: (2017). 12. “CBP Mission Overview,” CBP Video Library, 3:39, September 28, 2016, https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/video-gallery/video-library/cbp-mission-overview.

170 dangerous place.”13 By portraying the world in this way, and articulating danger via the

9/11 attacks, the agency’s necessity and legitimacy is shored up. The logic goes: if the world is in a state of turbulence and there are unknown actors with ill intentions toward the United States, then the outside world and others must be kept at bay. According to

David Lyon, the perceived insecurity and vulnerability of the post-9/11 era has made borders the focus of political, as well as intellectual, concern.14 He writes, “in a fast- paced world, the idea of borders as barriers to movement is an unacceptable irritation, but in a fearful and unsafe world such borders make a lot of sense.”15 Lyon references two realities actively present along the US border, and are most starkly seen at ports of entry and airports.

The CBP’s portrayal of the world as dangerous place gives credence to their expanding mission: “The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade

Center and Pentagon highlighted the urgent need to reevaluate border security risks as well as the resources needed to secure the nation’s borders.”16 As one of the world’s largest law enforcement organizations, CBP has sought “seamless security” 17 and to be

13. “CBP Mission Overview,” CBP Video Library. 14. David Lyon, “Filtering Flows, Friends, and Foes: Global Surveillance,” in Politics at the Airport 2008, ed. Mark B. Salter (London, UK; Minneapolis, US: 2008), 42. 15. Ibid. 16. Department of Homeland Security Ofﬁce of Inspector General, “A Review of Remote Surveillance Technology Along U.S. Land Borders,” (Special Review, Washington, DC, December 2005) 2: https://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets/Mgmt/OIG_06- 15_Dec05.pdf. 17. “Through the Years,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, last modified February 15, 2017, https://www.cbp.gov/about/history and https://www.cbp.gov/about.

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“continuously watchful and alert to deter, detect and prevent threats to our nation.”18

These objectives have been pursued through an array of strategies and techniques, but increasingly border security initiatives have involved the installation and deployment of sensory devices. The introduction of Secure Border Initiative Technology Program

(SBInet) in 2006 provides a good example of CBS’ efforts to gain comprehensive control over the border through a system of interlinking sensory devices and capabilities. As is explains in the initiative:

Surveillance technologies are to include a variety of sensor systems that improve CBP’s ability to detect, identify, classify, and track items of interest along the borders. Unattended ground sensors are to be used to detect heat and vibrations associated with foot traffic and metal associated with vehicles. Radars mounted on fixed and mobile towers are to detect movement, and cameras on fixed and mobile towers are to be used to identify, classify, and track items of interest detected by the ground sensors and the radars. Aerial assets are also to be used to provide video and infrared imaging to enhance tracking of targets.19

Although the SBInet program was terminated in 2011, it stands as a model of evolving

US border security practices – a technologically advanced and sensorially disposed system that brings devices and people into a responsive matrix.

In 2007, the year following the launch of the Secure Border Initiative, photographer David Taylor began documenting the US/Mexico border between El

18. “About CBP,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection, last modified November 21, 2016, https://www.cbp.gov/about. 19. Government Accountability Office, “Secure Border Initiative” (Report to Congressional Requesters, Washington, DC, September 2008), 7. https://law.utexas.edu/humanrights/borderwall/maps/gao-significant-risks.pdf.

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Paso/Juarez and San Diego/Tijuana.20 The project resulted in a series of photographs entitled Working the Line (2007-2010). The photographs depict restricted facilities, routine field operations, security devices and infrastructure, migrants, residents, border agents, and the terrain. While Taylor initially aimed to photograph the 276 obelisks that mark the boundary between the United States and Mexico, he wound up documenting much more and in the process captured fragments of the evolving security apparatus. An apparatus that in Taylor’s words range “from simple tire drags (that erase foot prints allowing fresh evidence of crossing to be more readily identified) to seismic sensors (that detect the passage of people on foot or in a vehicle).” 21 Two photographs in Taylor’s series offer particular insight into the expanding techno-sensory apparatus of border security: Seismic Sensor, Texas (2007) and Camera Room, New Mexico (2007). As these photographs show technological extensions of security along the border they help illustrate SBInet on the ground.

20. David Taylor is an American photographer whose photographs, multimedia installations, and artist's books. Taylor his famous for his documentation of the US/Mexico border. For more information, see http://www.dtaylorphoto.com/index.cfm. 21. David Taylor, “Working the Line,” David Taylor Studio, accessed September 20, 2017, http://www.dtaylorphoto.com/portfolio.cfm?nK=4418#0.

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Figure 11. David Taylor, Seismic Sensor, Texas. 2007. Archival Ink Jet Print, 24 x 32 in. And Camera Room, New Mexico. 2007. Archival Ink Jet Print, 24 x 32 in. From the Series “Working the Line.” David Taylor. From: http://www.dtaylorphoto.com/portfolio.cfm?nK=4418#0.

The use of remote sensors by the US government is not particularly new. The

Border Patrol began using seismic and magnetic sensors in the 1970s to assist agents in remotely detecting illegal intrusions.22 Nevertheless, under SBInet the importance of such devices was heightened. According to the Department of Homeland Security Ofﬁce of

Inspector General: “The goal of CBP’s Secure Border Initiative Technology Program

(SBInet) is to integrate new and existing border technology into a single, comprehensive border security system that will enable CBP to more effectively detect, identify, classify, and respond to illegal activity at the U.S. borders.”23 SBInet was intended to make the

22. DHS Ofﬁce of Inspector General, “A Review of Remote Surveillance Technology Along U.S. Land Borders,” 3. 23. Department of Homeland Security Ofﬁce of Inspector General, “Review of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Expenditure Plans for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009,” (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Washington, DC, October 2009) 3, https://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets/Mgmt/OIG_10- 05_Oct09.pdf.

174 border more sensible in both meanings of the word: capable of sensing incursions and making the border understandable.

SBInet was a technologically driven initiative that was intended to augment “the build-up of enforcement infrastructure and personnel along the United States/Mexico border with a state-of-the-art ‘virtual fence’.” 24 Although not the first of its kind, the

Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System and Integrated Computer-Aided Detection

System (I and II) came before, SBInet, contracted by the Boeing Corporation, promised to bring the border under total surveillance and control by creating an integrated system.

Integration would solve the problem of false alarms by connecting “things that detect,” as

SBInet’s former director put it, “with things that look.”25 By linking devices, agents, and control centers together, SBInet was intended to deliver a more sensitive, and as a result more responsive, border security system. As Geoffrey A. Boyce remarks, SBInet was

“intended to allow US border authorities the ability to detect, visualize, and respond to virtually any unauthorized incursion onto US territory in real time.”26 The assumption was that by linking devices together the Border Patrol could better access any given activity a sensor might register; by integrating “things that detect with things that look” agents could determine whether a vibration, a noise, or a heat wave was an illegal incursion or “a cow.”27 By linking radars and cameras with heat, motion, and acoustic

24. Geoffrey A Boyce, “The Rugged border: Surveillance, Policing and the Dynamic Materiality of the US/Mexico Frontier,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34, no. 2 (2016): 245-46. 25 Boyce, “The Rugged Border,” 250. 26 Ibid., 245-46. 27 Ibid., 250.

175 detectors, SBInet was supposed to provide the Border Patrol with a “common operational picture.”28

Seismic Sensor, Texas is a tightly cropped image that restricts the surrounding scene, making the exact locale unidentifiable. A pair of shiny black boots in dark green pants can be seen. The ground is a composite of tiny pebbles and compacted light brown dirt. At the center of the image lies an open grey case with a label that reads

“PROPERTY OF U.S. GOVERNMENT.” A neatly coiled black cord connects a plastic and metal picket to the case. Inside the container there is a green electrical board and electrical wires linking the board to a metal box. While ordinarily buried underground, here, at the feet of a border patrol agent, the seismic sensor is on full display. Seismic waves are typically used to monitor underground activities and effects in the earth’s crust, such as earthquakes and volcanoes, but seismic sensors along the border are employed to detect the illegal movement of migrants across the desert.29 These devices work by converting seismic vibrations into electronic signals. Turning environmental instruments toward the project of border security dehumanizes the movement of migrants while simultaneously using their inescapable corporeality against them. When a sensor detects the shift of weight that occurs when walking or running it appears as electronic signals to the border patrol operator. This abstracts movement—robs it from the experience of the body, from the hurry or heaviness of the step—makes it comparable to the breaking of

28. Boyce, “The Rugged Border,” 251. 29. Brian Kindamo, “Border Security in Difficult Terrain,” Military Technology 38. No. 12 (2014): 66-68.

176 rock within the earth or an explosion. But on the other hand, seismic sensors seal the fate of migrants to their bodies. If migrants could become weightless or really be taken up by the wind like tumbleweeds, they then might pass un-apprehended over the seismic sensors. This is the predicament of sensory devices, they are attuned to bodies but in transmission, the body is abstracted.

In a dimly lit control room, video footage and data from border towers and sensors stream in. This is the view supplied by Taylor’s photograph Camera Room, New

Mexico. The room appears subdued in the glow of 22 monitors, most of which display faint scenes of the desert terrain along the border. A sole person sits slouched at a desk, head propped by one hand and gaze directed toward the screens; his posture conveys a kind of postponement, an endless waiting. Besides the slight suggestion of movement by doubling of the man’s hand, from pushing the mouse from side to side as Taylor’s shutter opened and closed, the image appears still. The photograph captures a routine moment in the unfolding of security along the border. Despite its name, the control center is not the core of the security apparatus, it is not a single center with radiating spokes reminiscent of a tree or root, as Deleuze and Guattari describe.30 Instead, the control center is one among many and it functions like bulbs rather than a root. The rhizome, Deleuze and

Guattari write, “assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers.”31 The control center of Taylor’s photograph is a place where signals from dispersed devices are brought into connection, a

30. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateau, 16. 31. Ibid., 7.

177 place where signals can be redirected to other control centers or agents in the field, a place of concretion but not of priority or hierarchy.

While the dominance of video monitors in Camera Room exemplify the government’s desire to bring the border into visibility, Seismic Sensor, and the thousands of buried sensors the photograph gestures toward remind us that border security is not only visually oriented, it is multi-sensorially disposed. The seismic sensor on display in

Taylor’s photograph represents one device in an expanding system of interconnected sensors along the US/Mexico border, a sensory system that is intended to register shifts and changes in the environment, and turns the borderland into a responsive zone. Some

11,000 sensors have been placed along the U.S. border.32 These are periodically moved to stay abreast of shifting illegal traffic patterns. In a region where movement amounts to a security threat, detecting and mapping motion has been considered a powerful capability and as such a motivating factor in a wide range of devices.

The promise of such technology, however, has rarely come to fruition. Older seismic devices were, and still are, notorious for generating false alarms. “Moisture, insects, and intentional or accidental physical damage can affect the operation of a sensor” according to the DHS.33 In a way, the sensitivity of such sensors have plagued their performance and often thwarted their usefulness. “More than 90 percent of the responses to sensor alerts resulted in false alarms,” Geoffrey Boyce explains, “something

32. DHS Ofﬁce of Inspector General, “A Review of Remote Surveillance Technology Along U.S. Land Borders,” 4. 33. DHS Security Ofﬁce of Inspector General, “A Review of Remote Surveillance Technology Along U.S. Land Borders,” 3.

178 other than illegal alien activity, such as local traffic, outbound traffic, a train, or animals.”34 SBInet sought to make security more sensitive to activity along the border by linking sensors together. As the former SBInet director explains, “we classify the event to gauge our response: is it just a stray cow? A person?”35 Bringing old and new sensors into a common security matrix was supposed to give the border patrol the ability to distinguish between cows and people. But as a 2013 Homeland Security News Wire article reports, cows continued to be a security problem:

My first contact with the vital importance of border ground sensors was when I was riding along one night with a Border Patrol agent near the Rio Grande, ten miles south of McAllen, Texas. The CBP dispatcher announced five “hits” on a sensor just one-half mile from our location. The agent pounded the accelerator of his truck as we sped along a narrow two-lane road towards the sensor. Pulling off the road a few hundred yards from the banks of the Rio Grande, we met up with another CBP unit. Three agents charged down a trail leading to the river, a path known to be frequented by drug smugglers. What we found at the end of the trail, however, was neither men laboring under the weight of 80 pound packs of marijuana, nor a band of undocumented workers hiding underneath the brush, nor professional terrorists headed towards Dallas. Instead, there was a cow.36

While SBInet promised to resolve the problem of the cow, here the cow emerges again as a symbol of failure, the failure of sensors and ultimately the state of border security, as the title indicates: “Our Primary Border Security System Cannot Distinguish Between a

Cow and a Terrorist.” Detailing the routine procedures of a border patrol agent, a 2016

34. Boyce, “The Bugged border,” 250. 35. DHS Ofﬁce of Inspector General, “A Review of Remote Surveillance Technology Along U.S. Land Borders,” 3. 36. Lee Maril, “Our Primary Border Security System Cannot Distinguish Between a Cow and a Terrorist,” Homeland Security News Wire, last modified 25 February, 2013, http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/dr20130225-our-primary-border-security- system-cannot-distinguish-between-a-cow-and-a-terrorist.

179

Popular Mechanics article illustrates the continuation of this crisis: “Verdugo investigates a suspicious blip on a radar system that often turns out to be foul weather, or a rancher tending his land, or a stray cow.”37 The inability to distinguish a cow from an illegal immigrant, or a terrorist, demonstrate the failures and limits of technology along the border while simultaneously promoting the security industrial complex and the creation of more advanced technology.38 But the cow is more than error or a failure in the security apparatus, the cow is a line of flight that changes the nature of the apparatus’s connections.

Security is suddenly deterritorialized through the figure of the cow. Deleuze and

Guattari explain, “unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points and positions, with binary relations between the points and biunivocal relationships between the positions, the rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions, and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature.”39 Lines of flight do not destroy the rhizome but instead change its condition, cause a metamorphous. Security attuned to motion, vibration, heat, sound, and sight is left open to the ambiguity and multiplicity of sensing. “Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities,” Deleuze and Guattari write.40 The inability of a buried sensor

37. Mitch Moxley, “The Invisible Wall,” Popular Mechanics 193, no 1 (2016): 9. 38. Miller, Border Patrol Nation, 27. 39. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateau, 21. 40. Ibid.

180 to differentiate a cow from a human presents an example in which security’s sensory capacity cannot be disentangled from the world. Other things besides illegal migrants are registered by border security. SBInet, and systems like it, are susceptible to other forces in the environment, and as Boyce has shown sometimes to the environment itself. He explains the “rugged desert landscape blocked the sensors from detecting and visualizing bodies or movement at various angles and degrees of proximity.”41 Moments in which the terrain or a cow rupture security demonstrate that security through sensory devices is flighty.

The failures of SBInet expose the difficulty of creating a sensitive and responsive system in a world full of cows, uneven terrain, and weather. Sensory devices are open to the unfolding of things around them and therefore retain lines if flight through which security can at any moment be deterritorialized. The truck mirrors that extend out from

Rodadora Frontera are also lines of flight. The assemblage of lines and connections create a rhizomatic system where the mirrors reflect shifts in the environment like cameras towers surveying the desert ground. But the light that rebounds does not only reflect the immediate surroundings, it deterritorializes the sculpture and suggests the multiplicity of contemporary security full of lines of flight that will at least temporarily change security.

41. Boyce, “The Rugged border,” 252.

181

Sensing Airport: Moving, Seeing, Smelling, and Smiling

Passengers zigzag back and forth through the stanchions, making their way slowly toward the checkpoint at the Port Columbus International Airport. Next to them there is another line. Stanchions also form this line, but there are no switchbacks, just a straight shot from the atrium to the TSA (Transport Security Administration) agent waiting at the podium. PreTSA passengers line up here. The form of the two lines and the bodies that flow through them are telling: one conveys the expedience and ease of travel; the other, the need to slow down and carefully filter passengers. However, despite these differences, each line is equally the product of security. A promotional display of TSA

Pre√ seems to play out in these two lines. Standard screening entails multiple steps that can make moving through security slow, unpredictable, and messy. Conversely, Pre√ is streamlined, direct, efficient, and fashionable, passengers and their luggage can remain intact, unfazed by the demands of security. Standard screening passengers must disassemble themselves and their belongings to pass through the checkpoint. (See Fig. 3).

Pre√ passengers are those who have been deemed less risky by the TSA. Jasbir Puar explains, “TSA Pre√, and other pay-as-you-go securitization programs allow you to pay for your status as a non-security risk or terrorist threat.”42 Money and the willingness to disclose personal information becomes a way to remove one’s risk. For those unable or unwilling to pay and give TSA access to personal information and data, a higher level of

42. Jasbir Puar, interview by Cosmologics, “Regimes of Surveillance,” Cosmologics, December 4, 2014.

182 risk is assigned. A 2016 Congressional Research Service report describes TSA Pre√ as follows:

PreCheck is TSA’s latest version of a trusted traveler program that has been modeled after CBP programs. Under the PreCheck regimen, participants are vetted through a background check process (including screening against terrorist watchlist information). At selected airports, they are processed through expedited screening lanes, where they can keep shoes on and keep liquids and laptops inside carry-on bags.43

By paying a fee and volunteering personal information, passengers can move through the checkpoint unhindered by security. For all other passengers, security must do the work of evaluating their risk. The politics of these two lines is not uncommon, as Peter Adey notes, “It has been argued that the contemporary surveillance and security machine acts as a mesh or sieve that sorts wanted from unwanted and trusted from untrusted identities.”44 I begin this section with the checkpoint, the threshold of airport security.

43. Jerome P. Bjelopera, Bart Elias, and Alison Siskin, “The Terrorist Screening Database and Preventing Terrorist Travel,” Congressional Research Service: Report (Washington, DC, November 7, 2016): 16. 44. Peter Adey, “Mobilities and Modulations,” in Politics at the Airport, ed. Mark B. Salter (London, UK; Minneapolis, US: 2008), 146.

183

Figure 12. TSA Pre✓® Screening Ad. Digital Image. Passenger Self Service. Accessed October 3, 2017, http://www.passengerselfservice.com/2016/07/united-and-tsa-to- modernise-security-checkpoints/.

Artist Roxy Paine’s 2014 piece, Checkpoint, is a life size diorama of a TSA security screening area.45 Made entirely of maple wood the piece presents an uncanny scene. “You're entering into this space that maybe you're familiar with,” art director Ian

Ruffino explains, “but it's a peculiar kind of familiarity because the content within the window of the diorama is so utterly different from that that you might see in, say, a natural-history museum.”46 The familiar colors and textures of a typical checkpoint are replaced with light brown tones of the maple. Excluding the fluorescent lights, recessed

45. Roxy Paine is an American artist known for his large-scale sculpture and installations. He currently lives and works in New York. For more information, see http://roxypaine.com/. 46. Peter Tonguette, “Empty rooms create haunting dioramas,” The Columbus Dispatch, last modified November 13, 2016, http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2016/11/13/1- columbus-college-of-art-amp-design-empty-rooms-create-haunting-dioramas.html.

184 into the ceiling of the five-sided box, every surface bears the grain of the wood. The detail of each feature of the checkpoint is exquisitely crafted, from the bins to the computer cords to the security cameras mounted on the walls; it is the homogenous surface that separates this replica from the real machinery and architecture of the checkpoint. Paine, along with four assistants and an architect, have taken the now routine space of the TSA checkpoint and distilled it into an image that can be slowly scrutinized and contemplated. While the replica might get us to stop and rethink this space, the hard maple surface fails to capture security as an active process. Like a façade, the transposed and transmuted scene only furnishes an illustration. Erasing bodies and portraying security in accordance to the contours of machines and devices reduces security to a set of static objects. The checkpoint is active, animated by and through bodies and technology, in the absence of which the pervasiveness and corporeality of security is lost.

While Paine’s wooden checkpoint suggests security as a kind of obstacle course, something that directs and forestalls movement, contemporary security is more than a set of barriers. There is the physical concreteness of security that manifests, such as walls, moats, gates, or stanchions, but in the airport, like at the border, security is increasingly about detecting threats through the extension of sensory technologies.

185

Figure 13. Roxy Paine, Checkpoint. 2014. Diorama, maple, aluminum, fluorescent light bulbs, and acrylic prismatic light diffusers, 14 x 26 ft. – 11ft. x 18 in. – 7 ½ in. Roxy Paine. From: http://roxypaine.com/dioramas/.

In front of the checkpoint, bodies shuffle back and forth slowly moving closer to the Transport Security Officer (TSO) checking IDs and X-ray machines and full body scanners beyond. The quiet chatter of private conversations and the checking of IDs at the podium is suddenly disrupted; a man ducks and cuts under the stanchions, moving against the demarcated path and the flow of other passengers toward the security check.

He yells out, “DON’T GO THROUGH THERE! DON’T GO IN THERE!” It is unclear whom he is addressing on the other side of the TSA officers. Fear and adrenaline resounds in the coarseness of the man’s voice. “HE HAS A PACEMAKER!” the man yells across the crowd, whose attention he now has. A pacemaker uses low-level electrical pulses to stabilize abnormal heart rhythms. The heart, as it turns out, shares an

186 intimate relationship with electricity. Whereas a pacemaker is used to stabilize the heart’s rhythms, a defibrillator is used to resuscitate a heart through the shock of an electrical current. Both devices represent the harnessing of electricity as a lifesaving technique, but they simultaneously draw attention to the heart’s electromagnetic vulnerability. Just as an electrical surge can restart a heart or regulate its beats, the heart can also be stopped or disrupted by electrical currents. The electrical pulses that the pacemaker emits to keep the heart beating is susceptible to electrical interference. This is the source of the man’s fear; over the past decade electromagnetic devices have become a leading feature of airport security. Electromagnetic waves are used to see through passengers’ clothing and bags: both the full body scanner and the X-ray machine work in this way. Alistair Gordon writes, “Antiterrorist measures turned the airport into an electronically controlled environment rivaled only by the maximum security prison.”47 In the airport, the body is at the disposal of security. Under this context, the man’s anxiety is warranted. Nothing is off limits—even the heart might require scrutiny.

Security in the airport has become a site of great intimacy where the body is dealt with on the level of its exteriority and interiority. For contemporary passengers, moving through the airport involves revealing their bodies, belongings, and lives. The security drive to see intimate dimensions of passengers is an element of post-9/11 airport security.

The TSA, like its parent program the Department of Homeland Security, was formed in

47. Alistair Gordon, Naked Airport: A Cultural History of the World's Most Revolutionary Structure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 238

187 direct relation to the September 11, 2001, attacks.48 As the TSA’s main website clearly states, “the attacks resulted in the creation of the Transportation Security Administration, designed to prevent similar attacks in the future.”49 Following the attacks, the US government took over the management of airport security across the nation.

Whether the events of 9/11 were the sole reason for the dramatic shift in airport security or a convenient catalyst, the “terrorist” became a critical referent in the deployment of new technologies and protocol. “After every attempted (or successful) attack,” one Counter Terrorist article explains, “the Transportation Security

Administration (TSA) has added additional security measures.”50 The idea of the terrorist and the perceived threat of terrorism since 9/11 has served as a structuring principle in the carrying out and expansion of airport security. So closely does TSA align itself to

9/11 that its formation is presented as a matter of causation, a direct consequence of

“terrorism,” not a deliberate act taken by the government. In this light, security is understood, unproblematically, as a kind of ripple effect that always points back to the terrifying attacks. But “security is a condition,” as Mike Bourne argues, “a value and an indicator of the importance of other values; and a process through which that condition is achieved.”51 When it comes to post-9/11 airport security, and security in general, the

48. Colin J. Bennet, “Unsafe at Any Altitude,” in Politics at the Airport 2008, ed. Mark B. Salter (London, UK; Minneapolis, US: 2008), 52-53. 49. Transportation Security Administration, “Mission,” Transportation Security Administration, last accessed September 20, 2017, https://www.tsa.gov/about/tsa-mission 50. Forest Rain, “What is True Security? From Brussels to Orlando, Airport to Disney World: Security Models That Provide a Feeling of Safety Are Not Necessarily Safe.” Counter Terrorist 9, no. 5 (2016): 10. 51. Mike Bourne, Understanding Security, (UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2-3.

188 emphasis placed on terrorism affords a certain set of possibilities that otherwise would not be permitted. As Rachel Hall acknowledges, “modeling transport security in the

United States on Israeli security practices is far from politically neutral.”52 In the post-

9/11 era, security has been molded in response to terrorism. While terrorism has emerged as one of the primary conditions of the contemporary security apparatuses, this emergence is not causal, it asserts and seeks to usher in a certain set of values.

The figure of the terrorist, and the terrorist threat, has served as a productive force that has conceptually and physically shaped security in the airport. The vagueness and uncertainty of the terrorist, like the war on terror, has been incredibly productive for security. As Joseph Wasco alerts us, the contemporary security apparatus “determines what constitutes terror to enable its own field of action.”53 At the airport, terrorism is portrayed as an always present threat that needs constant management. This gives security a mandate to continuously expand its field and become ever more invasive in the process. On the macroscale, this rationale provides the directive for security to be anywhere (everywhere) and for an indefinite amount of time. On the microscale, this means the most intimate aspects of people’s bodies and lives may come under the domain of security. Evidence of the productive force of terrorism shows up in President George

W. Bush’s proposal for the Department of Homeland Security. The document reads,

“Terrorists today can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon. This

52. Rachel Hall, The Transparent Traveler: The Performance and Culture of Airport Security (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 131. 53. Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 27.

189 is a permanent condition and these new threats require our country to design a new homeland security structure.”54 Within these two short sentences, the expansiveness of the threat becomes an imperative for an equally expansive security apparatus. But again, as Wasco asserts, “the terrorist as well as the [Weapon of Mass Destruction] are highly elastic categories, subject to constant modification.”55 In other words, elasticity affords an evolving security that can constantly be amended and extended in relation to the perceived threat. At the airport, the figure of the terrorist has served as a pretense for treating passengers as national threats until proven otherwise. Under this context, the

TSA has made it its business to reveal passengers’ bodies, belongings, and lives.

If Your Eyes Were Sensitive to These Wavelengths Like the Scanners.56

That which is hidden, buried, or barred from sight has become a central tendon of post-9/11 airport security. As the un-seeable has become synonymous with threat, the

TSA has sought to minimize and manage this threat by enlisting new technologies and protocols that help to extend the visual field. “If terrorist embodiment is a problem of opacity,” Rachel Hall writes, “then securitized airports treat all passengers as suspect

(threateningly opaque) until they perform voluntary transparency, or demonstrate readiness-for-inspection.”57 For Hall, transparency has become the operative force of the

54. George W. Bush, “The Department of Homeland Security,” (Proposal of Department of Homeland Security, Washinton, DC, June 2002) https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/book_0.pdf. 55. Masco, The Theater of Operations, 27 56. Justin Mullins, “Full-body scanners: we reveal all” New Scientist, last modified November 18, 2010, http://www.newscientist.coni/article/dnl9746- fullbodyscanners-we-reveal-all.html. 57. Hall, The Transparent Traveler, 8. 190 airport, in terms of both security and consumerism. Gillian Fuller echoes this sentiment when she writes, “The modern airport is made of glass: a technology that materializes transparency, an aesthetic that entwines both ‘the X-ray gaze of empirical knowledge’ and spectacular possibilities of consumption.”58 Indeed, the state of transparency cannot be separated from the airport as place of consumerism. Completely seeing through passengers is the ideal, for both security and the markets. For security, the logic that follows is only by being fully transparent will it assure that passengers are not threatening. It is in this gesture that the TSA has taken on the task of making the invisible visible; the imperceptible perceptible; and the opaque transparent.

Acting as a gateway to the rest of the airport, the checkpoint serves as an essential component of airport security. All passengers must be accounted for and processed at the checkpoint before entering the airport terminals, shops, and restaurants. In addition to slowing down and filtering passengers, the checkpoint functions as a machine that renders bodies and belongings visible to security. The checkpoint is an apparatus for legitimizing travel and surveying surfaces and interiors. The checkpoint is a synthesis of architecture, personnel, and machines coming together to verify and arrest the body, if only momentarily. Airport security manages threat by parsing out bodies and objects, and legitimizing passengers’ travel. In this way, threat is treated as a hidden component that can be exposed through databases and the uncovering. Passengers are asked to prepare themselves and their belongings for screening. As a TSA sign announces before entering

58. Gillian Fuller, “Welcome to Window 2.1,” in Politics at the Airport 2008, ed. Mark B. Salter (London, UK; Minneapolis, US: 2008), 164.

191 the checkpoint: “BE READY FOR SECURITY.” Current protocol demands that passengers remove outerwear, belts and shoes, and empty pockets. Personal items must be appropriately sorted and placed in plastic bins. For some this is a routine procedure that requires no explanation or additional direction. For less frequent flyers, or less able passengers, the process can be demanding and produce uncertainty. Hall discusses how families and those with medical conditions or disabilities pose challenges to security based on reflexive governance. “Those unable to open their bodies or belongings up for inspection in keeping with agency protocol may require the assistance of more abled- body traveling companions or TSA employees poised to help passengers unable to help themselves.”59 To keep frustration down and efficiency up, at some airports, the TSA has added an alternate lane for those unable to ready themselves for security.60 The self- regulating and self-possessed body is the ideal passenger at the checkpoint. Or as Hall writes, “the transparent traveler desired by the US security state is independent, healthy, and able-bodied.”61 Disassembling and readying oneself for security is the first step to becoming transparent.

For those that have not bought into TSA Pre√, the checkpoint is the place to become transparent; to submit to security; to undo one’s opacity (suspicion) as Hall would say. Once passengers have been made ready, full-body scanners and x-ray machines finish stripping away any remaining opacity. Tapping into the electromagnetic

59. Hall, The Transparent Traveler, 122 60. Ibid., 123. 61. Ibid.

192 spectrum, such machines in effect extend the TSA’s field of vision. The human eye is sensitive to a fragment of the electromagnetic spectrum. Commonly referred to as light, beyond this limited range of radiation exist short and long wavelengths that escape human perception. Advanced Imaging Technologies use such wavelengths to penetrate material surfaces and detect specific substances, reconstituting what counts as visible. In the airport, this is one of the ways that passengers and their belongings become transparent to TSA agents. Justin Muller writes, “if your eyes were sensitive to these wavelengths like the scanners, every person you meet would appear naked, with pens, coins, belt buckles and the like magically festooned about their person.”62 But this extension of vision, specifically of the body, has a complicated history. Beatriz Colomina describes how the ability to visualize the interior of the body through x-ray technology became a mechanism for “policing the population by scrutinizing their insides.” 63 In the name of health, the interior body came under the domain of the government.64 What

Colomina refers to as “the most private spaces of the body,” x-ray technology made available to technicians and authorities alike.65 While tuberculous provided the rationale for such inspection more than half a century ago, today the threat of terrorism serves as the basis for seeing and scrutinizing the body. The body yet again is a governmental problem irrespective of privacy.

62. Justin Mullins, “Full-body scanners: we reveal all.” 63. Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 147. 64. Colomina, Domesticity at War, 146. 65. Ibid., 147

193

With the securitization of diverse sectors of society, technology has been praised for offering “noninvasive” and “unobtrusive” screening capabilities. From the perspective of security, securing more sites means handling more people, which can be both time consuming and personal. In a 2016 subcommittee hearing, Steven Wallen the Director of the Explosives Division for the Homeland Security Advance Research Projects Agency stated, “noninvasive screening at speed will provide for comprehensive threat protection while adapting security to the pace of life rather than adapting life to security.” 66 Such a statement is promising to businesses and security agencies, as well as those who are required to be screened regularly. As Mark Salter explains, “technological solutions are seen as the primary way to overcome the challenges of speed and security.”67 And yet, in the airport screening area the feeling is often contrary. Amongst antsy, tired, and excited travelers, those who have adapted best to security move the fastest; while those who are unable to adapt, or who fail to fully succumb to the demands of security, get caught up in the process. To do this, bodies must follow procedure and submit to the performance that security demands. Those who do not discipline their bodies to fit the checkpoint creates problems, cause blocks, in the security machine making it inefficient. “The idea of the

66. “Transportation Security Acquisition Reform Act: Examining Remaining Challenges,” (Written testimony of S&T Homeland Security Advance Research Projects Agency Explosives Division Director Steven Wallen for a House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Transportation Security hearing titled, January 7, 2016), https://www.dhs.gov/news/2016/01/07/written-testimony-st-house-homeland- security-subcommittee-transportation-security. 67. Mark B. Salter, “The Global Airport: Managing Space, Speed, and Security,” in Politics at the Airport 2008, ed. Mark B. Salter (London, UK; Minneapolis, US: 2008), 13.

194 autonomous individual who must not be controlled despotically (who no longer needed to be controlled despotically) rested upon the assumption that this individual can control and self-regulate herself.”68 In moments where passengers slow disrupt the processing by moving to slow or failing to fully comply, other passengers tend to blame the incompetence or ignorance of the passenger not security. Passengers inability to comply warrants additional screening. For example, missing the mark in the full-body scanner may result in a physical pat down and additional questioning. On entering the scanner, there is only one pose to strike: legs apart, forming acute triangle; body upright, stiff in the torso; shoulders pulled back with arms raised overhead, loosely framing the head within a diamond. The clarity of the image might be disrupted by letting a shoulder slouch or slightly moving in the process. Additionally, the clarity of the body might be obscured by a passenger’s hair or if they wear a headdress. The question that arises is

“noninvasive” and “unobtrusive” for whom and to what end?

The mandate to make all passengers transparent affects passengers differently.

While the attainment of transparency for some is a relished attribute as it permits them to move through security with ease and minimal discomfort, for others, this demand produces a highly anxious space that requires constant tending to. Between these poles, there is also those who have become unconscious to the work of making themselves transparent, automated to the demands of security. The false neutrality of airport security

68. Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 8.

195 becomes apparent when discussing the experience of groups who have been perceived as more dangerous, more risky.

Invasive forms of security, such as full-body scanners or x-ray machines, become more acceptable the easier they are to move through. In other words, the idea of security looking at the surface and contours of someone’s body or all of someone’s personal items has become more permissible with the ease at which the looking is conducted. The DHS has praised technological advancements as “unobtrusive” enabling “the seamless detection of threats while respecting privacy, with minimal impact to the pace of travel and speed of commerce.”69 Artist Tanja Ostojić’s September 2, 2015 performance of

Misplaced Women? at the Göteborg International Airport in Sweden, challenges this overarching disposition.70 Amidst the hubbub of the arrival terminal, Ostojić stands in the middle of the floor with bags laid out in front of her and a cardboard sign propped against a metal luggage cart. In black marker, the sign reads “MISPLACED WOMEN.” There,

Ostojić begins methodically disassembling her bags. “In approximately 45 minutes time,”

Ostojić recounts, “I took out the entire contents of my two suitcases, out of my handbag as well as out of my cosmetics bag. I took out each single item one by one, turning them in side out…” One photograph of the performance shows items piled haphazardly on the

69. “Transportation Security Acquisition Reform Act: Examining Remaining Challenges,” (January 7, 2016). 70. Tanja Ostojić is a feminist performance artist from Serbia who currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Her work centers on questions of belonging, movement, and citizenship. For more information, see http://www.van.at/see/tanja/ and http://www.berlinartlink.com/2013/12/10/interview-tanja-ostojic-the-eurosceptic/.

196 tile floor: computer cords, a digital camera, a magazine, a makeup bag, a passport, papers, and tobacco, among other things, lie on top of one of Ostojić’s suitcases.

The immediate absurdity and out of place-ness of the performance gains a resonance in the space of the airport. The act of removing, and in effect making visible, all the content of her bags simultaneously animates, and opposes, the logic of airport security. Since 9/11, security has progressively incorporated more advanced technologies and in the process, took on an aura of cleanliness and sterility. Noninvasive and unobtrusive technologies are supposed to alleviate the uncomfortableness of a security guard rifling through a passenger’s personal belongs or conducting a strip search. But in this iteration of “Misplaced Women,” Ostojić foregoes the “noninvasive,” literally taking her state of transparency into her own hands. One item after another, she undoes her opacity. This undoing epitomizes Hall’s notion of “voluntary transparency,” the act of demonstrating one’s “readiness-for-inspection.”71 But unlike the ideal transparency of the trusted traveler, here, becoming transparent is messy and out of control. While completely revealing all hidden content, the messiness of this revealing sits uncomfortably next to the clinically and cleanliness of contemporary airport security.

Amidst compulsory transparency in the airport, Hall argues, a “terrorist grotesque” has emerged.72 Analyzing media coverage of the thwarted underwear bomber, Hall writes,

“In the underwear photos a secret compartment, lurking just beneath the surface of the crotch panel, visualizes terrorist embodiment as a problem of grotesque folds and hidden

71. Hall, The Transparent Traveler, 8. 72. Ibid., 74.

197 depths.”73 Thus, threat is located not just in the invisible but in the unsightliness of interiors. Physically turning the contents of her bags inside out, Ostojić’s performance contradictorily embodies the logic of airport security and verges on the threateningly grotesque.

Figure 14. Tanja Ostojić, Misplaced Women? 2015. Performance. Göteborg Landvetter Airport, Sweden. Tanja Ostojić. From: https://misplacedwomen.wordpress.com/category/goteborg/.

By physically dissembling her luggage, Ostojić bypasses the venerated cleanliness of the checkpoint. The “unobtrusiveness” of airport security is challenged by achieve transparency by turning each item inside out. In fact, rather than establishing the ideal

73. Hall, The Transparent Traveler, 74.

198 transparent state, Ostojić’s performance verges on threatening. As Hagar Kotef has explained, in the modern schema order and control are juxtaposed to chaos and excess.

These differences are “at time produced in order to configure some constellations (which we deemed to be normative, just, or good) as moderate.”74 The excess of Ostojić’s performance simultaneously challenges the sterile representation of security and subverts its logic.

While opacity has become the focus of post-9/11 airport security, sight is not the only solution to opacity. Touch and smell have also been enrolled in the security project.

Despite the time and energy it might take to ready oneself for security, on entering the full-body scanner images are produced almost instantaneously. “Airports seek to extricate from the passengers all that must be tested and surveilled. As opposed to atomized individual, passengers are prosthetic subjects, made up of bodies, bags, trinkets, handbags, wallets, keys, and more.”75 We are told, by an official US customs voice, that advance technologies will improve security while facilitating legitimate travel and trade.

That Nose Does More Security than Anything Else.76

While an ideal transparent state propels and animates contemporary airport security, sight is not the only means through which transparency is pursued. Touch, sound, and scent have also been instrumentalized. To detect concealed objects, substances, and bodies, security has become ultrasensitive. Most airline passengers are

74. Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom, 133. 75. Peter Adey, “Mobilities and Modulations,” 145. 76. Field notes. O’Hare Airport, a TSA agent.

199 familiar with the process of stripping their bodies, at least partially, for security purposes, but by applying other sensory means the removal of clothing and shoes can be bypassed.

A TSA agent at O’Hare International Airport explains to a passenger in line for screening: “when you get to leave your shoes on, that’s because there’s a canine around!”77 Staying fully intact—not removing one’s clothing or shoes—does not mean that the hidden dimensions of passengers’ bodies have become irrelevant. Rather, the opacity of each passenger is being undone via scent. In explaining the effectiveness of the canine’s nose, the agent announces, “that nose does more security than anything else.”

Law enforcement’s appropriation of canine olfactory capacities has a long history.

From the bloodhound to the police dog, or K9, the keen scent of dogs has been used to detect things outside of the realm of human scent. In the airport, new security technologies are being driven by the power of scent. “Sniffing out terrorists” is the title of a 2009 research article by the European research organization Fraunhofer. In the article, as the title suggests, presents smell as an effective tool for identify terrorist. The article provides a synopsis for the unimaginative reader:

Literally hundreds of people are hurrying through the long airport corridor between Terminals A and B. Among them are two terrorists, who’ve hidden themselves in the crowd. They’re carrying small containers of chemicals in their jacket pockets, individual components for an explosive. But there’s something the criminals don’t know. As well as being observed by security cameras, they’re also being “sniffed out” by chemical noses hidden in the corridor wall. The smell sensors sound the alarm when the terrorists walk past, alerting an airport security guard who notes the problem on his monitoring equipment.78

77. Field notes. O’Hare Airport, a TSA agent. 78. “Sniffing out terrorists,” Research News, last modified April 1, 2009, https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2010/january/sniff-sensor.html.

200

The passage suggests that despite the abundance of seeing technologies in the airport, visual surveillance may not be enough to detect dangerous substances hidden in the crowd. The electronic nose system introduced by the article, HAMLeT (Hazardous

Material Localization and Person Tracking), provides an answer to potential threats carried in terrorists’ pockets and their further obscuration by the presence of the crowd.

Stuart Walton argues, “Smelling people is more intimate than seeing or hearing them because it involves taking them into one’s body, breathing them in.”79 While such smelling technologies have yet to be incorporated into airport security’s arsenal of machinery, the research and development of such devices demonstrates that the instrumentalization of the senses is not limited to sight. As Security is being routed, defined, and imagined through the sensory spectrum.

I Definitely Try to Smile a Lot.80

While generally security is concerned with dangerous objects, or previously dangerous people, dangerous potentials have increasingly become a point of concern in the post-9/11 era. In US airports, the emotional states and interior lives of passengers have progressively come under the domain of security. With advanced technologies security agents have been able to more fully access, and in effect assess, passengers’ physical bodies and belongings. And yet, despite the extension that such technologies afford, they have not provided entry into passengers’ potential to become a terrorist or the

79. Stuart Walton, In the Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling, (Winchester, UK: Zero Books, 2016): 90. 80. Field notes. Ohio University International Student.

201 terrorist sentiments they may harbor. Concern over passengers’ states of being lead to the

TSA officially introduced the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques program (SPOT) in 2007. While TSA officials describe SPOT as another layer of security, more specifically, the program supplied TSA with a way to assess what technology had not yet been able to assess the emotional stress, intention, and potentiality of a terrorist act.81 Behavior Detection Officers (BDOs) would assess threat by observing passengers’ behavior, specifically looking for “involuntary physical and physiological reactions that may indicate stress, fear or deception.”82 Within this context, it is not enough for passengers to achieve transparency at the checkpoint; they must constantly monitor their corporeality in relation to the security apparatus.

The airport has become a space in which appropriate behavior is writ large.

Reinforcing the idea that there is, in fact, a specific way of being in the airport despite the claim that lives have not had to adapt to security. Indeed, in the airport security goes about forming and informing physical and emotional ways of being. As Hall explains,

“the TSA’s monitoring of public feelings involves the subtle calibration of bodily and affective norms within the public space of airports.”83 This is the disciplining of

81. Department of Homeland Security Ofﬁce of Inspector General, “Transportation Security Administration’s Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (REDACTED),” (Audit, Washington, DC, May 2013). https://www.oig.dhs.gov/assets/Mgmt/2013/OIG_13-91_May13.pdf. 82. Department of Homeland Security, “Privacy Impact Assessment for the Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) Program,” (Privacy Impact Assessment, Washington, DC, August 5, 2008), https://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_pia_tsa_spot.pdf. 83. Hall, The Transparent Traveler, 149

202 passengers’ movements, gestures, and even emotional states. Colin J. Bennet has described the entire airport as a site of discipline, “where passengers become passive subjects and bearers of the power relations that force compliance.” 84 However, even more than compliance, passengers must embody the security state, managing and adjusting their corporeality in relation to omnipresent threat of the terrorist. Acting outside of the prescribe behavior and emotional response, automatically makes someone suspicious. While DHS claims that BDOs analyze passengers “regardless of race, gender, age, or religion,” what the DHS fails to recognize is that what is considered appropriate or normal in airports already excludes certain groups and therefore makes them more suspicious by default, or, perhaps, by design. Which is to say, the pressures of security are not evenly distributed or born by all passengers. While passengers must prove their innocence by performing transparency, as Hall contends, transparency is not equally attainable. For some passengers, transparency is harder to come by and a project that is never fully finished.

As a site of farewells and reunions the airport has long been an emotionally charged space. While departures and arrivals continue to stimulate emotional gatherings, in the contemporary airport emotions have become an important dimension of security.

Gillian Fuller writes, “airports work our feelings, as well as our baggage and identification data.”85 In the airport, emotions are tuned to security and consumerism, and

84. Colin J. Bennet, “Unsafe at Any Altitude,” in Politics at the Airport 2008, ed. Mark B. Salter (London, UK; Minneapolis, US: 2008), 68. 85. Gillian Fuller, “Welcome to Window 2.1,” 161.

203 those who fail to correctly conform to the appropriate emotional state will be cause for suspicion.86 Under SPOT, passengers’ behaviors are interpreted as revealing their inner emotions and intentions. Building on security practices at Ben Gurion Airport, SPOT aimed to identify signs of threats before they even begin to unfold. It is not enough to detect weapons or terrorist, security has equally become about anticipating the potentiality of terrorism by reading the way passengers act and move. A contributor to the Counter Terrorist Magazine praises security at Ben Gurion Airport, remarking that

“Israeli security detects people who have the will to commit acts of terrorism.”87 While detecting the will of passengers sounds outlandish, it has been presented as a promising avenue for counterterrorist agendas. The article argues that the “ability to recognize someone who is behaving suspiciously” is the ability to detect their will.88 Behavior is thus interpreted as the key to accessing someone’s intentions and capacities.

In the process of detecting behavior and anticipating threat, security has sought to delineate which and whose emotions are allowed. While some passengers are oblivious to the physical and emotional demands of the airport, and their disciplining, others are sharply aware of the work it takes to meet the prescribe “norm.” For some passengers behaving normally takes the careful compartmentalization of the body and any personal or social stresses. Describing the experience of moving through the airport as a Muslim

Laila explains,

86. Hall, The Transparent Traveler, 27. 87. Forest. “What is True Security?” 17. 88. Ibid., 16.

204

I feel like I have to—even if I am exhausted, tired, or whatever—I have to look calm. I have to make that effort even if I didn’t sleep that night or was packing, or I know I have a long trip ahead of me or whatever or if my kid is sick—or whatever the reason that might make me—I have to be calm and in my best look possible. I have to put on a smile, I have to be calm, and sometimes I think “look at those people there just being themselves.” I have to do extra to insure everybody not to worry about me.89

Laila describes the experience of being within security focused on the physical and emotional life of passengers measured against a given range of behavior. Laila’s predicament echoes Foucault’s assert that “There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself.”90 The effort that goes into adjusting and tampering one’s appearance and emotions to fit the security environment demonstrates the effectiveness of security. Learning how to be in the airport is not just about readying oneself for the checkpoint, as Hall writes, “screening passengers by observational techniques demands that passengers perform the affective labor of embodying and managing the appearance of the terrorist threat.”91 As discussed in previous chapters, embodiment is lived through bodily actions—embodied practices and techniques—and experienced through the flesh.92 In security programs like SPOT,

89. Field notes. Ohio University International Student. 90. Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 by Michel Foucault, ed. C. Gordon (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 155. 91. Hall, The Transparent Travelers, 155. 92. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Natural World and the Body,” in The Body 1999, ed. Donn Welton, (Malden, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 168.

205 passengers’ bodies bear the burden of security, both figuratively and literally. Passengers’ bodies become the medium through which security plays out.

Figure 15. “SPOT Checklist.” Digital Image. The Intercept. March 27, 2015. Accessed October 31, 2017. https://theintercept.com/2015/03/27/revealed-tsas-closely-held- behavior-checklist-spot-terrorists/.

Under the watch of BDOs, and other travelers, passengers are charged with correcting their movements and appearing happily unfazed. For some this means stifling their emotions, their exhaustion, or their confusion, to appear less suspicious. By adopting behavioral analysis as a layer of airport security, certain behaviors have been affirmed and normalized, while others amass dangers associations. According to TSA, the program was deployed before a scientific validation of the program was completed in

206 response to the need to address potential security threats. However, a scientific consensus does not exist on whether behavior detection principles can be reliably used for counterterrorism purposes, according to a 2008 report of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences.93

In the process of fixing behaviors and cultivating desired public feelings, involuntary behaviors and unchecked emotions have become highly suspicious. One’s ability, or inability, to perform appropriately becomes a serious matter that can result in the blockage or impediment of one’s mobility. While the DHS claims that SPOT treats all passengers equally regardless of identity, nationality, and beliefs, the threat, or the work demanded to manage that threat, demands placed on passengers are not distributed evenly. Indeed, Lyon and Haggerty have found that “Arabs and Muslims have been singled out in North America” disproportionate in the post-9/11 security era.94 To manage their suspicion certain passengers—passengers through no fault of their own carry more risk—must constantly tend to their own bodies. Mina, an Iranian woman, states, “I know what to do at airports, I do not look confused, I know what to do.”95 Like

Laila, Mina is very conscious of herself and her belongings in the airport and prides herself on knowing how to move through the airport. She explains, I pay attention to “my posture, the way I stand, when I’m in a line, who I’m looking at, if I’m smiling or not,

93. National Research Council, Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists: A Framework for Program Assessment (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2008). 94. Lyon and Haggerty, “The Surveillance Legacies of 9/11,” 295. 95. Field notes. Ohio University International Student.

207 how I’m carry my things, am I making it easy for them to detect what I have on me…”96

Mina’s list of things she avoids doing could be followed by “exaggerated yawing,” or

“Excessive complaints about the screening process,” two things that BDOs specifically looks for. In March 2015, The Intercept published a list of behaviors that arouses suspicion in the airport, (See figure 8). While this was the first time that such a list was presented to the public, Laila and Mina’s accounts demonstrate the internalization of security by some passengers. As Hille Koskela explains, “being constantly conscious of being watched by invisible overseers leads to internalisation of control.”97 Moreover,

Laila and Mina’s experiences, along with the list of suspicious behaviors, accentuate the way security plays out across and the body, and that all bodies are not created equal in the eyes of security.

Conclusion

The border and the airport offer sites in which security has been radically extended in the post-9/11 era. But rather than witness an emergence of new forms of fortification, security at these sites has become increasingly sensorial. Extended through sensors, security guards, advanced machines, and ordinary citizens and visitors, the aim of security is to sense disruptions in the environment, in the case of the US/Mexico border, and sense abnormalities, in the context of the airport. Along with this sensory turn, security has reasserted its interest in the body. Beyond offering a means to

96. Field notes. Ohio University International Student. 97. Hille Koskela, “‘Cam Era’ – The Contemporary Urban Panopticon.” Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3 (202): 299.

208 discriminate amongst bodies, in these new security apparatuses corporeality has come under scrutiny. Walking across the desert along the US/Mexico border, one’s step might be felt by seismic sensors in the ground, heard by microphones distributed across the terrain, or seen by mounted cameras. Even the body’s own heat becomes a subject of security; take for example the infrared cameras that can see the body in complete darkness or when thermal scanners were used to measure airport passengers’ temperature during the Ebola epidemic. One cannot evade security by avoiding obstacles, the only method of evasion is to perform a miraculous act of disembodiment. Becoming a TSA

Pre√ traveler does not allow a passenger to skip security, rather they fully submit to security in advance through the release of personal information and biometrics. This is not becoming disembodied. To become disembodied in relation to security means to become imperceptible: invisible, weightless, heatless, soundless, bodiless. Until then the body will not be able to disengage security. Until then, the lines of flight that momentarily deterritorialize security when sensors mistake a cow for a smuggler will have to suffice.

209

CHAPTER FIVE: WAVES IN THE AIR: TRANSDUCING SECURITY

While, thus far, this dissertation has investigated the sensory implications of security by examining the intersection of spaces, machines, and bodies, the following chapter taps into the energetic states of security. By taking up the electromagnetic spectrum, which mobilizes contemporary security machines, I explore an aspect of security that ordinarily goes unnoticed and unperceived but is increasingly filling and defining ordinary spaces of travel, leisure, and consumption. While invisible and inaudible to the human body, electromagnetic waves animate security technologies and bring devices into larger security assemblages. In this chapter, I trace and draw out the socio-spatial implications of the securitization of electromagnetic waves. To begin, I recount ethereal ideas and the discovery of the electromagnetic spectrum. Following, I draw on Douglas Kahn’s work to examine how artists have transduced such electromagnetic waves making security newly perceptible. Specifically, I analyze how, through transduction, Benjamin Gaulon’s public installation 2.4Ghz (2008-) opens onto security as waves and flows that link up with and feed into security assemblages. I then examine how imperceptible security waves are made audible and visible in Christina

Kubisch’s composition Security (2007), and Walead Beshty’s photographic series Travel

Pictures (2006). Next, I consider how transductive media challenges and complicates a

Greenbergian notion of the medium, suggesting instead that medium functions as a site of process and encounter. And finally, how an expansion of medium security might be approached as atmospheric.

210

The Ether: “And Doth It Not Readily Pervade All Bodies?”1

Long before the 19th century physicist Heinrich Hertz discovered the electromagnetic field, there had been energy in the air. While Hertz proved James Clerk-

Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetisms in 1888, scientist and philosophers, among others, had hypothesized of an ethereal sphere beyond the physical world. Jennifer

Gabrys explains that, “even when the ether was scientifically reputed, there remained a language and imagination for describing this hazy space where messages and energy accumulate and transfer.”2 Thought of as an invisible “substanceless substance” that existed between bodies, the ether, or “aether” as it was also called, was associated with a supraluminary sphere.3 Aristotle described the aether as the fifth element after Earth, Air,

Fire, and Water. Caroline A. Jones explains that the sensual component of the Greek concept “which designates the hot, bright energy that propagates from the sun through an impalpable medium and across incalculable space” is buried in the word’s etymology, which may have been adopted from the Sanskrit Vedas.4 While notions of the ether transformed and shifted from antiquity, at times becoming more associated with the occult than any scientific domain, Aristotle’s aether foreshadowed critical scientific equations and discoveries of the 18th and 19th century.

1. Isaac Newton quoted in Oliver Lodge Sir, The Ether of Space (New York; London: Harper & Brothers 1909) xvii. 2. Jennifer Gabrys, “Atmospheres of communication,” in The Wireless Spectrum: The Politics, Practices, and Poetics of Mobile Media, Barbara Crow; ed. Michael Longford and Kim Sawchuk, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 47. 3. Carolina A. Jones, “Ether,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contemporary Art, ed. Carolina A. Jones (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007),137. 4. Ibid., 137-8.

211

In the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published between 1875 and

1889, the entry for “Ether” begins: “a material substance of a more subtle kind than visible bodies, supposed to exist in those parts of space which are apparently empty.”5

Written by Maxwell himself, the entry challenges the solely physical account of reality that is available to the senses. For Maxwell, the energetic force of the ether, although subtle and invisible, was material and real nonetheless. In 1909 physicist Oliver Lodge would begin his book, The Ether of Space, with Maxwell’s definition. The “oldest and best known function for an ether,” Lodge writes, “is the conveyance of light,” but now

“more functions are known, and more will almost certainly be discovered.”6 In the interim, between Maxwell’s Encyclopedia entry and Lodge’s manuscript, Hertz had discovered radio waves, transforming the “hazy space” of the ether into a scientific reality. While Lodge, among others, had sought to prove Maxwell’s theory, especially after his death in 1879, “Hertz found something Lodge had missed—something to ‘feel’ the waves with—and it was nothing more than a loop of wire with a small gap between its ends across which spark could jump.”7 This capacity to feel electromagnetic waves along wires, according to Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon, was truly exciting, but as they

5. Oliver Lodge Sir, The Ether of Space (New York; London: Harper & Brothers, 1909) xv. 6. Lodge, The Ether of Space, xv. 7. Nancy Forbes and Basil Mahon, Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2014), 255.

212 write, “the ultimate test of Maxwell’s theory would be to detect waves in space.”8 Which

Hertz finally accomplished with a sheet of zinc.9

18th and 19th century skepticism, as well as mystical interpretations, of the ether were a product of its intangible state: unable to be felt, unable to be verified by the senses. Before Hertz’s discovery, the invisible electromagnetic spectrum was truly ethereal to most people. But during the 19th century, ideas about the ether became extremely prevalent.10 As Jose Luis de Vicente and Honar Harger point out, illustrators of the 19th century “speculated on the existence of an ethereal parallel landscape and depicted its possible usages.”11 While the electromagnetic spectrum would eventually encompass “gamma and X-rays at the top (or highest) frequency, down through ultraviolet, infrared, microwave, radio and television to power-line networks at the bottom of the scale,”12 before scientific proof, the electromagnetic field was inescapably ethereal. Indeed, Carolina A. Jones describes how the ether was thought of as opposite of the body, as a kind of other, beyond bodily reach. She writes, the “‘ether’ is the concept people turn to when they want to describe special cases of disembodiment—special gaps, absences, carriers of forces at a distance, inaccessibilities and invisibilities that range from the interpersonal (in Spirit photography) to the intergalactic (in relativistic

8. Forbes and Mahon, Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, 255. 9. Ibid. 10. Gabrys, “Atmospheres of Communication,” 50. 11. José Luis de Vicente Luis de Vicente and Harger, “There, but Invisible,” in Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves (Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica: Actar, DL, 2011).11. 12. Mitchell and Cambrosio, “The Invisible Topography of Power” 229.

213 cosmology).13 The ether served as a stand-in for that which was unreachable, whether referring to spirits or the cosmos; the ether was something that exceeded sensory apprehension and therefore could be taken as a space of disembodiment, as Jones argues.

But, again, once Hertz first felt the electromagnetic current and then the field, the ether was made sensory.

With a zinc sheet in 1888, in a laboratory at Technische Hochschule Fridericiana in Karlsruhe, Germany, Hertz felt electromagnetic waves in the air. His initial experiments demonstrated that an electrical spark could jump between two metal spheres, creating a circuit. Although ordinarily “air doesn’t conduct electricity,” as Forbes and

Mahon explain, by placing the spheres close together and using a high voltage “a spark will appear to jump across the gap.”14 After conducting this experiment multiple times,

Hertz positioned a large zinc sheet at the opposite end of the table from where he initially set up the circuit. Using a detector, which consisted of a loop of wire with a slight gap between its ends, he went about testing the strength of the electrical current within different points of the apparatus. Forbes and Mahon provide this account of the experiment:

He places the detector on the table between the primary circuit and the zinc reflecting sheet, closes the blinds, waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, and then switches on his primary circuit. Turning his back on the sparks scintillating between the spheres, he looks for tiny sparks between the terminals of his detector. They appear, faint but unmistakable…He looks to see if the brightness of the sparks varies as he moves the detector slowly away from the primary circuit

13. Jones, “Ether,” 137. 14. Forbes and Mahon, Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, 10.

214

toward the reflecting zinc sheet. Indeed, it does. The sparks diminish to nothing, then grow again to their brightest, and then the cycle repeats.15

The appearance of sparks near the vertically positioned zinc sheet indicates that the electric current is not confined to the circuit. Waves appear to be propagated outward until they hit the zinc surface where they are reflected.

He knows that when any kind of wave is reflected back toward its source, it forms a standing wave, which appears to vibrate in place, like a guitar string. Hence, waves are being produced by the primary circuit and reflected by the zinc sheet. This is exactly what he wanted to find.16

Hertz had confirmed that electromagnetic waves could travel through the air and devised a way to sense them. Reflected by the zinc sheet, waves “make themselves felt,” in Hertz words, and through the detector standing waves could appear.17 From this series of experiments Hertz’s “conception of the nature of air and wire transmissions underwent a significant transformation.” As James G. O’Hara writes, “in accordance with Maxwell’s theory he now considered the waves to be propagated not in the interior of a conductor but rather in the surrounding space.”18 Hertz’s empirical demonstration, proving the existence of waves oscillating in space, was the beginning of an increasingly electromagnetic world.

Hertz and Hermann von Helmhotz, according to Joe Milutis, “found the ghost of the visible-light spectrum and translated the luminiferous ether of the nineteenth century

15. Forbes and Mahon, Faraday, Maxwell and the Electromagnetic Field, 10. 16. Ibid. 17. Heinrich Hertz. Electric Waves (New York: Dover Publications, 1893) 154. 18. James G. O’Hara, “A ‘Horrible Conflict with Theory’ in Heinrich Hertz’s Experiments on Electromagnetic Waves,” European Review 15, no. 4 (2007): 546.

215 into the electromagnetic spectrum of the twentieth.”19 From radio to radar, from telecommunications to the Internet, electromagnetism would become a defining condition of the 20th and 21st century. To describe the phenomena of living in a world defined equally by buildings and signals, Anthony Dunn and Fiona Raby coined the term

“Hertzian Space.”20 Although the electromagnetic field was never truly far from hand, today the world more than ever, as Greenspan reminds us, is “powered by the invisible waves of the electromagnetic spectrum.”21 Electromagnetic waves, including radio, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet light, x-rays, and gamma rays, animate all sorts of ordinary devices, which has led Adam Greenfield to conclude, “we are always already present in the Hertzian city.”22 Ironically, however, as Luis de Vicente and

Harger explain, while continuously being guided and directed by electromagnetic forces, the physical trace of such signals are “imperceptible to the human sensorium.”23 Which is to say, despite being thoroughly immersed in an electromagnetic world full of all kinds of signals, waves continually escape perception. However, artist have captured these elusive waves and made them sensory.

19. Joe Milutis, Ether: The Nothing That Connects Everything (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 38. 20. José Luis de Vicente and Honor Harger ed., Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves (Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica: Actar, DL, 2011), 43. 21. Anna Greenspan, “Wireless Waves,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 14, no. 3 (2016):138. 22. Adam Greenfield, “Of Sidewalks and Signals: Learning to Listen on the Urban Frequency,” in Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves, ed. José Luis de Vicente and Honor Harger (Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica: Actar, DL, 2011), 45. 23. Greenfield, “Of Sidewalks and Signals,” 48.

216

Transducing Electromagnetic Security

Despite all the ways that the electromagnetic spectrum has been drawn down from the ether and put to work, the vibrating waves that animate countless devices and intertwine with the built environment remain insensible to most. As the ether escaped the senses, today electromagnetic signals continue to go unperceived—not because of faintness or infrequency—but because of a bodily disposition. The inability to see, feel, or hear a significant range of electromagnetic activity is a problem of transduction. Dunn explains, “our sense organs cannot transduce radio waves or other wavelengths outside the narrow bandwidth of visible light (and infrared energy through the skin as warmth).”24 The seeming immediacy of sensation – the light that blinds the eyes, the trickle of water that alerts the ears, the weight that strains the muscles, the heat that burns the skin – jumps over an important step in the process of sensing. To register the brightness of the sun or the sound of the ocean, the sense organs and the nervous system transduce the stimulus. In the body, transduction is the process that converts sensory signals to electrical signals that are then processed by the brain. As a scientific study of sensation tells us: “Transduction occurs in the nervous system when energy in the environment—such as light energy, mechanical pressure, or chemical energy—is transformed into electrical energy.”25 Douglas Kahn explains that transduction at its base

24. Anthony Dunn, Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 107. 25. E. Bruce Goldstein, Sensation & Perception, 7th edition (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2007), 7.

217 level is the movement of energy within and between different classes.26 Dunn’s explanation that radio waves cannot be transduced by our sense organs is important for understanding the relationship between bodies and electromagnetic fields that envelop them, but transduction also occurs through media in the world.

Kahn’s book Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the

Arts begins with the statement, “radio was heard before it was invented.”27 By examining radio as a naturally occurring phenomena, Kahn offers a radical account of technology, energy, and sound that releases radio from a history of communication technologies and broadcasting. Radio waves radiating across and through the earth and atmosphere, what

Kahn refers to as “natural radio,” existed long before the invention of radio at the end of the 19th century.28 Although the radio, as a technological device, is credited with bringing distant voices and sounds into people’s homes, the radio is just one medium among others capable of transducing electromagnetic signals. Earth Sound Earth Signal helps explicate the role of media in bringing energetic forces into audibility, media that consists not just of technological devices. As Kahn writes, “it is common to observe that technology is what makes the inaudible audible.”29 Here, media is the crucial factor; without any media to transduce these energetic states, they remain imperceptible.

However, not all transduction is the same. When the wind is heard through the trees or

26. Douglas Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 54. 27. Ibid., 3. 28. Ibid., 1. 29. Ibid., 56.

218 static electricity is heard through the telephone line or the bush, Kahn explains transduction is at work, but these are different kinds of transduction: “The Aeolian and

Aelectrosonic are manifestations of naturally occurring energies, the former rooted in physical states of mechanics and the latter in electromagnetism.”30 It is electromagnetism which Kahn pursues further in Earth Sound Earth Signal, and that which I now turn to in relation to security. Security is in the air, amongst vibrating waves of telecommunications and wireless networks, security waves contribute to the electromagnetic fields that engulf ordinary spaces of inhabitance and movement. Unseen by eyes, unheard by ears, and unfelt by skin, these electromagnetic waves go unperceived.

Flickering Security Signals

Wireless security cameras are caught up in the magnitude of electromagnetic waves that vibrate across homes, offices, cafés, and streets. Indeed, they share the same

2.4Ghz frequency as many other wireless devices.31 One reason for this shared frequency is that it is relatively good at moving through diverse materials. Unhindered by most walls, 2.4Ghz provides for a wide range of uses. By transducing electromagnetic waves radiating in the air, artist/hacker Benjamin Gaulon’s project 2.4Ghz draws attention to the presence of electromagnetic activity and the abundance of security cameras in use in the urban environment.32 What began with Gaulon traveling to European cities and recording

30. Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 53 (my emphasis). 31. John Herman, “Why Everything Wireless is 2.4 GHz,” WIRED, last modified September 7, 2010, https://www.wired.com/2010/09/wireless-explainer/. 32. Benjamin Gaulon is a French artist and researcher whose work deals with the limits and failures of information and communication technologies; planned obsolescence, consumerism and disposable society. His artistic practice includes

219 security footage, evolved into an ongoing project that has included public installations in multiple cities and gallery exhibitions as well as a series of creative workshops.

The public installation of 2.4Ghz entails mounting video receivers with monitors along city sidewalks. Photo and video documentation of the piece installed in Paris and

Dublin give a good understanding of how the artwork looks on the streets. An instructive sequence of images shows a video receiver and monitor fastened to a metal sign pole at the edge of a sidewalk. The wires and gadgets of the devise are cased in a small metal box that matches the pole. Facing outward from the pole there is a rectangular window through which the monitor can be seen. In addition to showing the practical details of the piece, the photos draw attention to an interesting aspect of the work. During the day, the piece appears innocuous. Blending in with its surroundings, the monitor and the metal box could easily be overlooked, but at night, the glow of the screen catches the eye.

While most urbanites are used to the bombardment of flashing lights and screens, there is something quite odd about the video stream Gaulon makes visible. The fuzzy images that the small monitor displays give the impression of peering in on something that is not for you to peer in on. The flicker of the surveillance footage across the screen is reminiscent of the footage shown on crime shows. The change of scene from traffic to a dark alley produces a kind of watchful suspense. However, the real effect of the piece is not so much in the image that the monitor presents, but the acknowledgement that security

installations, pieces of hardware, web based projects, interactive works, street art interventions and workshops. For more information, see http://www.recyclism.com/.

220 cameras are everywhere and that many of their signals are constantly being propagated across space.

By adopting common receivers and attaching them to light posts, road signs, and metal guards, Gaulon transduces security signals in the air and makes them available to pedestrians on the street. In this way, security is shown not only to involve numerous devices but the flow of energy. As security technologies have been associated with altering “public spaces, institutions, and homes,”33 taking account of the wave part of security might undo the very distinction between these spaces. The fact that radio waves, among others, can travel through ordinary walls regardless of what they contain, whether commercial, private, or governmental, challenges security as a set of limits and enclosures. Which is to say, because of the nature of electromagnetic waves, defining security in relation to spaces of enclosure misses the expansiveness that is contemporary security.

33. Ronnie Casella, “The False Allure of Security Technologies,” Social Justice 30, no. 3 (93): (2003), 82.

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Figure 16. Benjamin Gaulon, 2.4Ghz. 2008-. Public Installation, mounted wireless video receivers. Benjamin Gaulon. From: http://www.recyclism.com/twopointfour.php.

As the specter of the watchman in the design of the Panopticon functioned as a principle of disciplinary power, as Foucault has articulated, many have asked whether current visual surveillance technologies, such as security cameras, are extensions of that same logic (see chapter 2 for fuller discussion). However, rather than aligning to the technology of the Panopticon as a disciplinary space, the flow of security that Gaulon makes visible in 2.4Ghz comes closer to Gilles Deleuze’s description of societies of control. Whereas, in disciplinary societies the “individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another,” as Deleuze explains, in societies of control closed

222 systems are replaced by free-floating ones.34 Rather than examining sight, Deleuze concentrates on spatial conditions, including how spaces are inscribed and the movement from one space to another. Indeed, his argument that societies of control are replacing disciplinary societies hinges on a realigning of space. The security waves that Gaulon taps into—undefined by destination and unhindered by walls—resemble the spatial boundlessness that Deleuze evokes. Not defined by physical boundaries, whether institution, building, or state, security emerges as limitless.35

In addition to making security feeds visible, 2.4Ghz shows security to be incredibly pervasive as it cuts across distinctions of private and public, interior and exterior. Glimpsed in the static video feed of Gaulon’s monitors is an undulating dimension of contemporary security. In her review of an exhibition that 2.4Ghz was included in called “Trace Recordings” in 2013, Katherine Biber wrote, “we have surrendered willingly to this perpetual recording and, in the process, produced endlessly- new forms of evidence, without our fully grasping the consequences.”36 Biber’s reflection on the magnitude of contemporary security technologies and her description of “perpetual recording” recalls, again, Deleuze’s ceaseless extension of societies of control, in which

“perpetual” is of key significance. As Gaulon’s piece intercepts signals meant only for

34. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” October 59, (Winter 1992): 3. 35. Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” 4. 36. Katherine Biber, “Surveillance is our new normal, so let’s take a closer look,” The Conversation, last modified November 4, 2013, http://theconversation.com/surveillance-is-our-new-normal-so-lets-take-a-closer-look- 19244?utm.

223 certain eyes, the electromagnetic field appears alive with security. The ability to tap into video feeds streaming across diverse urban spaces at will indicates that security is not only a set of physical fixtures but an assemblage of machines, people, and energies.

2.4Ghz temporarily puts receivers in-circuit with the city’s security fields that propagates out from homes, business, and government centers.

Hearing Security Waves

In Luigi Russolo’s 1913 futurist manifesto, “The Art of Noise,” he writes:

Let’s walk together through a great modern capital, with the ear more attentive than the eye, and we will vary the pleasures of our sensibilities by distinguishing among the gurglings of water, air and gas inside metallic pipes, the rumblings and rattlings of engines breathing with obvious animal spirits, the rising and falling of pistons, the stridency of mechanical saws, the loud jumping of trolleys on their rails, the snapping of whips, the whipping of flags.37

The sounds Russolo describes are those that had come to dominate the modern city: the clank and whir of industry, and the clatter and screech of transportation. These are mechanical sounds, Aeolian as Kahn defines, made from physical movement and pressure. Since Russolo’s call for artists to invest in the noises of the modern age, it has become a common practice for sound artist to turn to, or tune into, the surrounding environment. Sound artists regularly engage with and respond to everyday sonic experiences in their work. James Sexton writes, “a recurrent preoccupation of a number of sound artists has been an interest in sound as a material presence within everyday life,

37. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noise (future manifesto 1913), (New York: Something Else Press, 1967), 7.

224 which overlaps with interest in how different spaces can shape the behavior of sound.” 38

In this way artists have drawn attention to sound as an integral aspect of the spaces people inhabit. Beyond just elevating the sonic environment, Shannon Mattern explains, sound artists “can give a kind of presence to infrastructures we’re unaware of, even when we’re inhabiting them.”39 However, more than amplifying ignored Aeolian manifestations, some artists have turned their attention to the imperceptible waves in the electromagnetic field, the Aelectrosonic, in Kahn’s terms. The focus of these artists is not the overlooked infrastructure but energetic forces. Making imperceptible electromagnetic waves audible draws attention to invisible infrastructures that we are immersed in.

Through processes of transduction such artists have turned electromagnetic waves into sonic encounters.

Sound artist Christina Kubisch turns the quiet flow of electromagnetic activity into a sonic experience.40 More than attending to the modern capital as Russolo’s manifesto called for, or advocating for an expanded appreciation of the role of sounds as

Murray Shaffer would do years later with the soundscape, Kubisch brings electromagnetic environments into audibility through transduction. Her interest in the energetic waves that everyday devices propagate but ordinarily go unperceived began in

38. James Sexton, Music, Sound and Multimedia : From the Live to the Virtual (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 88. 39. Shannon Mattern, “Infrastructural Tourism,” Places Journal (July 2013), https://doi.org/10.22269/130701. 40. Christina Kubisch is German sound artist. Her work consists of performances, multimedia concerts, sound installations, sound sculptures and work with ultraviolet light. For more information, see http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/works.

225

2000 when Kubisch was working on an installation piece that incorporated electromagnetic signals. During the installation of the piece, Kubisch was faced with electrical disturbance that interrupted her piece and caused sonic distortions. In an interview, she recounts, “I tried to construct some filters to eliminate them and then I discussed it with the engineer I was working with.” The engineer told Kubisch that the disruptions were inescapable, as he explained, ‘it’s the signals of the magnetic fields around us—there are more and more of them and you have to accept that.’41 Her work intersected with the existing electromagnetic field around her, already in the environment. While Kubisch had long engaged electromagnetic signals, after her discussion with the engineer she began scheming about how, rather than canceling out electromagnetic disturbances, to instead tap into them, to listen in on them.

In 2004 Kubisch began her ongoing project Electrical Walks. The project has manifested as both public walks and compositions. Providing participants with a special pair of induction headphones, Kubisch invites listeners to embark on an electromagnetic walk through the city. As electromagnetic waves fill the air, ripple invisibly across space, emanate from ATM machines, LED screens, Kiosks, Neon signs, and all sorts of other vibrating machines, Kubisch’s walks give participants the opportunity to listen in on an unheard dimension of the city exposing them to the electromagnetic condition that they are already immersed in. For Greenspan, the transmission of electromagnetic frequencies

41. Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, “Christina Kubisch,” The Field: The Art of Field Recording, (Axminster: Uniform, 2013), 66.

226 defines contemporary cities as much as physical features.42 He writes, “behind everything we can feel, touch, hear and see are the vibrations of the electromagnetic waves.”43

Existing at the limit of sensory apprehension, electromagnetic waves often drift unacknowledged, unappreciated, and uncriticized. In addition to highlighting the foundational role of electromagnetic waves in urban life, Greenspan’s draws attention to this sensory problem. Despite being ever-more deeply integrated within the electromagnetic spectrum, which Hertz felt more than a century ago, electromagnetic waves go undetected by bodies that move through, and reside in them. Electrical Walks make ‘real’, in Shannon Mattern’s words, “the myriad waves and particles that make possible, for instance, ATM transactions, Wi-Fi connectivity, and building security systems, and that envelop and penetrate our bodies when we walk down the street or withdraw cash from the bank or open our front doors.”44 Through transduction, Kubisch reveals material conditions of the field that ordinarily escape sensibility.

Although as Kahn makes clear radio did not start with a technological invention, as radio waves existed in nature long before radio was invented, Kubisch was fascinated by the idea that the inundation of electronic devices and machines since the 1980s has made the world electromagnetically louder. All that is required to hear electromagnetic activity, as Kahn explains, “is the proper transducer.”45 Kubisch’s induction headphones effectively allowed her to turn disturbance into attention, opening a new space for sonic

42. Anna Greenspan, “Wireless Waves,” 143. 43. Ibid. 44. Mattern, “Infrastructural Tourism.” 45. Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 7.

227 and musical exploration that moved beyond the ordinary soundscape and studio. She excitedly states, “with these new sensitive headphones, it was just fantastic, there were so many different sounds and rhythms!”46

Security appears as the third track on Kubisch’s 2007 album Five Electrical

Walks. Lasting just over 4 minutes, the sonic experience is one of static vibration. The composition crackles, hisses, pulses, beeps, and zigzags in and out of distinction, shifting from high to low frequency. Sounds flutter and fade out, quicken and slow, jitter and thump, all along maintaining a static twitch. As the composition unfolds, intensity builds and then relents. Some sounds almost strike a familiar chord, such as the revving of an ignition or the crackle of a lost radio station. Kubisch’s composition does not stand in for security nor does it provide a representation of security, instead, it operates as a material extension of security as the movement of energy. Her induction headphones convert electromagnetic signals being transmitted by security machines into mechanical sounds.

The crackling and hissing is the effect of Kubisch transducing electromagnetic currents.

With her induction headphones, she transduced and recorded the signals of antitheft security machines from malls in the cities of Madrid, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, London, and Taipei. But rather than inspire a comparison between these metropolises, the various electromagnetic signals become indiscernible. Lost in the sum of static pulses, the composition amplifies security as a persistent presence across these far-flung spaces of consumerism. Security clashes with the familiar shine of the mall filled with pop music.

46. Lane and Carlyle, “Christina Kubisch,” 66.

228

The composition agitates and prickles the ears and skin, producing an effect like electricity in the air. By tranducing electromagnetic waves, Kubisch makes latent security processes present to the senses. The waves that make up Security are most likely from

Electronic article surveillance (EAS) systems. EAS is a standard antitheft technology often used in department stores. Such systems work by creating an electromagnetic field that customers pass through when they exit the store. With a transmitter on one side and a receiver on the other, a dual system creates an electromagnetic field tuned to a specific frequency. In merchandise tags, hidden metal ribbons that resonate at the same frequency as the field, vibrate when they cross the electromagnetic current. The transmitted energy creates a resonant circuit that Kubisch could tune into with her headphones. Through transduction the silent circuit is flipped into audibility, making ordinarily peripheral security processes available to the ears.

Because the human body is susceptible to a limited range of the electromagnetic spectrum, and as Kahn writes “audiovisually skewed,” there are a multitude of waves at the disposal for anyone who wish to operate below the level perception. 47 But through transduction, perception can be extended. This is the work of Kubisch’s induction headphones as they convert energetic security currents into static twitches that crackle and hiss. The sounds that make up Security are coupled to this process of transduction as well as the security of the shopping malls. Thus, while Security affords a distinct ensemble of sounds, the composition cannot be fully detached from the energy of security

47. Kahn. Earth Sounds Earth Signals. (13).

229 nor simply reduced to a continuation of its electrical signals. As Stuart Jones writes,

“inasmuch as the electronic oscillations that are experienced as sounds are produced by the interaction of the waves with the induction loops, they are not directly the sound of the waves themselves nor are they Kubisch’s rendering of data into sound.”48 Instead, the induction headphones are an intervention, an interruption via media into the security circuit, into the space of security that produces sounds out of the encounter of waves and media.

Seeing X-rays

Whereas Security makes electromagnetic waves audible, Walead Beshty’s photographic series Travel Pictures makes X-ray radiation visible.49 The series consists of nine chromogenic prints, or C-prints, ranging in size from 88h x 49w to 97h x 49w.

Like Kubisch, by transducing energetic waves, Beshty makes security perceptible in a new way, but Travel Pictures diverges from Kubisch’s Electrical Walks in terms of the kind of transduction to which the photographs are attached. The transduction present in

Travel Pictures is linked to Beshty’s light sensitive medium, his photographic negatives.

X-rays are like visible light but more energetic—with a higher degree of radiation and a higher frequency—they can penetrate materials where light waves cannot. Whether seeing a human’s bone structure or passengers’ personal items hidden within their

48. Stuart Jones, "Now? Towards a Phenomenology of Real Time Sonification,"AI & SOCIETY 27, no. 2 (2011): 226. 49. Walead Beshty is British artist based in Los Angeles. He is well known for wide ranging work in photography, exploring how the medium functions or fails to capacity to document. For more information, see https://www.artsy.net/artist/walead- beshty and http://www.regenprojects.com/artists/walead-beshty.

230 luggage, the primary application of X-ray technology is to extend the field of vision.

Ordinarily X-ray machines used in airport screening have no lasting effect on items, but in Beshty’s case, the electromagnetic waves activated the light sensitive layer of his film.

The radiation caused the silver halide crystals to react. This, indeed, is what the light sensitive emulsion was made to do—react to radiation—but Beshty’s film had already been exposed to light while photographing a former Iraqi embassy in Germany.

In 2006 Beshty went to document an abandoned Iraqi embassy located in the former East Berlin.50 Following Germany’s reunification in 1991, the Iraqi government abruptly departed and the embassy hastily closed. In the exodus, nearly everything was left: furniture, office equipment, books, and documents. With much of the embassy’s contents still filling rooms, corridors, and closets, the building fell into a liminal state.

One visitor recounts:

Papers are strewn everywhere, files, important documents, letters, photos, names, addresses; mountains of them ripped from folders and filing cabinets and just scattered around. Chairs are overturned, sofas gutted, desks ravaged, walls blackened, shards of glass lie on the floor. Dirty curtains billow in the nonchalant breeze through broken windows. You’d think a bomb hit the place even before you realize where you are. But this is one Iraqi site which was never bombed – it was simply abandoned.51

The disaster that seems to be present throughout the building is the result of the rapid dismantling of the embassy and the years it was left untended. And while intruders had left their marks, some purely destructive, others more creative such as the artists who

50. Jan Tumlir, “Walead Beshty: Piece by Piece,” Aperture 192 (2008): 35. 51. “Party at Saddam's house (The abandoned Iraqi embassy),” Abandoned Berlin (blog), May 2, 2014, http://www.abandonedberlin.com/2010/06/party-at-saddams-house- abandoned-iraqi.html.

231 have graffitied the walls, Beshty’s interest in the site was connected to its state of in betweenness. Legally the site is neither a part of Germany nor Iraq. The former embassy exists “in a gap in international law, because of the way the Vienna Convention was written,” Beshty explains, “it was essentially a tract of land that was in geo-political limbo, a sovereignty-free zone.”52 Compelled by what he describes as a “completely indeterminate place,” Beshty made multiple trips to photograph the embassy.53 It was on his return to the United States that Beshty’s film underwent a second wave of exposure as it passed through airport security.

The effect of the electromagnetic waves on Beshty’s film functions as a kind of double exposure, where scenes of embassy’s wreckage emerge washed in airport security. Travel Pictures offer a record of an undisclosed catastrophe; the effects obvious but the cause unknown: doors left ajar, windows broken, books strewn across the floor, furniture stacked haphazardly, and cabinet contents no longer contained. While the embassy appears descriptively in the series of photographs, security appears as bursts and gradients of color that dance across the surface of the prints in abstract patterns. For example, in Travel Picture (Sunset), a typewriter is seen sitting at the edge of a desk along with a pamphlet and a stack of papers. Some of the keys on the typewriter are missing and the platen, where the paper would be, is pushed all the way to one side

52. Olivier Mosset, “Pier Conversation: Walead Beshty and Olivier Mosset,” Mousse 19 (Summer 2009), http://moussemagazine.it/walead-beshty-olivier-mosset- 2009/. 53. Walead Beshty, interview by Mikkel Car, “Interview: Walead Beshty,” 2011, http://www.konsthall.malmo.se/upload/pdf/Walead_Beshty_Interview.pdf.

232 giving the impression that the writing machine was abandoned in the middle of use, albeit quite some time ago. The desk faces two large windows where only sections of glass remain. Through the window frames and past the shards of glass, a balcony covered in debris can be seen. A variety of bare trees and shrubs can be spotted beyond the balcony.

Overlaying the entire scene is a magenta wash that shifts in intensity across the surface of the image. Highly concentrated along the right edge of the image, the vibrant reddish- purple spreads out and defuses into the shadowy corners. (See Fig. 16). Beshty emphasizes the color distortions in each photograph through subtitles, which includes: sunset, rose, meadow, violet, granite, fern, fog, and mist. These titles are whimsical, they draw away from the clinical scrutiny of the airport and the political fallout of the embassy. They cling to and amplify the abstract play of light. But as Jan Tumlir writes,

“these pictures reveal the submersion of one medium under another.”54 Travel Pictures resonate with the electromagnetic field of the X-ray machine.

54. Jan Tumlir, “Walead Beshty: Piece by Piece,” Aperture. No.192 (2008): (35).

233

Figure 17. Walead Beshty, Travel Picture (Sunset) Tschaikowskistrasse 17 in multiple exposures, (LAXFRATHF/TXLCPHSEALAX) March 27-April 3, 2006. 2006-2008. C- print, 90 x 51 in. Guggenheim Museum, New York. From: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/22884.

X-ray machines have become part of international and domestic travel in airports around the world. The deployment of X-ray scanners, and other electromagnetic wave technology, is connected to a series of disasters. In 1988, Pan American Flight exploded

234 after a bomb was made its way onto the plane through checked luggage.55 While the Pan

American Flight highlighted the need to think about aviation security, the September 11 attacks provided the context for mandatory screening. When TSA (Transport Security

Administration) was first formed, its primary concern was the security of transportation systems. Since the organization’s formation, TSA has deployed 1850 advanced X-ray scanning devices.56 Along with other electromagnetic devices, airport security has been expanded electromagnetically.

Able to pass through fabric and flesh, X-ray waves extend the eyes of security by furnishing images of hidden content. Their effectiveness is dependent on the fact that materials absorb X-rays differently. Absorbed by some surfaces and reflected by others,

X-ray machines produce an image that reveals not only the shape of objects but also their materiality. The color distortions in Beshty’s photograph are the result of radiation passing through the film in the X-ray machine. As the light sensitive crystals react to the

X-ray waves, the film transduces security and in turn makes the energetic radiation visible. In this way, Travel Pictures inverts the visual proclivity of the X-ray machine.

Unlike anti-theft security systems that go off when the signal is interrupted, X-ray machines only produce images to be scrutinized. The X-ray image shows the density of materials and objects within the suitcase.57 Incapable of sensing suspicious objects on its

55. Kelly Leon and Rongfang Liu, “The Key Design Parameters of Checked Baggage Security Screening Systems in Airports,” Journal of Air Transport Management 11 (2005), 69. 56. Ibid., 70. 57. Kelly Leone and Rongfang Liu, “The Key Design Parameters of Checked Baggage Security,” Journal of Air Transport Management 11, no. 2 (2005): 71.

235 own, a security guard must read and make sense out of the X-ray images to determine whether dangerous objects are hidden in a passenger’s bag.58 In a reverse fashion, then,

Beshty’s prints show the very force used to extend security’s vision. Through multiple exposures, both the dilapidated embassy and international airport security become co- present. Beshty explains, “this is why the X-rays made sense to me, they were both a way the film saw the act of travel, and they were a mark of international borders, the same international laws that put the embassy in such an odd situation.”59 The photographs thus present two kinds of space: one, of the regulated environment of US airports, and one, of conflicted political and symbolic territory. Through transduction of the X-ray machine the former embassy is seen through the presence of the electromagnetic field of security.

Medium Specificity

In the 1940s, art critic Clement Greenberg advanced the concept of medium- specificity as a strategy for modernist art. Greenberg was concerned with what he saw as a confusion in the arts across mediums. To assuage this confusion, and disentangle the arts, he advocated for each medium to retreat to its proper place. In this vein, he argued that painting divest pictorial space, and instead focus on the flatness of the canvas and paint. He promoted artist embracing the inherent conditions and limitations of a given medium in order to restore the distinction between art forms. Thus, Greenberg called for an investment in the medium that would reflect a purity of form over imitation. Heralding

58. Tobias Halbherr et al, “Airport Security Screener Competency: A Cross- Sectional and Longitudinal Analysis,” The International Journal of Aviation Psychology 23, no. 2 (2013): 115. 59. Olivier Mosset, “Pier Conversation: Walead Beshty and Olivier Mosset.”

236 purity for its sensuousness, Greenberg celebrated abstract art and music’s capacity to produce effects through immediate sensation.60 However, underpinning Greenberg’s elevation of medium specificity is the withdrawal of the arts into their discrete confines, their inherent properties. Purity of the medium meant that any given art form should be extracted from other art forms and the broader social context. Therefore, Greenberg’s move toward purity solidified the concept of the autonomous art object.

In contrast to Greenberg’s explication of medium through his curtailing of the arts, Kahn positions media as an essential component of transduction. Whether thinking about natural occurring media or technological devices, media can make phenomenal that which escapes the senses. For example, the wind might be made audible through the trees or electromagnetic signals are made audible through the radio. Phenomena in each example are made sensible in ways they were not before.61 Taking a tree or a radio as a medium cast a radically different understanding of medium. Whereas the pure medium for Greenberg is cut off from the world and other influences—it is internally directed and organized—Kahn’s medium is a site of conveyance and transformation, which cannot be disconnected from that which is external. Although Greenberg had painting and sculpture specifically in mind, his prescription of the medium contributed to a limited, withdrawn, definition of art. Benjamin Gaulon, Christina Kubisch, and Walead Beshty put pressure on this limited definition by taking to the street, the mall, and the airport. Taking

60. Clement Greenberg, “Towards a New Laocoon,” Partisan Review 7 (1940): 297. 61. Kahn, Earth Sound Earth Signal, 56.

237 advantage of transductive media, these artists show media to be a critical and experimental site of encounter.

Through 2.4Ghz, Security, and Travel Pictures medium becomes rearticulated as a means of engagement and connectivity. Specifically, media becomes a way to open hidden structures and obscure presences to the senses. Through media the ether was first felt, and through media these artists make immersive security fields perceptible. Beshty furthers the idea that media exists beyond a single prescription when he says, “in essence a medium is defined dialectically by application and technology, each informing and changing the other.”62 Beshty’s dialectical medium emphasizes a working through multiple forces. In resisting a self-contained understanding of medium, Beshty reads the notion of pure form as a “smoothing out of history and the medium.”63 Medium in the account of 2.4Ghz, Security, and Travel Pictures is not merely self-reflexive or contained but connected to machinery, phenomena, and space outside of the media itself.

Medium emerges in the work of Gaulon, Kubisch, and Beshty in opposition to the self-contained status of the autonomous art object, against a Greenbergian understanding of the medium. For example, in transducing electromagnetic waves that carry surveillance camera signals, Gaulon draws attention to the constant broadcasting of security in the air. The medium, thus, is a site of transaction where security, technology, and the senses meet. This medium cannot be disconnected from the exterior messiness of

62. Walead Beshty, interview by Mikkel Car, “Interview: Walead Beshty,” 2011. 63. Ibid.

238 the world, where information and energy leak and objects are constantly collaborating.64

It is an interdependent working of medium that makes electromagnetic waves perceptible.

Medium specificity in these examples opens onto the energetic force of security.

Configuring the medium as interdependent comes closer to Marshall McLuhan’s understanding, not as an insular expression but as a connective condition that links back to other media: “since no medium has its meaning or existence alone, but only in constant interplay with other media.”65 This interplay reworks the parameters of medium from an autonomous object to an interrelated field. In describing the medium in a broader context

McLuhan states, “just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane.”66 For McLuhan this reveals new and opposite forms of sensibility. Within the frame of medium specificity and transduction, the airplane wing reveals that the medium works through, and is worked through by, external forces. As transduction takes place on the level of the media, and through the media, a different understanding of medium specificity is produced. Ljubec explains, “by following the artist’s traces on the interface, we are transduced into a new medium, by transcending the old.”67 Živa Ljubec suggests that transduction does not only reconfigure the medium but also what is sensible, as he continues, “suddenly sensibility is recognized as a

64. Douglas Kahn. Earth Sound Earth Signal, 236. 65. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 26. 66. Ibid. 67. Živa Ljubec, “Art of Peripheral Permeability: Revisiting Interfaces in Biological Media for Post-Biological Culture,” Technoetic Arts: A Journal Of Speculative Research 10, no. 2/3 (2012): 302.

239 gnoseological faculty, that is, a faculty that produces a certain type of knowledge.”68 In addition to shifting what is, and what is not, made accessible through the senses, what is knowable also shifts. Knowledge is caught up in the apprehension of the sensuous world, and therefore redefined as new things, environments, and spaces become sensory.

Atmosphere of Security

Although March McLuhan’s conceptualization and writings are clearly linked to the rise of telecommunication on a global scale, these new technologies were always less important than what they made possible. McLuhan’s well-known phrase “the medium is the message,” points to this fact, but more than emphasizing the medium as in the television or radio device, there is a gesture toward something bigger than these machines. For McLuhan, Greenspan explains, the true significance of the radio, telephone, television, and computer is that they illuminate the “the electric environment itself.”69 Beyond transducing waves of telecommunication, such devices point more broadly to the electromagnetic spectrum, a field of electromagnetic activity that exists across and between spaces. Machines are not necessary for sensing the electromagnetic field, as Kahn recounts, “if it is cold and dry, hairs on your body and fibers on you clothing let you know it is electrical.”70 Yet, it was through scientific experimentations and technological incursions into electric environments that expanded the field of

68. Ljubec, “Art of Peripheral Permeability,” 302. 69. Greenspan, “Wireless Waves,” 142. 70. Douglas Kahn, “Electrical Atmospheres,” in Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves, ed. José Luis de Vicente and Honor Harger (Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica: Actar, DL, 2011), 25.

240 electricity. Again, as Kahn demonstrates, “the imperial architects did not know as they stretched telegraph and telephone lines and cables over the earth that they were building a huge sensing array to observe and study the effects of atmospheric electricity, electrical storms, magnetic storms, earth currents and electromagnetic fields and waves…”71 While the earliest telegraph and telephone lines were thought of as new networks of communication, they also offered new ways of sensing naturally occurring signals already present and active in the environment. Anna Greenspan writes, “these discoveries, with their re-conceptualizing of the physical world, came with a sense that the planet was submerged in an invisible liquid-like medium.”72

More than the radio, telephone, television, and computer, the medium might be thought of as the air. Or more specifically, as Gabrys espouses, the atmosphere. “The atmosphere,” she writes, “is quite literally the space through which wireless signals travel, but it is also the historic and poetic substance that has enabled the speculation towards communication without wires, as well as a social, political, and economic apparatus.” 73 The atmosphere operates like the ether before it, delivering energetic waves while functioning as a space of speculation. What has changed, however, is its status of medium. The atmosphere is not so much a means of communing with ghost, but with other people and machines wirelessly. The atmosphere, as Gabrys articulates it, is where distant communications, transactions, and exchanges are mediated. Approaching this

71. Kahn, “Electrical Atmospheres,” 25. 72. Greenspan, “Wireless Waves,” 141. 73. Gabrys, “Atmospheres of Communication,” 54.

241 field of activity as atmospheric, she argues, “enables a sense of the relation between electromagnetic trajectories and new geographies, whether the ‘ball of earth’ or cities.”74

In other words, not only is the atmosphere a mediating force but it bundles and brings dispersed places into connection with one another and the electromagnetic spectrum. For

Derek McCormack, atmospheric things are “articulated through a technical process of experimental spherification in which new capacities to act are generated through folding materiality upon itself in a process of differentiation.”75 Although McCornmack is specifically address gaseous states here, the work of artists tapping into the electromagnetic field they articulate that which is atmospheric.

By transducing electromagnetic security 2.4Ghz, Security, and Travel Pictures provide a means to rethink not only the proliferation of devices everyday spaces, but also the electromagnetic waves that vibrate in the air. These artworks bring that which is

“barely sensed and yet are compelling,” in Kathleen Stewart’s words, to the surface.76

Hertzian space has been associated with the limits of perceptual familiarity, but security can also be thought of in this way.77 While at the edge of sensory awareness, security, as part of the electromagnetic spectrum, has the potential to be invisible, inaudible and atmospheric. Quietly moving through and across bodies and spaces, electromagnetic security is part of Hertzian space along with the wireless devices, radiating technologies,

74. Gabrys, “Atmospheres of Communication,” 54. 75. Derek McCormack, “Atmospheric Things and Circumstantial Excursions,” Cultural Geographies 21, no. 4 (2014): 611. 76. Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 447. 77. Usman Haque, “Sky Ear,” Architectural Design 75, no. 1 (2005): 10.

242 and naturally occurring electromagnetic currents. Kahn has referred to devices like radios and telephones as “sensing instruments,” capable of tapping into electronic environments.78 Gaulon, Kubish and Beschty demonstrate other ways of tapping into electronic environments. Through their selected media these artists tap into energetic fields of security. Gabrys writes, “wireless signals draw our attention to this space in between, the atmosphere through which wireless waves travel, the intervening medium of the air.”79 2.4Ghz, Security, and Travel Pictures draw attention to security in the air by bringing electromagnetic wave to the senses – orienting us “toward everyday atmospheric conditions that are integral to lived urbanism” as Marina Peterson writes.80 Taken together these artworks show security not to be confined to specific objects or even areas but energetically radiating across spaces of inhabitance, travel, and consumption.

Security is atmospheric.

Conclusion

Art critic Vicenç Altaió argues, “it is characteristic of the world of the art of representation to lay siege to the invisible and make it visible to the naked eye, and to give it sense, and aesthetic sense.”81 In many ways, this is what Security and Travel

Pictures do, they make an invisible dimension of security perceptible in a way it had not

78. Kahn, “Electrical Atmospheres,” 25. 79. Gabrys, “Atmospheres of Communication,” 47. 80. Marina Peterson, “Atmospheric Sensibilities Noise, Annoyance, and Indefinite Urbanism,” Social Text 131 35, no. 2 (2017): 69. 81. Vicenc Altaio, “Making the Invisible Visible,” in Invisible Fields: Geographies of Radio Waves, ed. José Luis de Vicente and Honor Harger (Barcelona: Arts Santa Mònica: Actar, DL, 2011), 6.

243 been before. The electromagnetic waves that propagate outward in the mall and in the airport, are not just given a new aesthetic sense, they are made sensory in the first place.

Through a process of transduction 2.4Ghz, Security, and Travel Pictures bring invisible, inaudible waves into the realm of sense perception. In doing so, they offer more than a representation of electromagnetic security. Between the artworks and the security they reference, a vibrant materiality exists. Radically linking both are the energetic waves that populate these spaces. Not only do Gaulon, Kubisch, and Beshty intervene in these electromagnetic fields, but their work is the product of these energetic forces. More than a representation of the invisible, by tapping into energetic waves these artworks make sensible—aurally and visually—immersive security fields. By sensing security in this way, security might be rethought as a field and reimagined as atmospheric. As Hertz drew the ether down to the ground, these artists draw enigmatic security waves into a sensory perceptibility. And in the process, simultaneously challenge how security and medium are understood. Through Gaulon’s video receivers, Kubisch’s induction headphones and Beshty’s color negative film, security emerges as part of the electromagnetic spectrum, or part of Hertzian space. Medium, on the other hand, emerges as something relational and interconnected. Whether it be the air or film, here, medium is an active matrix not an autonomous thin unto itself. By tapping into electromagnetic security fields, the invisible workings of security are exposed. The electromagnetic spectrum, at the edge of perception, is alive with not just wireless communication but security waves and signals that create security thresholds and penetrate bags and walls.

As security extends out through electromagnetic fields, security becomes even more

244 sensitive while evading the senses. It is through moments of transduction that this kind of security might be brought down out of the ether and into the realm of the senses, in a way that its pervasive presence might be heard, seen, and felt for the first time.

245

CONCLUSION: SECURITY TOWARD OTHER ENDS

SimpliSafe is a company that offers homeowners the ability to effectively turn their house into an all-out security machine. The company describes the system in a four- step process: “1) When one of your sensors detects an intruder, it alerts your base station.

2) The base station sends a signal over cellular network to our monitoring center. 3)

Security experts receive the signal and call you before contacting the police. 4) Unless you cancel the alarm, we send the police to your home to ensure your safety.”1

SimpliSafe is a sponsor of conservative talk radio shows such as The Rush Limbaugh

Show and The Glenn Beck Radio Program. In return, both hosts have promoted

SimpliSafe to their listeners as the best security system for protecting their families and their homes. Taking Limbaugh assertion that we are living in “really, really, really dangerous times,”2 securitizing one’s home seems like a necessary and reasonable step.

According to the company’s website, “SimpliSafe is so remarkably effective a Wisconsin police department uses it to catch criminals.”3 Shipped directly to the customer’s door, the company effectively brings policing technologies home, a reminder that private companies, government entities, and citizens alike can exercise policing, as Marc

1. “Features,” SimpliSafe, accessed September 20, 2017, http://simplisafe.com/wireless-home-security-feature-overview. 2. Rush Limbaugh, “We’re Living in Dangerous Times – And Donald J. Trump Is the Target,” Rush Limbaugh, last modified March 7, 2017, https://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2017/03/07/were-living-in-dangerous-times-and- donald-j-trump-is-the-target/. 3. “Make Home Feel Safe Again,” SimpliSafe, accessed September 20, 2017, http://simplisafe.com/.

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Schuilenburg asserts.4 SimpliSafe was also a sponsor of the Home & Garden Television network marketing promotion sweepstakes: “HGTV Smart Home Giveaway 2017.” The network built a state-of-the-art home in a gated community in north Scottsdale, Arizona, that viewers could enter to win. The home was design with smart technologies, including temperature-controlled baths and showers, and a SimpliSafe system. In a commercial for the home, “SimpliSafe Protects the HGTV Smart Home 2017,” the narrator describes how the home can become a space of relaxation again through security.5 Advertisements for SimpliSafe security systems frequently appears on the cable channel, suggesting that getting one’s “forever home” is only the first step, the next is safeguarding it, securitizing it.

SimpliSafe operates like a miniature border security initiative, a reminder that no place is unworthy of being monitored, whether by watchful eyes or advanced sensing technologies. In rural Ohio, signs are posted along gravel roads telling drivers of passing cars that the neighborhood watch is on the lookout and ready to report anything suspicious. Entering the Shard in London, the tallest building in the United Kingdom, all bags must go through an X-ray machine. In a new apartment complex in Missouri, the office assistant proudly announces, “On the premise there are cameras mounted everywhere providing comprehensive surveillance 24/7!” At the British Library, as well

4. Marc Schuilenburg, The Securitization of Society: Crime, Risk, and Social Order, trans. By George Hall (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 29. 5. “SimpliSafe Protects the HGTV Smart Home 2017,” YouTube Video, 1:00, 28 April. 2017, posted “by SimpliSafe,” September 21, 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=o44TOg9Auzg.

247 as the Tulsa Public Library, each bag must be opened and inspected. The Mall of

America in Minneapolis, Minnesota has its own counterterrorism unit that stops and interviews more than 1000 suspicious persons each year.6 The Department of Homeland

Security tries to encourage all Americans to be alert with the slogan “See Something, Say

Something” and their “Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative.” And yet, despite the extensive presence of these kinds of securities, we are told that threats are evolving and emergent. Under such circumstances, everyone is urged to be aware of their surroundings and to “report unusual behavior, suspicious or unattended packages.”7 To what end do we perform all of this security and to whose detriment may it contribute?

After handing over my documents and explaining the details of my trip to Paris and my stay in London, the French border security agent looks at me and says, “This,” holding up my passport, “doesn’t look anything like you.” I don’t know what to say—I feel my cheeks getting hot—and I think of my friend’s sister, returning from visiting her family in Saudi Arabia, getting interrogated at US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) in

Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C. After extensive questioning about why she was in the US and the nature of her travel to Saudi Arabia, the sister begins to cry. Taking keen interest in this, the CBP officer demands a reason for the tears, but when she explains she misses her husband and is tired from traveling, the officer remains

6. Daniel Zwerdling, “Under Suspicion at The Mall of America,” NPR All Things Considered, last modified September 7, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/09/07/140234451/under-suspicion-at-the-mall-of-america 7. United States. The Federal Emergency Management Agency. Terrorism. 2013. 148. https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1549-20490- 0802/terrorism.pdf.

248 unsatisfied. He states, “that’s not good enough,” and continues to interrogate her emotions. Stress manifests corporeally. In addition to tears or sweat, the body can break out in hives under strenuous conditions. Under security that is more and more about bodies, the body’s response to security can be deemed suspicious or unacceptable. During the Ebola epidemic in the fall of 2014, Nurse Kaci Hickox was quarantined in New

Jersey after returning from Sierra Leone where she had been volunteering with Doctors’

Without Borders. The forehead scanner at the airport displayed her temperature as 101 degrees Fahrenheit; she had a slight fever, one of the first indicators of the Ebola virus.

But as the New York Times reports, the scan “came after four hours during which she had not been allowed to leave.”8 In other words, the scrutiny of Hickox’s body in the airport could have contributed to her rising temperature. In a world where security is increasingly directed at bodies, security becomes registered in and through bodies.

In contemporary security, the body is taken as an indicator of risk, a sign of danger, but also as means of extension, a sensor, that if it is tuned correctly, can carry out security beyond the reaches of devices or law enforcement. As the focus of security, the body feels security—sometimes by hands during a strip search, sometimes by floodlights on the street or at the border, sometimes by loud speakers or alarms. But security might also be felt in the sweat upon the eyebrow or the muscle contraction of a forced smile as a

Muslim woman tries to present herself as calm and collected in an airport—a space

8. Anemona Hartocollis and Emma G. Fitzsimmons. “Tested Negative for Ebola, Nurse Criticizes Her Quarantine.” The New York Times. October 25, 2014. Accessed September 23, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/nyregion/nurse-in-newark- tests-negative-for-ebola.html.

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Rachel Hall describes as, “tense with the pressure to perform.”9 Although security is felt in bodies, bodies do not always feel security equally. David Lyon and Kevin D. Haggerty explain, “Arabs and Muslims have been singled out in North America for disproportionate attention” in the post 9/11 security-era.10 Certain bodies feel security on and in their muscles more frequently. Nonetheless, as security works through all bodies by attuning people to suspicious behaviors, dress, and corporeality, a person might also become aware of security at work in her own eyes, ears, nose, and gestures. Carrie

Noland asserts, “bodies are sensing as we perform them, or how our movement—abrupt or gentle, effortless or forceful—make others feel.”11 In many ways, the security body is the pristine sensor because it can move, infiltrate, and incorporate multiple faculties at once. Becoming aware of our performance of security provides a way not only to recognize security at work in the body but also to recognize “the constructed and iterative nature of our acts.”12 In the current security era, sensing what is considered suspicious is not neutral; instead, it is a cultivated way of seeing, hearing, smelling, and being in the world that oftentimes carries biases.

9. Rachel Hall, “Unwitting Performances of Transparency: Monitoring the Travelling Public, Managing Airport Affect,” Performance Research 16, no. 2 (2011): 97. 10. David Lyon and Kevin D. Haggerty, “The Surveillance Legacies of 9/11: Recalling, Reflecting on, and Rethinking Surveillance in the Security Era,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 27, no. 3 (2012): 295. 11. Carrie Noland, Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 6. 12. Ibid.

250

Sensing security holds multiple meanings: first, it is a way of sensing the presence of security all around us. Second, it is sensing security in our bodies in our routine movements, behaviors, and general corporeality. Third, sensing security entails the deployment of sensors and technological devices that extend the senses for the purposes of security. By attending to the sensory entanglements of security, security emerges as incredibly pervasive. Not limited to a single site, security is caught up in bodies, technologies, and spaces. And moreover, security is not just caught up in bodies, technology, and spaces, but productive of them. In this expansive domain, odd things can be brought together, like cows, tumbleweeds, terrorists, hearts, the sun, and the air.

Additionally, by taking account of the sensory dimensions of security, security emerges as an intimate affair that brings seemingly disparate security experiences together. Art provides one way to interject in the unfolding of this entangled security. Consequently, I finish this project with a discussion of two artworks that point to the possibility of security apparatuses being redirected towards alternate ends.

251

Figure 18. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Krzysztof Wodiczko, Pavilion Zoom. 2015. Interactive Installation. Projectors, 9 infrared cameras, 3 robotic zoom cameras, 3 computers, 2 IR illuminators, 1 ethernet switch, HDMI and USB extenders and cables, dimensions variable. Saatchi Gallery, London. Photograph by Jena Seiler (2017).

In a large room people gather, some in pairs, some alone. Their attention is drawn to the walls where live video feeds are projected. The image flickers and pans. An extreme close-up of a person in the crowd appears. Her face momentarily fills one quarter of the divided image on the wall. Then the camera zooms out and reveals other bodies in the room. They are entranced by the evolving footage that their own image has also been swept up into. The first person’s face is bracketed by the outline of a white box. Above the box, the numbers 2468:203 appear in white text against a black rectangle. The numbers resemble a tag or a marker, but it is at first unclear what the numbers denote. A white line shifts and contracts, and then connects the first person’s box to another box in a different part of the room. The area within each box is reproduced: first, at the top of

252 the original image, and then—in a grid on the wall through which one enters the space— cropped faces and blurred fragments of the space show up as an archive of those who have entered the space. Their identification data is listed below. The line that extends out from one person to another place in the room or another person is also marked with text.

The words remote, distant, potential, or confirmed could pop up next to the line.

However, in this instance text reads “attraction.”

In the spring of 2017, I experienced Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Krzysztof

Wodiczko collaborative installation Pavilion Zoom (2015) at the Saatchi Gallery in

London.13 Upon stepping into the room, one enters—not just an immersive and interactive artwork, but—a security circuit. A circuit that without the presence of bodies in the space would go virtually dead. As Rich Benjamin describes, the artists “capture and loop your every movement and project it onto the ceiling and walls.”14 The piece consists of 12 computerized surveillance systems that have been designed to analyze the public, in this case gallery visitors. Using facial recognition algorithms, the cameras in the room detect the presence of participants and record their spatial relationship within the room and in relation to other bodies. This footage and information is then projected onto the walls. The apparatus is automated; there is no controller, no one orchestrating

13 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian artist whose work engages architecture, technological theater, and performance. For more information, see http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/. Krzysztof Wodiczko is a Polish artist known for his large-scale photo and video projections. For more information, see http://culture.pl/en/artist/krzysztof-wodiczko. 14. Rich Benjamin, “Selfies are just the contemporary version of the art masters’ self-portraits,” Quartz, July 27, 2017, https://qz.com/1038612/saatchi-gallerys-selfie- exhibition-selfies-are-the-contemporary-version-of-the-art-masters-self-portraits/.

253 the selection or collage of images. “Independent robotic cameras zoom in to amplify the images of the public with up to 35x magnification,” Lozano-Hemmer explains, “the zooming sequences are disorienting as they change the entire image “landscape” from easily recognizable wide shots of the crowd to abstract close-ups.” 15 The sensing of bodies and movement in the space reminds us of SMARTLights and systems of sensors along the US/Mexico border. Lozano-Hemmer and Wodiczko appropriate and put on display the machineries of advanced surveillance technology. In the context of the larger

Saatchi exhibition titled “From Selfie to Self-Expression,” the artwork is couched in society’s interest in presenting and reproducing itself, under which the Zoom Pavilion is flattened, emptied of its politics, and turned into the ultimate selfie-backdrop: you, standing in front of a projection of you! The strange relay of one’s own face on the walls, repeated, highlighted, magnified, brought next to other faces present in the room, is entrancing. But the artwork is about more than the love or fascination of our own image, the installation brings surveillance technology into full view, makes it present and reveals its capacity, but as we track ourselves across the walls, the apparatus tracks us, archives us, and memorizes us—this is a space of immense power using technologies of surveillance and control. Even if people do not evade, hide, or run from the pivoting camera, but instead stand motionlessly waiting to snap the best picture of their projected image, Zoom Pavilion puts security technologies front and center and brings visitors into the fold of security. But even more important than demonstrating the capabilities of

15. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, “Zoom Pavilion,” Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, accessed September 20, 2017, http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/zoom_pavilion.php.

254 security technologies, Lozano-Hemmer and Wodiczko have directed the technology to an understanding of how security informs our presence in relation to others.

Whereas security is usually considered in terms of tracking the movements, acts, and behaviors of deviant individuals like criminals and terrorists, Lozano-Hemmer and

Wodiczko reveal that everyone is tracked, the camera is interested in all bodies.

Moreover, whereas security is thought to highlight suspicious bodies, Lozano-Hemmer and Wodiczko’s piece highlights the separation between people and the pull of people toward each other. Where words like danger and risk might be expected, worlds including attraction and remote, distant, and confirmed show up instead. The artwork magnifies the distance and closeness of people to suggest their physical—and possibly other—relations, like comradery, mutuality, co-presence, or aloneness. This is not the stuff of security, it is the stuff of conviviality, recognition, and existing in the presence of others.

The capacity of a device to sense a body, a substance, a space, or an environment is a powerful reminder of advancing security technologies. But despite the systems through which security expands, security is not only about technology. Security is in bodies, embodied; security is in the environment and is helping to produce space; security is in the air, vibrating through electromagnetic energy across air and space; security couples entities, technologies, and bodies to create security assemblages that expand out rhizomatically to create ever-more connections; but, like all rhizomes, there are unpredictable lines of flight. There is a line of flight in sensing what Carrie Noland recognizes as a potential to become aware of one’s own body while enacting certain ways

255 of sensing within a culture. More than just becoming aware that one’s sight extends security, this recognition could lead some to redirect their sensory perceptions toward something besides suspicion and scrutiny. This is one of the opportunities Zoom Pavilion affords. Where security is about turning the senses toward others in a manner that is about social distrust, anxiety, and fear, in Zoom Pavilion surveillance technology is used to draw people into relation, to connect them and show possible connections between them. This is about sensing of a different kind: sensing in relation to others toward a sociability within the space and perhaps beyond. Perhaps this kind of sensing extends to places where cows and illegal migrants are mistaken for each other and where the brightness of the sun might undo security, as is suggested by Reaper in the Sun and

Rodadora Frontera (Border Tumbleweed).

Like Trevor Paglen and SIMPARCH, Walid Raad, in his artwork Operator #17 (I only wish that I could weep), suggests a line of flight through which security becomes something else under the intensity of the sun, even if only for a moment.16 The artwork is a single-channel video that presents a montage of the sun setting. In the 5-minute video produced in 2002, the sun descends beyond a dock, behind the clouds, and below the sea again and again. Each of the clips have been sped up to accentuate the sinking sun. In some of the clips the silhouettes of people on the boardwalk can be seen against the illuminated sky, but the camera stays fixed on the horizon. The video is attributed to a

16. Walid Raad is a Lebanese artist known for dealing with the memories and lasting legacy of the Lebanese Civil War. He is the sole creator of the fictional collective “The Atlas Group.” For more information, see http://www.theatlasgroup.org/ and https://www.artsy.net/artist/walid-raad.

256 fictional security guard who was stationed at Corniche, a seaside walkway in Beirut, from

1995 to 1996. The guard oversaw the camera and was supposed to monitor the comings and goings of people along the dock; however, as the opening text of the video describes,

“every afternoon the operator of camera #17 diverted his camera’s focus away from its designated target and focused it on the sunset.”17 Although this video—like all the other artifacts that Raad has included in his project The Atlas Group—is constructed, the narrative and the act itself gesture toward the possibility of redirecting security apparatuses to alternate ends.

Figure 19. Walid Raad, Operator #17 (I only wish that I could weep). 2002. Single Channel Video, 5:00. Video still. The Atlas Group. From: http://www.theatlasgroup.org/data/TypeFD.html.

17. Walid Raad, “Operator #17,” The Atlas Group video, 5:00, 2002, http://www.theatlasgroup.org/data/TypeFD.html.

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Even though operator #17 does not refer to a real person, his desire to see the sun setting over the Mediterranean, which he had been barred from during the civil war, represents real conditions that limit peoples’ movement and enjoyment. Moreover, turning the camera toward the sun is not only easy to sympathize with but temporarily deploys security to something else – the phenomenal moment in which the sun surrenders to the watery horizon. Raad’s project The Atlas Group was established in 1999 with the intention to “research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon. One of our aims with this project is to locate, preserve, study, and produce audio, visual, literary and other artifacts that shed light on the contemporary history of Lebanon.”18 The Atlas

Group operates as an archive but Raad has intentionally created all of its content. This is not meant as a hoax or a gimmick, but is intended to serve as a reflection on the selective construction of history and the political and social impact of the Lebanese civil war.

These artworks provide examples of security technologies turned to alternate ends. Operator #17 (I only wish that I could weep) presents an instant in which the project of security has been superseded by a desire to see and capture the last moments of daylight over the Mediterranean Sea. Zoom Pavilion appropriates advanced surveillance technologies to draw visitors into relation with one another within the space. Redirecting security toward a phenomenal moment and an emerging sociability disrupts the project of security by shifting the emphasis from distrust and suspicion to curiosity, attraction, and potentiality.

18. Walid Raad, “The Atlas Group Archive,” The Atlas Group, accessed September 20, 2017, http://www.theatlasgroup.org/index.html.

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By approaching security through the senses, this project demonstrates the pervasive force of security as it is lived through, and in, bodies and across technologies.

Attending to the sensory entanglements of security first reveals that security produces certain ways of sensing and being in the world. This recognition aligns to an understanding of the senses as socially informed.19 Second, a sensory analysis of security affirms and extends Marc Schuilenburg’s assertion that we are living in a state of securitization, where there is no single monopoly on security but a plethora of actors and practices. Brought together in this dissertation, these insights afford a different way of conceptualizing and addressing security. Through the senses, security emerges as a pervasive and intimate force that is active in our technologies, bodies, relations, and even the air. A multiplicity of actors do not only pursue security, security is taken up along sensory lines that pulsate and penetrate, creating security fields that envelop bodies and spaces. From this perspective, security surfaces as more than a question of safety, risk, or threat. Security becomes a question of what it means to participate in the world and how sociability and belonging materialize. A sensory understanding of security allows us to pan away from the figure of the terrorist, or even an attack, and exposes the broader political, social, and bodily consequence of the securitization of society.

19. See David Howes, Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), and Constance Classen, Worlds of Sense: Exploring the Senses in History and Across Cultures (New York: Routledge, 1993).

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