Counter/Surveillance
Control, Privacy, Agency
Culver City California 90230
United States
The Wende Museum in Culver City, California, is thrilled to share its recent Getty initiative, PST ART: Art and Science Collide exhibition catalog, Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency.
The catalog expands on the Wende’s ongoing exhibition Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency, curated by the Wende’s Chief Curator Joes Segal and science historian Marieke Drost. The exhibition features artists such as Sadie Barnette, Paolo Cirio, Xu Bing, Gerhard Lang, Liat Segal, and Ken-Gonzales Day, among many others, and includes miniature cameras, listening devices, and forensic composite Identikits from the Crypto Museum, Eindhoven; National Cryptologic Museum, Fort Meade, Maryland; and Museum in der Runden Ecke, Leipzig.
In the late 19th century, French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon pioneered identification techniques that prefigured the proto-biometric methods of the Cold War in the East and West: facial recognition, forensic portraiture, and fingerprinting. Innovative surveillance devices such as miniature cameras and bugs were the stuff of real-life espionage dramas, and by the early 1960s, facial recognition was computerized. Along with activists and dissidents, many of those surveilled were artists who developed creative responses to authoritarian oversight.
The catalog features powerful combinations of declassified, analog materials from former East Germany, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, and the United States; and combines these historical secret police files with contemporary artists who critically respond to the roots and current applications of these surveillance devices and methods. The catalog contains critical essays by Marieke Drost, Joes Sgal, Ken Gonzales-Day, and Liat Segal and is richly illustrated.
