Laura Poitras’s ‘Astro Noise’ Engages Politics Through the Invisible and Examines Surveillance Through the Personal.

Laura Poitras’s “Astro Noise” at the Whitney Museum of American Art engages visitors in the act of surveillance, making intelligible the invisible effects of post-9–11 U.S. surveillance. The exhibition serves as an addition to Poitras’s film trilogy documenting post-9–11 America as well as a continuation of her effort to make legible the thousands of classified NSA documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The show begins with images of intercepted drone and satellite footage from the artist’s “Anarchist” series. These images, printed on large format aluminum, are recognizable as appropriated and decontextualized intelligence, despite being abstract and indecipherable. This act of publicizing classified surveillance data continues throughout the show, revealing government surveillance technology in an increasingly and personally terrifying manner. The exhibition reveals operations of power via technology without fetishizing this technology, and is intimately political without neutralizing and aestheticizing politics.

In the next room, a massive projection screen loops Poitras’s two-channel film, O’Say Can You See (2001/2016). On the first side, a slow-motion loop depicts faces of people walking by Ground Zero just days after the September 11th attacks. The video is characterized by the absence of the tragedy itself — instead, viewers are allowed to investigate the gaze and reactions of passerbys in attempt to discover just what it is on the other side of the camera that they are looking at. On the other side of the projection screen plays a second channel: a video of the aftermath of the September 11th attacks not as ground zero rubble, but in the form of recorded military investigations of captured prisoners. Poitras avoids showing footage of the aftermath of ground zero, instead revealing the more invisible consequences as they were carried out by the American government. The horror of this invisibility continues with Bed Down Location, where visitors are invited to lay down in the dark room and view time-lapse video of night skies in Yemen and Pakistan. In moments of filmed daylight, drones that were invisible at night can be spotted above. To those abroad, the presence and invisibility of these drones represent both surveillance and death. What may begin at first as an activity of stargazing quickly becomes a terrifying scanning of the time-lapsed skies for evidence of drones, and any aesthetic pleasure derived from the video is quickly denied by this activity. Poitras allows the visitors to empathize with civilians abroad, whose lives have been as much, if not more effected by the September 11th attacks than those of U.S. citizens.

Apart from her work documenting the effects of Post-9–11 U.S. military action abroad, Poitras’s more recent involvement with Edward Snowden has given her insight to the operations of U.S. domestic surveillance. While many classified documents leaked by Snowden have been made public, it has been the continued effort of press and filmmakers such as Poitras to make them intelligible to a greater public. In “Astro Noise,” domestic surveillance takes an engaging form as visitors move from Bed Down Location into the next room, where they encounter video feed from a thermal infrared camera hidden in the previous room. Visitors crowd around the screen, both surveilling others in the previous space, and feeling violated by learning that they themselves have been surveilled on. Next to the thermal camera is a video feed displaying information intersected from visitors’ smartphones by a Wi-Fi sniffer. The visitors are unwillingly engaged, both with their body and their devices. The visitor’s intimate relationship with this data, rendered as both image and text, prevents them from stepping back to aestheticize or fetishize the means of collecting it. This close engagement carries through to the next room, where visitors are finally allowed to peer at selected documents from the Snowden files through small viewing windows. Reading through the documents, the visitors once again discover that they have been and are being surveilled unwillingly, this time not by the other visitors in the museum but by the U.S. government.

The aesthetic banality of NSA documents is made up for by a designed relational aesthetics as visitors negotiate taking turns peering through viewing windows, united by their newly discovered, shared identities (whether as U.S. or foreign citizens) as victims of U.S. government surveillance. This relational choreography prevents the visitor from feeling helplessly alone as a victim of privacy violation and forcing them to share this now deeply personal and emotional space with other visitors. What is written in the documents is shockingly inhuman, and the appearance of any diagrams, poetic language, or other human expression is unsettling. The installation has been divorced from any aesthetic contemplation and has transformed the eighth floor of the Whitney into a political space. “Astro Noise” avoids being merely about politics, and instead unwillingly engages the visitor themselves in the political action of surveilling others, forcing them to contemplate the ethics of this action on both a personal and global scale. It establishes an environment where an experience as aesthetically banal as reading a legal document becomes urgent, intimate, and emotional.