Roundtable

A roundtable discussion of agency in surveilled space: who is watching, who is being watched, who decides which spaces are visible to the camera and which are effectively invisible, off-limits to authorities. The panelists will examine how engineers, artists, and activists intervene in surveillance systems to subvert, invert, and redefine these relationships, and how the principle of “sousveillance”—meaning surveillance from “below,” or watching the watchers—applies. It features artists and engineers who jointly produce software and hardware applications that access and visualize data usually obscured from public view; artists whose projects have questioned the rhetoric of surveillance by intervening more playfully in the expected aesthetics or power dynamics; and activists who monitor post-9/11 surveillance by intelligence agencies and its effects on immigrant and dissenting communities.

Moderator
Lex Bhagat, co-editor of Atlas of Radical Cartography

Participants
Mariam Ghani, artist and co-founder of Index of the Disappeared
Anjana Malhotra, human rights lawyer and former fellow with Human Rights Watch
Jenny Marketou, video and installation artist
Trevor Paglen, artist, writer, and experimental geographer, Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley

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

All discussions will be recorded, transcribed, and eventually published, both in free downloadable form online, as well as in a forthcoming Index print publication.

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