By Martica Sawin
Just at the time of a prospective clash between Apple and the Federal government over access to the iPhone of one of the two terrorists responsible for the recent San Bernardino bombing in which 28 people were killed, comes Astro Noise, Laura Poitras’ “immersive installation” on the Whitney Museum’s 8th floor.
In a museum devoted to the visual arts in one form or another, how can an artist make palpable an essentially invisible yet pervasive phenomenon, the system of surveillance that surrounds us? Documentary filmmaker Poitras, director of the Academy Award-winning Citizen Four, wanted to involve the viewer in a more visceral experience than that of a passive spectator. Through the hybrid medium of installation she has attempted to generate a sense that Big Brother does indeed have us all in his sights. This might have been suggested via a panoramic overview of drones, satellites, and electronic devices amid a network of vibrating lines, but instead we move among shadowy viewers into a darkened space to confront a large hanging screen showing a random assortment of faces reportedly looking at the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Projected on the other side of that screen is blurred footage of a bleak cell in which two soldiers interrogate a hooded prisoner. A bench against the gallery wall facilitates an extended viewing, but there are few clues as to place or outcome, leaving the impression that since 9/11 such scenes have become pervasive and almost generic. Proceeding into the dim light of an adjacent gallery, visitors are invited to lie down on a large platform in order to look up at a star-studded night sky on the ceiling. Lying there we become potential targets should a passing satellite mark the location and forward it to a bomb-carrying drone. Leading away from that hypothetical rooftop is a twisting passage with illuminated horizontal slits in the walls. Almost like confined prisoners trying for glimpses of the outside world, we strain to see what lies beyond these narrow openings; in one instance a market place filled with dancing figures is followed in the next window by the same space, now a depopulated desolate scene of destruction. In the final phase of the exhibition the filmmaker herself comes into focus through footage that she shot from a rooftop in Iraq during an incident in which an American soldier was killed. This aroused the suspicions that led to years of government surveillance, demonstrated by an array of official documents on the wall next to a screen showing her brief film of the residents on the rooftop of the house in which she was living. At the exit from Astro Noise there appears a constantly shifting record of the cellphone serial numbers of those who have passed through the exhibition—a cautionary message.
The over-all effect is deliberately destabilizing due to unpredictable sequences, frustration with lack of explanations, and the short-circuiting of expectations of rational progression. On February 19, at a public discussion with the filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer (The Look of Silence) Poitrasspoke of her concern with the effect of space on the emotions and the goal of trying to create a series of moments that could constitute a shared experience. The non-fiction filmmaker, they both stressed, is bound by reality, the force of the empirical world…that must be bent in the effort to engage audiences emotionally. Astro Noise continues at the Whitney Museum through May 15.
