Wei Wei at 5000 feet

Since Edward Snowden we should be talking about surveillance: not so; either it is accepted as inevitable or desirable or OK up to a point. Artists don't see it like that. Certainly not Wei Wei whose Disposition allows the viewer to gaze into boxes within which he is gazed at by Chinese guards while he sleeps or sits on the toilet. Richard Hamilton's Treatment room shows us a seedy, institutional interior evoking NSA/GCHQ's surveillance of Yahoo user's  intimate, shared photos.
 But Art can deal with surveillance in many ways: Arnall's Robot Readable World goes inside the  black box and represents the CCTV material as 'found footage'. The Bureau of Inverse Technology (BIT) fly their own drone and can look down on the watchers (NSA and GCHQ). Or what about collaboration? In Luksch's The Eye dancers run through Busby Berkeley routines under CCTV and then request the footage from the data companies. Another form of collaboration is to deconstruct the 'found footage' and reflect on the 'uncanny- is the figure on the footage really there or is it a doppelganger? Omer Fast's Better at 5000 feet talks to the drone operators as they wax lyrical about the 'white blossom' or heat signature of potential targets. It has been noted that drone operators come from the X Box generation. Two forms of drone-operator- playfulness exist: the aesthetic appreciation of  'white blossoms' or X Box frenzy. Figures dodging behind boulders in the Yemeni desert must hope for the former and can request the found footage from the CIA.
Wei Wei shows us the way: he follows the secret police in his car even snatching the agent's ash tray complete with fag ends and relocating it in an art exhibition as found object.  But how do we reclaim the digital traces of us that GCHQ routinely hoover up, turn them into refound footage and display as art? Well:  Arnall and Luksch have made a start.

• in Elmgreen and Dragset's Phone Home visitors to the installation can connect with friends and family worldwide (free) while other visitors can monitor their calls in an adjacent room.
• Jud and Wachter in Berlin set up a wifi network (can you hear me) on the Swiss embassy to relay their own messages to NSA/GCHQ posts on nearby embassies.
• Simon Denny's Secret Power looks in detail at the visual style that went into the power point slides that Snowden took from the NSA. Although the viewer cannot 'phone home' we can follow the same interpretive steps as the NSA analysts.
• Take another look at the slides in Secret Power specifically the GCHQ slides depicting Online Covert Action; imagine the mental states of the analysts who create this Tower of Babel; to reverse this algorithmic damage they need to use Taryn Simon's Image Atlas. Here is a drill for using the Atlas: take each term from each box in the Snowden slide ACNO-key skills strand and feed them one by one into the Image Atlas search engine.
• Paglen has deconstructed the Facebook algorithm which scans our images for dress style and repurposed it so only images relevant to Freud and Marx are selected, He also is planning an orbiting satellite which has no use or purpose (ie spying); it will be an aesthetic object-simply to look at.