Last night I joined the party train with the Berlin English-speaking expatriot community at Marietta Bar. Met up with John Brownlee, met some very lovely girls — a German and a Romanian — beauties — who are courting Big Pharma and want to practice their English, and then I had some time to chat with Hasan Elahi, who I had met last Friday at Hairy Mary. Do you know who Hasan Elahi is? Hasan is the artist behind Tracking Transience!

I read WIRED and I listen to NPR every single day — even now in Berlin via podcasts. I think I first heard of Hasan Elahi on Studio 360 — maybe WIRED? However it may well just have been in the mediasphere.

Hasan is cool, hip, playful, fun-loving, and now a major player in the modern art scene. If he didn’t need to be a wanderer before, he needs to wander now. He has galleries around the world and needs to spend time popping around the globe doing seminars, talks, installations, panel discussions, and the like. He is also someone who lives life pretty well — last night, when I remembered I left my jacket liner at the bar and had to go back to look for it (and I got lost and ended up bailing for the night), it was after 3AM and the drunken American mob (well, Hasan and I were quiet but we’re in our 30s, but we were with college-age and early twenties merry pranksters — Europeans actually do open their windows and yell hateful things our of their windows at 3AM on a Thursday night when you’re being loud — it happened) were on our way from the closed Marietta Bar and headed back for more at the “we close whenever” Hairy Mary and Hasan Elahi was right there with him, a half-empty Budweiser Budvar in one hand and his camera phone in his right.

And yes, he does snap a new picture from his camera phone when he arrives in a new place. He tags the photos using names and cities and so forth, but the system is not GPS-based, it is tag-based: folksonomy based on a system he predefines. For example, the G4 server running the site receives his tagged images and parses it using PHP and then ties into the Google Maps API to render a real-time map of where he is.  Elegant, really — and simple, too.  So, let’s say he is going someplace new.  Well, he can put in the street name and number, and that is a good enough tag for Google Maps to find him.  So, for example, his PHP app is smart enough to understand the following:

• Hairy Mary
• Marietta Bar
• Office
• Berlin home
• Lehrter Strasse 5d Berlin

And since Google recognizes places as well, he can take a picture at Berlin Hauptbahnhof and tag the image “Berlin Hauptbahnhof” and it will find him and place him on a map.

So, working with Google Maps is elegant — he could arrive in Northern Virginia and just tag an image with “iota bar virginia” and it should work — and it does! And it really does for many restaurants, bars, stores, airports, and so forth — to it means that Hasan Elahi doesn’t require clunky GPS systems — that Google Earth and Google Maps go all of his heavy-lifting.

Brilliant, really.

The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online on WIRED

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he’s keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we’re drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone’s touchscreen. “OK! It’s uploading now,” says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. “It’ll go public in a few seconds.” Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you’ll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi’s site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you’re on, it’s hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he’s doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they’d been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn’t their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn’t been detained since.

So it dawned on him: If being candid about his flights could clear his name, why not be open about everything? “I’ve discovered that the best way to protect your privacy is to give it away,” he says, grinning as he sips his venti Black Eye. Elahi relishes upending the received wisdom about surveillance. The government monitors your movements, but it gets things wrong. You can monitor yourself much more accurately. Plus, no ambitious agent is going to score a big intelligence triumph by snooping into your movements when there’s a Web page broadcasting the Big Mac you ate four minutes ago in Boise, Idaho. “It’s economics,” he says. “I flood the market.”

Elahi says his students get it immediately. They’ve grown up spilling their guts online — posting Flickr photo sets and confessing secrets on MySpace. He figures the day is coming when so many people shove so much personal data online that it will put Big Brother out of business.

For now, though, Big Brother is still on the case. At least according to Elahi’s server logs. “It’s really weird watching the government watch me,” he says. But it sure beats Guantanamo.

Speakers > Speaker Detail

Hasan Elahi
Assistant Professor, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University

Hasan M. Elahi is an interdisciplinary artist with an emphasis on technology and media and their social implications. His research interests include issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers. He has had numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally in venues such as PS122 and Exit Art in New York; the Kulturbahnhof in Kassel, Germany; the BBC Big Screen in Manchester, UK; and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has also lectured at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University and the Tate Modern in London. His work has been supported with significant grants and numerous sponsorships from the Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, Creative Capital Foundation, DuPont Industries, the West Virginia Cultural Center and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain among others. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Elahi’s Pop!Tech Appearances:
Pop!Tech 2006 “Dangerous Ideas”

Hasan Elahi on NPR’s Studio 360

Last weekend, new media artist and Pop!Tech 2006 speaker Hasan Elahi was interviewed on NPR’s Studio 360 hosted by Kurt Andersen about Hasan’s website art project, Tracking Transcience.

The website has tracked Hasan’s life in all its mundane glory, in real time, for more than 5 years now. He began the project in response to his experience in an airport where he was wrongly identified and detained as a terrorist and was constrained to report on all of his whereabouts and movements on the days around 9/11 to the FBI. After he was freed of all charges, he decided to voluntarily track his movements online.

Pop!Tech Host and Curator, Andrew Zolli is also on the program to discuss the impact of Hasan’s work and its context in a world with a changing view of privacy.

Listen to it here on iTunes, or visit the Studio 360 website and listen to the episode online.

AND stay tuned for Hasan’s upcoming Pop!Tech Pop!Cast of his 2006 presentation. Check Pop!Tech Pop!Casts for more information.

Hasan M. Elahi From Wikipedia

Hasan M. Elahi is an interdisciplinary media artist with an emphasis on technology and media and their social implications. His research interests include issues of surveillance, sousveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers.

His recent work falls in the area of Sousveillance Culture together with artists Amy Alexander and Jill Magid], as recently presented at the Conflux Festival in New York.

Sousveillance

As reported in Wired (May 22, 2007), Elahi has put his entire life online:

Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.

The globe-hopping prof says his overexposed life began in 2002, when he stepped off a flight from the Netherlands and was detained at the Detroit airport. He says FBI agents later told him they'd been tipped off that he was hoarding explosives in a Florida storage unit; subsequent lie detector tests convinced them he wasn't their man. But with his frequent travel — Elahi logs more than 70,000 air miles a year exhibiting his art work and attending conferences — he figured it was only a matter of time before he got hauled in again. He might even be shipped off to Gitmo before anyone realized their mistake. The FBI agents had given him their phone number, so he decided to call before each trip; that way, they could alert the field offices. He hasn't been detained since.

Exhibitions

He has had numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally in venues such as PS122, Exit Art, and Pace Digital Gallery in New York, the Kulturbahnhof in Kassel, Germany, the BBC Big Screen in Manchester, UK and The Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia. His work has been supported with significant grants and numerous sponsorships from The Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, Creative Capital Foundation, DuPont Industries, the West Virginia Cultural Center and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain among others.

Faculty positions

Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida. He has also taught at West Virginia University; Wanganui School of Design, in Wanganui, New Zealand; and also in Houston, Texas.

See also

• Steve Mann (live 24/7 wireless video webcast starting 1994)
• Joi Ito (transmission of pictures from cameraphones)
• Justine Ezarik
• Justin Kan
• JenniCam
• Sophie Calle (surveillance artist)
• Julia Scher (surveillance and sousveillance artist)
• Sousveillance

External links

• • Tracking Transience
  • Hasan Elahi siteWired (May 22, 2007)
  • CBS Evening News (June 18, 2007)
  • Sousveillance culture
  • Sousveillance Culture with A. Alexander, J. Magid and H. Elahi

Art Criminal: Hasan M. Elahi

This story at We Make Money Not Art describes the artwork of Hasan M. Elahi who isn’t actually a criminal, but was supected of being a terrorist and was investigated and interrogated between June and November 2002 by the FBI. Elahi says the FBI wanted to know everything he had been doing while overseas, “What was I doing there? Who was I speaking with? What did I see? Where did I sleep? And even down to what I ate and drank. I was eventually cleared and to the relief of my friends, family and co-workers, I am officially no longer considered a terrorist – after a 3 hour long polygraph exam which was repeated 9 times.”

Mr. Elahi’s art is influenced by Orwell’s vision of a future state of total surveillance and control. In one piece he wears a device which uploads images tagged with exact GPS coordinates of where the image was taken to a server which then sends the GPS tag to the United States Geological Survey which returns an aerial surveillance image of the his location. The server compiles the returned map with the uploaded images and small thumbnails of the previously used images into the web based file which can then be accessed online.

Artist’s Statement:

I like to think about the appearance of technology rather than technology itself. More importantly how the technology is packaged or should I say, marketed into an appearance of desire and need for the consumer. This need I feel is more based on a social understanding and [social] function of the technology. Just as any other product that has a pioneering stage, an acceptance stage and an obsolescence stage, I feel that the timing of how a certain technology is adopted by society is far more important than the technology itself. It is in these human borders and frontiers that I am interested in…and also the traces that they leave behind. I have been attempting to bridge these virtual conditions with physical geopolitical parallels and have been fascinated at the translations and the mis-translations of them. I find the most potential in these mutual misunderstandings. I find states of designed obsolescence in structures and systems of power as a global citizen. I prefer lo-fi to hi-fi–and in these absurd realities, I find my works attempting to balance and tumble simultaneously.