I have had too many Big Slices and Jumbo Slices for my own good, generally after a night of drinking up in Adams Morgan, Washington, DC.  Well, I always assumed the Jumbo Slice was a variation but it is an official regional pizza style! Huzzah! At least according to A List of Regional Pizza Styles via digg

While this one sounds like it’s merely a style based on size, I’ve seen arguments for it in the comments (here and here) and over on Boing Boing.

While I’m not sure it’s going to be a widely recognized style, It’s in the interest of Slice readers to know about it, even if it, so …

Yes, the jumbo slice of D.C. is mainly known for its size. There are many competing places offering this style. The link to the article below tells about the development of the jumbo slice, the competing claims of who has the “First Oldest Original Jumbo Slice,” a laboratory-based nutritional analysis, and the fact that people only eat it when they are drunk.

Jumbo Slice Lore of D.C. [Washington City Paper]

Here’s the Washington City Paper Article (and, it is totally exactly like this):

When bars close on a Saturday night in Adams Morgan, cops usually can gauge the impending mayhem by the length of the line at Pizza Mart.

On a night in mid-October, the unruly column forms in front of the pizzeria right on cue, at 2:45 a.m., just after most bartenders have shouted their last call. Never mind that it’s the first cold weekend of the season, or that the nightlife district along 18th Street NW seems filled to only half-capacity tonight. Just about everyone on the strip has come here to bump elbows and jostle himself one step closer to a single slice. It’s so tight that served customers have to make their exit with their slices over their heads, negotiating them like clumsy waiters.

Amid the catcalls and the laughter come the night’s first genuine fighting words.

“You bitch!”

And the rejoinder: “You ho!”

The crowd forms a circle. A formidable young woman in a blue tank top lunges at her braided foe, and the pair go tumbling onto a sidewalk strewn with greasy paper plates and leftover pizza crusts. Some patrons break out of the line altogether to get a better view, and ecstatic men shout whatever catfight clichés pop into their heads.

“Rip her shirt off!” screeches an overjoyed meathead, his right hand pumping the air in a fist, his left forearm cradling a slice of pizza.

As the swaying throng bumps up against cars parked along the sidewalk, a man in a teal Mitsubishi decides it’s time to get his sporty ride out of harm’s way. He is blocked by revelers who are hanging out in the street. First, he nudges the riffraff with his front bumper. Then, unwisely, he decides to lay on his horn. Someone cocks a slice of pizza back to his shoulder and hurls it, like a circus clown in a pie fight, clipping the rear wheel well on the driver’s side. The driver brakes hard, thinks better of it, and then moves along.

Back on the sidewalk, a volunteer referee has managed to tear the women apart. But the circle hasn’t broken up just yet; now two dudes are swapping unintelligible insults and throwing wild haymakers. It’s not even 3 a.m.

There are two easy ways to find yourself in the middle of an early-morning slugfest at Pizza Mart: Hit on someone else’s significant other, or try to cut in line for pizza.

After all, owner Chris Chishti’s crew isn’t serving up just any kind of slice. His renowned “jumbo slice,” a greasy slab that requires two paper plates to handle, runs nearly a foot-and-a-half long, and weighs in just shy of a pound. Novices at the counter often have to ask how to go about eating such a beast. As any jumbo-slice veteran will tell them, you just fold it like the morning newspaper and go to work.

In the five or so years Chishti’s been dishing out his trademark, it’s become a staple for late-night bargoers who are looking to coat their stomachs before the long cab ride back to the ’burbs. As for the Tijuana-cockfight atmosphere, one can’t help but notice that the excess commotion merely reflects the excess of Chishti’s slices.

But they weren’t always so monstrous. In fact, when the Pakistan native opened his modest carryout in 1997, he had no intention of stretching his pies far beyond their initial 18-inch diameter. That is, until one of his neophyte cooks left behind a mangled dough ball after a busy night in 1999.

When Chishti strolled into his shop the next morning, he figured the misshapen mound was unusable. But then he took a fresh dough ball from another tray. “What I did, I took that dough ball and put it with the other dough ball,” says the mustachioed Chishti, clapping together his cupped hands to illustrate the epiphany. He kneaded the oversized ball, dropped it on a baking screen, and sent it through his conveyer oven dressed with cheese and sauce.

What came out the other end was jumbo indeed, and its creator saw no reason to stop there: “I said, ‘Let’s go bigger.’”

Three different pizza shops on the main drag of 18th Street now serve the city’s famous jumbo slice. Each proprietor asserts his own form of jumbo-slice originality:

•Chishti, owner of Pizza Mart: “I’m a pizza maker. I was calling mine the jumbo slice. Then he went over there and starting calling his the jumbo slice.” “He” refers to Jawed Khan, owner of Pizza Napoli.

•Khan: “We came in with the biggest slice.”

•John Nasir, owner of Pizza Boli’s: “I don’t know how you can ‘invent’ something….Maybe [Chishti] took the idea from one of our stores.”

As the first cook on the block, Chishti stakes the only legitimate claim. He was the first pizza maker on the block to widen his pie beyond 20 inches, and he also bestowed the now-famous moniker on his peculiar slice. But his brainchild has been hijacked over the years—by his former pizza associates, no less—so the genial Chishti gets a bit prickly over the issue of jumbo-slice legitimacy.

“You don’t need a coat and a tie to make pizzas,” says Chishti, arguing that his competitors are businessmen rather than cooks. He says a secret recipe for his jumbo slice accounts for a taste superior to the other pizzas on 18th Street. “I’ve been doing this for 23 years—that’s my experience.”

The most visible spat unfolded last year, when Nasir, owner of the 75-store Pizza Boli’s chain and a former business partner of Chishti’s, greenlighted one of his franchises to open just three doors up the street from Pizza Mart. The franchisee, Kerry Guneri, made the jumbo slice his featured product. He and Chishti quickly found themselves in the middle of a neon-sign war:

•March 2003: Guneri opens his Pizza Boli’s. He installs a neon “Jumbo Slice” sign in the window on the southern side of his store. It’s facing the Pizza Mart, where Chishti’s window holds a mere plastic “Jumbo Slice” sign.

•July 2003: Guneri compounds the insult by installing two additional neon signs. These read “Original Jumbo Slice.” Chishti decides to respond the very same day Guneri’s new signs go up. He calls Xin Guan Signs near Chinatown, Guneri’s supplier, and orders a neon sign that reads “Real Original Jumbo Slice.”

•July 2003: Guneri tells the Washington City Paper (“Pie Fight,” 7/25/03) he’s through installing the neon signs, which cost about $700 apiece. “This place is lit up like a whorehouse as it is,” he says.

•August 2003: Chishti installs a final neon sign, designed by one of his regular customers on a piece of scrap paper. It reads “First Oldest Original Jumbo Slice.”

Anyone who bothers to parse the vying shops’ respective strings of adjectives surely would see that Chishti invented the jumbo slice. But what escaped both proprietors was the fact that nobody cares. In reality, many self-proclaimed jumbo fans couldn’t tell you whether they’d eaten a slice from Pizza Mart or Pizza Boli’s the night before. It’s like trying to remember whether you stopped at an Arby’s or a Hardee’s on a road trip.

When Khan, once an employee of Chishti’s, opened up the rival Pizza Napoli just down the street from Pizza Mart in late 1999, he knew the game wasn’t about creating a special sauce or even serving a marginally better pizza. It was about making a bigger slice.

“They had an 18-inch pie and then went to a 22-inch,” Khan says of Pizza Mart. “[But] we came in here and started with a 30-inch. That was the biggest.” Chishti disputes that Khan’s pie was ever larger, but the point is clear: Size trumps everything else.

In spite of Chishti’s talk of a secret recipe for his jumbo slice, the customer demands only that his belly be full in the end. The gluttony imperative was lost on Bill Thomas, owner of the Blue Room club on 18th Street, and proprietor of the now-defunct Kung Fu Pizza, which once occupied a portion of the same building. When he opened his kitschy, martial-arts-themed pizzeria in 2000, Thomas and his team had spent months working on recipes for gourmet pies, even experimenting with spring water in their dough.

“We actually thought quality would sell, and we were stupid,” says Thomas. Kung Fu Pizza shut its doors after a four-month run. The eatery stayed open late and attracted a small following from the wait staffs of surrounding bars, but the Adams Morgan party crowd never took to the Asian finger food and modestly sized pizza. “At the end of the day, it was all about the big slice,” he says.

When your slice’s supremacy is predicated entirely on size, the only way to improve it is to make it larger. So Chishti has expanded the diameter of his pie at least five times since he opened, finally arriving at the 32-incher he cooks today.

The pies on 18th Street have stopped expanding only because there’s no larger pizza oven on the market. Khan has considered buying an oven designed primarily for large cakes; Chishti, who’s already upgraded his oven once, has started cheating with the one he has, sending his pies over the burners stretched in one dimension. This method results in slightly larger, if oval, pizzas.

Such evolution has made the slices unwieldy—and not just for the customer. Both Chishti and Khan grew their slices right out of the delivery business. Chishti decided years ago that he wouldn’t even try to bring his No. 1 product to your front door. “You put it in the box and send it, by the time it gets to the customer it’s soggy,” he says. “We don’t want that to happen to our jumbo.”

Khan, however, was more determined. He ordered custom cardboard boxes that measured nearly 3 feet across, just so he could deliver the entire jumbo pie in its original form, rather than stack the slices on top of one another in a single box. When the boxes buckled under the sheer weight of the pies, sending all the grease to the center, he looked into heavy-duty cardboard boxes that cost three times as much as the pizza itself. He even special-ordered an insulated, jumbo-size delivery sheath; it could have doubled as a toddler’s sleeping bag.

But in the end, most of his drivers couldn’t even fit the pies into their cars.

Khan had to scrap the delivery venture after just a year. Which was fine with him, because all the action comes in off the street.

Like any overhead-conscious carryout proprietor in D.C., Chishti likes to keep the inside of his business spare. The eatery includes a handful of stools and a pair of steel counters, but there are no chairs and no tables. No customer bathrooms. No artwork. And certainly no nutritional-information charts.

Even though your average clubhopper loves to crack a joke about fat content as she paints her face with tomato sauce on 18th Street, she doesn’t really want to know just how much energy is stored in that jumbo slice.

The Washington City Paper sent three cheese jumbo slices, one from each of the jumbo-pizza makers, to the ABC Research Corp., a food-testing laboratory in Gainesville, Fla. Calculated on the basis of the lab’s calories-per-gram analysis, the single slices from both Pizza Mart and Pizza Boli’s soared over the 1,000-calorie threshold.

Pizza Boli’s trounced the field with a whopping 1,309 calories, and Pizza Mart settled for silver with a respectable 1,117. That’s roughly equivalent to two Big Macs, or, for active women and most men, about half the calories the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends for an entire day’s intake, let alone as a Friday-evening nightcap. By comparison, Pizza Napoli’s slice made for light fare at a modest 917 calories, but it weighed significantly less than the competitors’.

None of the slices necessarily jibe with today’s low-carbohydrate diet fad, either. Each sample stored more than 115 grams of carbs alone, including the comparably dainty slice from Pizza Napoli, which had a disproportionately high carb rate. The slice from Pizza Boli’s again led the pack in fat content; its roughly 53 grams just edges out Pizza Mart’s 47.

The growth of the jumbo slice may have been foiled by the undersized ovens, but not before it became the city’s lone culinary icon, the District’s own take on the supersize phenomenon. It was an unlikely turn, given that the jumbo slice has nothing to do with America’s growing waistline. That petite, Bally’s-going little tart who comes pinballing out of the club, dying to get her hands on a slice of pizza that could probably be wrapped around her torso—she’s not the same woman buying the latest meal deal at McDonald’s four times a week.

No, the jumbo slice sprang from the very same beast that sustains it: drunkenness. Any jumbo-slice owner will tell you that the majority of his weekly sales are made over the course of about eight hours on the weekend.

“Sometimes people throw a slice on you,” says an exasperated Chishti, who tries to clock in exclusively during the daylight hours now. “They’re drunk, they fight with each other, they argue… Sometimes you’re serving pizza to guys who are so drunk they’re hard to handle.” In a painful show of irony, Chishti was once the target of a flying jumbo slice, hurled by a loaded patron who said the pizza was too large to eat.

There’s an old joke that says everybody’s eaten a jumbo slice but nobody remembers it. The joke gets told quite often, mainly because it’s true. Most people, when they consider the sheer size and uncontrollable grease, can’t stomach the thought of eating a jumbo slice during the day. Drop an open napkin on a jumbo slice and it disappears.

The sober and sensible tend to stay clear of the big slice and, for that matter, the 18th Street pizzerias altogether. Over the course of a weekday lunch hour in Adams Morgan, the staff at Pizza Mart might sell just a few slices. But once the bars close and everybody’s sauced, the jumbo becomes the centerpiece of 18th Street’s pre-dawn circus. And priced at $4 or less, it’s a perfectly affordable, even expendable, toy. That’s why so many slices wind up in the street, on top of cars, and, often, in people’s faces. It’s an insane spectacle for a neighborhood where many people still beg for change each day.

“The funny thing is, now people know about them,” says Adams Morgan resident Mindy Moretti, baffled by the jumbo’s popularity. “You see people taking pictures of other people eating them. They’re almost a…tourist attraction.”

And like any tourist magnet, these slices require their own police protection. Officers Andrew Zabavsky and Dustin Roeder, two D.C. bike cops assigned to Adams Morgan, have made the area in front of Pizza Mart something of a default post during their weekend-night shifts. Most cops would rather handle parking complaints all night than work a strip full of obnoxious, drunken brawlers, but Zabavsky and Roeder have staked it out as their beat. Riding mountain bikes, they spend much of their night dodging drunks who stagger out into the street.

“Most of the fights tend to gravitate around the pizza joints,” says Zabavsky. “Some days it’s off the hook, one after another after another.” It doesn’t matter where a scuffle has its roots—out in the street, inside a club, or way back in childhood—the fuse often gets lit in the jumbo-slice line. Roeder talks about the pizza servers as if they have the most treacherous job in town: “With the bars, at least they can send a bouncer out to flag us down for help. But the pizza guys, they’re pinned in back there.”

The cops have collared many bruisers on 18th Street, but it’s often the less violent jumbo-slice incidents that stick out in their minds. “Craziest thing I ever saw with the jumbo slice,” starts Zabavsky: “This guy up near McDonald’s drops his slice right on the ground—cheese-down and everything. He picks it right up and starts eating it like nothing happened. He’s smiling.”

On a Friday night, the sauce on your Pizza Mart jumbo slice comes out of what’s commonly referred to as a “garbage can.” There’s nothing necessarily unsanitary about this storage method; it merely indicates the massive amount of pizza that will be moved in a single night.

The volume of cheese is similarly industrial. On a Friday afternoon in mid-October, Pizza Mart receives a shipment of roughly 900 pounds of a mozzarella-provolone mix. That’s nearly half a ton.

“And I’ll probably be back on Monday,” sighs 55-year-old Thomas Carroll, a deliveryman for Nino’s Pizza Dough, sweating as he schleps the 30 boxes with a handtruck. Asked if that’s an extraordinary amount of cheese, Carroll laughs. “You see all them boxes?” he asks, gesturing to about 1,500 stacked and bundled pizza boxes on his truck, each destined to hold just a single slice. “Those are for [Pizza Mart], too.” Of the 40 or so regular deliveries Carroll makes, only a Maryland pizzeria takes in more product than Pizza Mart. And right behind Pizza Mart on the list is the Naval Academy.

Inside the Pizza Mart kitchen, there are no chef hats, no high-flung dough, and no handlebar mustaches. The rush-hour spectacle is more a lesson in ergonomics than in Italian culinary tradition. This is where, on a busy weekend night, an assembly line of cooks will manufacture upward of 800 pounds of pizza in a matter of hours. There’s nothing romantic about the process:

One guy takes a gooey dough ball off a plastic tray. Tonight there are about 80 dough balls ready to go for the late-night blitz. He kneads and stretches the dough to its 32-inch diameter, drops it on a screen, and passes it to the next cook.

This guy dresses the dough. He ladles his sauce from the plastic can with what looks to be a family-size salad bowl, and he sprinkles mozzarella-provolone mix from packages pulled from 30-pound boxes. When the pie’s ready, it makes its slow crawl through the oven on a conveyer belt, out the other side to the last cook.

This guy cuts the pie, places the slices onto aluminum-foil-covered plates, and drops them onto a metal tray with a thud. He needs to fold the bottom third of each slice back onto its upper portion just to make sure it stays on the plate. “Sometimes, during the day, they’ll say, ‘Oh, I don’t want this. You folded it. That’s no good,’” says Munir Butt, working the register on a Friday night. “But not right now.”

Finally, the slices go under the heat lamp. From start to finish, the journey lasts less than 10 minutes. Pies ride on through the oven, shoulder to shoulder, throughout the night.

Out front, three workers serve the slices and man the register. They’ll handle the slices with metal tongs, in order to keep the grease off their hands and clothes, and they’ll bang the counter with their tongs when they’re ready for the next customer. They work three, four, sometimes five people deep in the line, just to keep up with the 2 a.m. rush. A tiny fraction of the slices—maybe 2 percent—are so mutilated that they don’t make the cut. Of the slices they do serve, some look as if they’ve been sat on. Regardless, every slice will be pounced on.

“The pizza guys really have cultivated this post-nocturnal feeding frenzy,” says Scott Bennett, owner of the newly opened Amsterdam Falafelshop on 18th Street. “The way I see it, when the tide comes in, all boats float. God bless the pizza guys.”

But no one in tonight’s kitchen, nor its owner, will be getting rich off the jumbo slice. In favorable weather, a jumbo joint might sell anywhere between 600 and 1,000 slices on a strong weekend night; priced between $3.50 and $4 a pop, that might bring in somewhere between $2,000 and $4,000 in an evening. But after covering rent, ingredients, and the pay for seven staffers or more on the busy shifts, the owners will be left with pocket change on each slice.

So if you can’t pack more weekends into a year, you may as well pack more pizzerias into the city. Nasir, for one, says he may be serving his big boy out of a new Pizza Boli’s on U Street NW by the end of this month. Khan has already started dishing his own monstrosity out of his kebab house, also on U Street.

But Khan sees no reason to contain the jumbo slice within the District. Early next year, he expects to open a pizzeria in Florida. After researching locales in South Beach and Key West, he says he’s just about settled on the City Walk area of Orlando.

“It will be all about the jumbo,” he promises.

The mess left behind after the weekend pizza craze has put the jumbo slice and its purveyors at the very top of the Adams Morgan NIMBY list. Moretti, a member of the local advisory neighborhood commission, says an uncanny wind tunnel carries greasy paper plates up 18th Street, across Columbia Road, and all the way to her Adams Mill Road apartment building on gusty weekend mornings.

“Several of us have joked about going and collecting all the paper plates, putting them in a trash can, finding out where the [pizzeria] owners live, and dumping them in their yards,” says Moretti.

When bars and clubs become a nuisance, residents can force owners into line by threatening to withhold their support for a liquor-license renewal. But when it comes to the pizza joints, none of which serve liquor, the residents hold no bureaucratic aces up their sleeves. Essentially, the pizza places reap all the benefits of a nightlife business without being held to the same standards. “We can hold up against bars because of the [alcoholic-beverage] commission,” says Bryan Weaver, also a neighborhood commissioner. “But there’s no Shitty Sauce Commission where we can go and say, ‘Hey, these guys are making bad pizza.’”

The commission has supported a neighborhood liquor-license moratorium since it was introduced in 2000. Some members, resigned to fielding cheese-and-crust complaints at each monthly meeting, say they would be willing to place a similar moratorium on the jumbo, if only it were possible.

“Our hands are tied as far as the big slice goes,” says Moretti.

The public-health implications of the jumbo are on full display on a recent Sunday. In the hours before dawn, the mess on the sidewalk in front of Pizza Mart forces squeamish passers-by onto their tiptoes, hopping from one small patch of visible concrete to the next. Greasy plates and pizza boxes, too many to count, blanket the sidewalk. Maimed slices sit on top of cars and inside flowerpots. Fat pigeons peck their way through tomato sauce and cheese.

The inside of Pizza Mart looks the same as the outside, only no pigeons. At 4:30 a.m., cashier Butt shuts off the neon, locks the front door, and mouths an apology through the window to a few tardy stragglers hoping to get a slice.

The last jumbo customer of the night, now satiated, looks over both shoulders before dropping his empty pizza box between two cars parked at the curb. What’s one more bit of cardboard added to the mess? He takes a final sip from his soda, leans over, and places the empty cup on top of the box.

On the sidewalk, a bored bouncer gets his kicks by shining a flashlight on the rats that have come out to feast on more pizza than they can handle. These rats live a good life, and this is their prime feeding hour—a short window of time after the heavy foot traffic has died down but before the sprawling slices have been scooped up. Aside from the bouncer, their only company is a lonely sot dry-heaving beside a parking meter, his chin covered in spittle.

Butt says a homeless guy agreed to clean up the storefront after close tonight for 10 bucks, but by 5 a.m. it looks as if he’s a no-show. As usual, this morning’s pizza detail will fall to just one man: Anwar Tate, a 29-year-old Department of Public Works employee, who works his way up 18th Street every Saturday and Sunday morning armed with a metal rake, a heavy-duty shovel, and a ride-on vacuum. Tate’s chipper today, and he’ll need to be. He’s got only two hours to knock off the entire block before Adams Morgan’s early risers come out expecting a pizza-free street.

“You try to get it off the sidewalk as quick as you can,” he says, handling the slices with either the shovel or his gloved hands. “It’s just part of the job.”

There’s plenty of pizza refuse beyond Tate’s jurisdiction. Slices have been flung into the yards of residents along Euclid Street NW and throughout Adams Morgan. Paper plates and napkins dot a path all the way over the Duke Ellington Bridge and up to the Woodley Park Metro station, over half a mile away. And because plenty of slices found their way into cabs, surely some of the 800 jumbos dished out at Pizza Mart have traveled over the Potomac into Virginia by now.

Butt says Pizza Mart, despite brisk business, didn’t have a single fight last night. But when he turned his back for just a second during the blitz, some asshole made off with the tip jar. It was only $15 or $20, to be split among the staff at close. “Not much,” he acknowledges. “But you work hard for it.”CP

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.

Mark writes, “I decided to celebrate this International Workers’ Day by driving the rover with my family into the remote mountains here in southern Tanzania to a fly-fishing and hunting lodge . . .”

Fraternal Revolutionary greetings to my dear comrades the world over on this May Day, the 30th Anniversary of the Committee for a Workers’ International! by Mark Harrison

Onward in solidarity towards reaffirming the ideas of genuine socialism!

I decided to celebrate this International Workers’ Day by driving the rover with my family into the remote mountains here in southern Tanzania to a fly-fishing and hunting lodge up amongst the highland tea estates to spend the weekend playing lawn tennis and drinking gin and tonics. An absolutely splendid opportunity to manifest our solidarity with the international proletariat with a few invigorating rounds of golf, and a sortie or two of croquet.

The workers at the lodge estate – rather disappointingly for the glory of Socialism but rather fortunately for us – chose not celebrate May Day, they instead chose to report to work, which ensured that our meals were excellent, and that the greens were well trimmed.

The weekend offered my niece and godchild a valuable opportunity to manifest some solidarity and learn the joy of physical labor in that I permitted her to carry my golf clubs (see photo). I will be an excellent father some day.

I also taught her to fly fish – though she failed to catch anything. I intended to give her two educational gifts with our angling outing – one, the pleasure of enjoying the fruits of her labor, and two, the unparalleled joy of living off nature’s bounty – by allowing her to eat for dinner what she caught. In this particular case, of course, nothing. However, the mollycoddling grandparents, in their appallingly undidactic and emotional way, undermined my entire evening fishing trip’s work in that, at dinnertime, she was simply handed a plate of food in whose production she had had no part. I’m sure she was disappointed, though she made an impressively brave effort to put up a very convincing show of enjoying her utterly decontextualized meal. Once things have gone their course, and I have my inheritance firmly in my hand, my godchild will no longer have to suffer such unfortunate assaults to the development of her character. (see fishing photo)

Fortunately for my goddaughter’s education, the weekend started rather differently with some very good opportunities for character-building . The drive up into the mountains is only a hundred miles or so, but it is across bone-jarring, treacherously dangerous, washed-out dirt roads that make the Appalachian trail look like the Disney World monorail. Within minutes of departure, she had nausea and a headache against which to practice fortitude in the face of adversity. After a little over an hour of this hell, her whinging and moaning had decreased to a low embittered mutter, and I was afraid that she had become too rapidly acclimated to the travails of the trip and that the didactic effect would fade long before we arrived at our destination. Fortunately, well out in the middle of the bush endless miles from nowhere, the radiator cap blew off, becoming irretrievably lost, ejecting the coolant in a dramatic geyser of spewing froth and steam, the engine overheated violently, and we came to a grinding halt.

We were traveling with a group of academics – they in another rover – and this breakdown presented us with the chance to have a committee meeting in which everyone could present their completely unqualified, but impressively formulated opinions on how to fix a diesel engine in the middle of the bush with absolutely no tools or materials. The librarian spotted the bottom of a colonial-era soup can rusting on the side of the road and proposed we hammer it into the form of a radiator cap. The committee considered this and tried a few preliminary experiments with the tire iron and concluded that the idea was terrible. By this time, we were up over 6000 feet, and it was a bit chilly which gave my niece something new to build character over. All the Midwestern academics found the biting air invigorating and reminiscent of all the years they spent out in that featureless, culturally devoid hellscape between Pittsburg and Denver. My few memories of the Midwest usually pitch me toward depression, but these folks jabbered on happily about such revolting things as headcheese and ice fishing.

In any case, at some point, the menfolk realized that we each had Swiss Army knives in our pockets, so we decided that we should whittle something to solve our problem. That idea had an incredibly manly, frontiersmanlike quality to it, and the women hadn’t thought of it so we hunted down a well-sized eucalyptus branch and set to carving a cork for the radiator.

The subcommittee of men decided that the best way to hold the newly-whittled stopper in the radiator was to cut it just precisely so long that slamming the hood closed would secure it tightly in place. The women discussed something about the Midwest and my niece whinged about it being cold, which made me happy because this whole Africa experience was finally presenting an experience to toughen her up a bit.

After a bit more discussion in subcommittee, we advanced our stopper design to include a rag around the bottom of the stopper to create a tight seal, and a bunch of rag on top of the stopper to provide a compressible mass that would allow us to push the cork tightly into the radiator, but to do so without doing damage to the radiator by applying too much uncushioned force.

Unfortunately, we had no rags.

Then my mother says, “Hey, no problem, I saw some rags ground down into the road a couple hundred yards back. I’ll go pull them out.”

Now, I’m thinking “WTF?” You see, when the radiator cap blew off, my mother was driving the vehicle. So you have to imagine that we’re pounding along this hellish single track – which in itself requires intense concentration so as to avoid pitching into a gaping pothole or careening off into the bush – the view is 90% obscured by the thick clouds of dust the rovers are kicking up, and the remaining 10% of visibility is ruined by the muddy smear of dirt you create trying to clean the dust off the windshield with your wiper fluid. Now, at the time she saw, identified, and registered the presence and location of a few tattered bits of dirty cloth embedded in the dried mud of the road, she was pounding along at 40 kph and there was radiator fluid and steam spewing out of the car.

To boot, my mom is in those years where she receives Social Security, she wears trifocals, and was relatively recently hospitalized to have surgery on her failing ocular nerves. She has no peripheral vision.

Now, this of course begs the question, “Why the hell was this woman driving the vehicle?” Yes… well, when you live in a country where every mosquito bite is a potential grisly death by malaria, building codes are non-existent, car inspections leave vehicles in a state where they not-unseldomly burst into flame for little or no reason, and genocidal wars in neighboring nations is de rigueur, you get a bit lax about doing your risk-benefit analyses… I don’t know. My mom was holding the car keys when we walked out the front door… so she was driving.

Anyway, so while she didn’t notice that the temperature gauge had climbed into the DANGER zone, and bright red warning lights had turned on, she did notice that a bit of rag was embedded in the road two hundred yards back from where the rover had ground to a halt.

Women are truly amazing. It must have to do with some latent gatherer instinct that’s been unused for thousands of years except when a husband/boyfriend says, “Hun, where are my car keys?” And she’s like, “In the right breast pocket of your suede jacket under the newspaper on top of the large coffee table in the downstairs TV room. Where you left them.” Stunning. I’m truly impressed.

What I hate though, is that I’ve never had a girlfriend who could give such a response without an eye-roll, as if that location of my keys should be obvious to anyone with eyes.

I’m sorry. Women are just built differently. If my half-blind, pensioner mother can pick up the location of a bit of rag ground into the mud while navigating a fuming 4×4 skidding to a halt on a single-track, then my girlfriend can certainly donate the .0000001% of her mental processing power it requires of her to focus her instinct on remembering where each and every one of my possessions are at any given moment. And to do it without the eye-roll, thank you very much.

Anyway, it was grand that my mother registered that bit of cloth. She’s the best. A saint. I’m not sure how the rest of you survive without her as your mom.

So my saint of a mother walked back the road, dug the rag out, came back, and we constructed our composite material stopper. We filled the radiator with our bottled water (a pampered vehicle, to be sure), positioned the cork, slammed the hood and the committee decided that I was going to drive.

My niece was buoyed by the apparent success of the repair and back in good spirits. We all got in the car, I turned the key and… nothing. Well, not exactly nothing. A pitiful, quiet whine from some warning thing, and a risibly weak chug from the engine and the battery was dead.

No problem, we have two vehicles – one working. We’ll just jump it.

Wrong, no cables. Again, another opportunity for my niece to slip into despair and to notice that she was now very hungry. The Midwesterners all seemed to be enjoying this, since it somehow reminded them of their hardscrabble, working-class upbringings in Indiana or Minnesota or wherever and old Model T’s and such tripe.

We were on a slight grade, so it was decided that everyone would push, and we would roll-start the car. Now at the decision of the committee, the one person past puberty and not qualified to receive Medicare – i.e., me – is chosen to sit in the driver’s seat, while the crew of retirees and their cast of physical ailments, and a little girl get behind the rover to push it. I, strapping young man, decades from the onset of senility, doubt the wisdom of this committee decision, but who am I to questions such a large mass of aged wisdom? I get behind the wheel, and they start to push.

Now, I’ve roll-started this vehicle in our 40-foot long driveway – in reverse. The slope of our driveway is about that of a handicap access ramp at a convalescent home. You don’t need much speed to start this car.

The team of seven gets pushing and we’re going about as fast as you do in the drive-thru line at Taco Bell at lunch hour. We’re very slowly using up the bit of downward grade we’ve got left, approaching the bottom and end of our opportunity. I’m thinking, “We gotta go faster”. But how do I, 30-something guy, sitting at the wheel of a rover being pushed along a dirt track in the middle of the African bush by a group of retirees find the gall to stick my head out the window and yell. “Faster, you guys!”? Answer? I don’t.

One by one, they drop off and from their various wheezing stopping points yell some suggestions about why don’t I start the damn car… by this time, I’m going maybe 3 miles per hour and the last retiree, a healthy 65 year-old former judge from that vigorous, outdoorsy state of Washington begins to very slowly distance himself in my rearview mirror, yelling his starting suggestions. I pop the clutch, the wheels stop dead, and the rover skids to a halt in yet another cloud of dust.

Now I’m 100 yards down the road, it’s uphill in both directions, we have no jumper cables, no tow rope, and we’re in the middle of the freaking African bush. I get out of the car, and walk back up toward the reconvened committee meeting which has already started.

Still, I’m in good spirits. I’m thinking, “This is a great experience for my niece! Maybe we’ll get stuck out here and she’ll have a real Africa experience, like that time when I was a kid and the drunk soldiers in Liberia were going to execute me at that checkpoint!” I think things like that at an early age do wonders for character development. I’m completely convinced that it’s those types of mildly traumatic experiences at an age where you have no sense of mortality that give you the perspective and attitude necessary to truly enjoy the rest of life. I credit all those somewhat unpleasant experiences in my youth that I survived by the skin of my teeth with being the reasons why I am such a smashing human being.

So I’m walking back to the committee meeting with visions of toughing it out, teaching my niece how to purify water with a bit of cloth, a plastic bottle, and six hours of sunshine, or perhaps a really dangerous ride hanging onto the back of a lumber truck, or something of the sort. Something to get her to think about something other than what kind of dolphin-motif curtain she’s going to get for her bedroom when she gets back to States in the fall. Something to toughen her up inoculate her against becoming an airhead mall rat.

Then, out of the blue, a sparkling-new Land Cruiser roars by me and slides to a halt at the committee meeting. The doors spring open and out jump two tanned, sexagenarian Great White Hunter guys decked out in pith helmets and khaki short shorts. I can’t believe my freaking eyes.

The short shorts safari gents turn out to be old colonialists who came from Great Britain as children 50 years ago and still live up amongst the old colonial tea plantations, studying exotic butterflies. I’m stunned. It’s like Halloween in Chelsea.

One is a tall, still-brutally-handsome Sir Anthony Quayle type with the accent and mannerisms that make you not want him anywhere near your girlfriend. And he can probably cook, too.

His long-time companion is a petite man with a bitchy expression who makes catty comments about his partner’s fading hearing.

The safari lepiologists announce gallantly that they are returning to their estate to fetch jumper cables and a tow rope, and that they will be back forthwith! They roar back off in a cloud of dust. The womenfolk swoon. We menfolk try to change the subject to something about backcountry road construction techniques.

In a half an hour, the short short safari men are back with jumper cables, their Land Cruiser humming virilely, our rover reanimates with this automotive Kiss of Life, they give us their tow-rope just in case, and we all drive off towards our destinations.

The rest of the weekend passed affably except for an evening when we watched this awful flick, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, in which Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner take two hours proving that a Hemmingway story can really suck. Not only was the acting unbearable, and the story painfully boring, self-indulgent, and astoundingly stupid; the oblivious racism was stunning even for its time and the Swahili they had the “natives” speak more often than not laughably and unforgivably had nothing to do with the rest of the script.

Gregory Peck (lying on a chaise lounge at the base of Kilimanjaro, in a safari camp, dying of gangrene from a cut on his leg): Mke wapi?! (Translation: “Wife where?!”)

Dark Servant Guy Incomprehensibly Wearing Fez: Alikwenda kupika nyama, bwana (Translation: “She went to cook meat, sir.”)

Gregory Peck: So, she went hunting impala…

AAAAAAAGH!!!

DIE GREGORY! DIE!

After that scene I drank a bunch of beer and went to play snooker with the retired judge who also didn’t have the fortitude to stand any more of the movie. I’m impressed that the rest of the crew was able to watch to the end – but then, their hearing is going and they don’t see so well at night, so perhaps it wasn’t as painful for them.

My niece said the movie stunk. I’m thrilled she showed some character growth this weekend.