The FBI held Hasan Elahi in custody and extensively interrogated him for several days in 2002, believing him to be a terrorist. But even after his innocence was established, his name remained on the terrorist watch list. Partly to provide a future alibi and partly to raise some troubling questions, Elahi began tracking all his movements and activities using a GPS and a camera, posting the real-time results on his website. Hasan Elahi turned his life into a technological disappearing act and maybe also into a work of art.
Interviewed by Niels Van Tomme.

How is your relationship with the US government nowadays?

Hasan Elahi: I get harassed still to this day– every time I fly through Kennedy airport I get taken in for hours. Other airports are hit or miss. To be honest, I have very good reason not to live here after all this, but remain here. This is home, this is where I grew up, I’m an American citizen and this is my country. So it does pose a very interesting question when your idea of the country does not necessarily reflect your government’s policies. I am certainly indebted to the US for what I’ve established here with my citizenship, it would’ve been impossible growing up in a small village in Bangladesh. On the other hand, I don’t agree with what our government is doing and that’s one of the reasons I’m doing this project.

Your exhibition, ‘Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project’, sounds bombastic and scary, at the same time there is a certain peace coming from your images. Are we accepting fear?

HE: I don’t know if we’re accepting fear, I think acknowledging fear is a little different than accepting it. I have to take this to the point where it’s almost comical. Looking at my urinals, pretty much all of it is actually fun.

There are tongue-in-cheek things happening behind the scenes that defuse the tension of the real story. If I only focused on the negative, then it would become depressing and gloomy, it would become scary. Rather I reverse the situation, take control of it, almost create a satire of it by stepping back from it, and heighten that fear even more. There is something silly about the images of the airline meals. There is even a real knife. If I had a knife in my bag in any of the airports around here, I would get arrested and taken away, but as soon as I sit down on the plane, it’s perfectly all right to hand that knife to me.

How did you start the project?

HE: It’s a very organic process. At first it was just an image on a webpage, then it became an image on a very primitive map, then the map got a little more detailed, then we were able to move in and out of the map and then we started adding more and more layers. It’s a multifaceted project and it’s really taking on a life of its own. One of the things I’m really excited about is that the database is actually generating the work. It’s not feasible to show 30,000 images so I have to extract certain ideas. There’s this thing about sleeping in airports. One of the first things I did after I was cleared was flying to Singapore, but I couldn’t clear customs and immigration. I arrived in Singapore and stayed at the airport for four days (which incidentally is built on the site of a very brutal prison) and then flew back. There’s a record of me leaving, there’s a record of me entering, but there’s no record of me ever being anywhere for those four days, I literally blipped up into nowhere. In that sense, looking at the airport terminal as limbo, it’s interesting to compare it to say, Guantanamo. It’s not Cuban territory, it’s not US territory, it’s not international territory, it exists in a physical space, it doesn’t exist politically; it’s a non-space. The same way as Guantanamo is a non-space, these airport terminals are surrogates for non-spaces.

They all look very familiar.

HE: That’s the beauty of it.

It’s the in-between space, in-between nothing.

HE: Exactly! It is nothing, and that’s where this piece comes in, these are all 1,200 images of airports that I transited through. It is exactly what you were talking about, it’s nowhere, it’s nothing, it’s non-space, and yet you’re flooded with images of these non-spaces.

There’s also something absurd about tracking yourself. In a way you’re mapping your life, but it doesn’t make things necessarily more clear.

HE: My strategy is that at the end of the day there has to be human beings for controlling information. There’s a lot of information about us out there, and if 300,000,000 million people opened up their identities, you would need to hire another 300,000,000 people to keep track of it. So in a way you maintain anonymity by completely giving it up. I love to use the example of Amsterdam. Curtains in Amsterdam don’t do anything, you can see right though them, but you don’t sit there and look into people’s apartments. It’s your own decency that says keep walking. It’s self-control. It’s all out there, but after a certain point no one cares and you become anonymous. By offering all this information I truly live a very anonymous life. It seems like a contradiction, but there is an absurdity in the contradiction.

You’re traveling a lot; you’re a techno-nomad, leaving a trace of your existence through technology.

HE: Absolutely. It is interesting to look at what Vito Acconci has done, mapping with his body in space. I’m doing more of a cyborg version of that, it’s a cyber mapping of the body, of the body politic, rather than the physical body itself. It is a continuous mapping; it’s a very quantitative process and getting it down very precisely to this micro-level is exactly what I have to do with the FBI. I have to explain to them where I was on this day, what I was doing, who I was talking to, why I was there. But in a way, I’m completely free, if I offer everything and tell everything there’s nothing left to find out. Things could have gotten really ugly during the investigation, but I never experienced any of that. I’m very forthcoming, so in a way I look at it as helping out, I’m doing my share, my duty to the country.

So you subverted the use of technology?

HE: Right now we have cell phones that track us and we don’t think anything of it, because we’ve grown dependent and we like that dependence. Once we’ve gotten used to this technology for keeping track of people and pets, things that are close to us and that we like, that’s when we will start working on keeping track of the bad guys. Who will question it, if we’re using it for such positive things? We’ve learned to accept this, I’m kind of joking about this obviously, but there’s parallels to this in the way our government works. The whole premise of this project is to draw attention to these new laws and policies. We have fought for over 200 years for the rights and liberties that this country stands for and within weeks we had that wiped out. Isn’t there something wrong with that? I have no problem with using myself as a subject in drawing attention to the enforcement of these laws. People will start talking about it and once you have a dialog coming from various perspectives it becomes a stronger argument.

And art can do such thing?

HE: I’m a firm believer that some of the best art barely passes for art. I’m interested in that aspect where we question: What is this? This isn’t art! If we are questioning it, it’s probably good. Mel Chin’s work I find to be very effective. The fact that you can go out to a field and get a community together to plant a specific type of plant that will suck dioxins from the soil. It’s an amazing artwork but at the same time it’s also something much bigger than art, called life. So, yes, art can do such thing. But I also think that we have to be very open to what art could be, that art may be taking on a physical characteristic that we’re not necessarily familiar with. It may become something completely different and we may tell ourselves ‘No, that’s not art’. I’m really excited about works that challenge my thinking and question my beliefs. I’m not interested in providing answers; I just want to get more questions.

Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project is on view at Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC until June 9. Elahi’s website

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 at 11:20 am and is filed under Arts, Exhibitions, In the District, Interview, Science and Technology, The Commons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.