In 2015, at the 56th Venice Biennale, artist Simon Denny presented Secret Power, as part of his ongoing research on the visual culture of the National Security Agency (NSA). It was only two years before that the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked sensitive materials from the NSA. While the artist’s interests in these documents were initially sparked by revelations that New Zealand (the birthplace of the artist) was part of the Five Eyes global surveillance network, the artist is also interested in speculating on a “visual imaging department” within the NSA, looking into the ways NSA communicated internally about its own operations and politics.
Perhaps it was not a total coincidence that we should encounter Denny’s work in 2015. 2015 was, after all, the “International Year of Light and Light-based Technologies” (IYL2015) as designated by the United Nations. As the official website for IYL2015 puts it: “Light plays a vital role in our daily lives and is an imperative cross-cutting discipline of science in the 21st century. It has revolutionised medicine, opened up international communication via the Internet, and continues to be central in linking cultural, economic and political aspects of the global society.” The documents released by Snowden were distributed through the Internet. We can also imagine that the gathering and circulation of intelligence within those documents were themselves made possible by the Internet. Rapid pulses of light that enable sensitive information to travel at the speed of light.
On display within the dim interiors of the Marciana Library, in Venice, was Denny’s installation, made up of illuminated server racks, hollowed out to serve as vitrines for the artist’s appropriation of the leaked documents. While the setting of the library was clearly a deliberate choice on the part of the artist to point to the library as a site of knowledge and power, we need also to consider the lighting of the installation setup as part of the artist’s provocations. Against the warm orange glow that softly showed off the contours and surfaces of the paintings and sculptures in the Marciana Library, the cool blue lights emanating from Denny’s server-rack vitrines revealed a new apparatus of power and knowledge, a global network of intelligence and surveillance enabled by an infrastructure of lights and optics.
Light gives life, literally. This is most evident in the biological and chemical processes that sustain our ecosystems. Its importance in our perceptions of the world is also represented in the ways we describe knowledge as revelations, illuminations, and clarifications. If we truly live in a photosensitive culture, then perhaps Denny’s work offers an important complication. That is, there is a biopolitics to this light. This infrastructure of light and optics enables the surveillance of bodies identified as potential threats to those looking from the other side of the dashboards and monitors. And it is this biopolitics of light that I am particularly interested in exploring with my own project on Singapore’s infrastructural lights (i.e. the network of street lamps that are becoming smart sensors for the city, the lights that are perpetually on, 24/7, to secure the critical infrastructures of the city).
Bo Wang, Spectrum, or the Singapore Dan Flavin (2016)
[On a similar point, but as a brief digression, it is inspiring to see how the New York-based artist Bo Wang sampled light sources from various locations across Singapore in order to critique this biopolitics of light. Wang’s Spectrum, or the Singapore Dan Flavin (2016) presented fluorescent tubes sampled from consumer and public spaces (e.g. a dining and cocktail place, a hotel lobby) to industrial and working spaces (e.g. offices in financial hub, dormitories for migrant workers), arranging the samples from warm to cool, orange to blue, as part of his installation. What is revealed is how migrant workers in Singapore, those precarious bodies who build and maintain the critical infrastructures in Singapore, are subjected to bright blue lights even in their spaces of rest.]
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Returning back to Denny’s installation at the Marciana Library on closer examination, there is nonetheless something quite unsettling about the ways in which the artist had chosen to materialize his appropriations of the NSA documents. Stuffed into his server-rack vitrines were Denny’s attempts at making a spectacle out of what we consider to be fairly innocuous graphics and illustrations (e.g. bar graphs, clip-art). There is an ambivalence here. One that vacillates between a mocking exaggeration of NSA’s fairly crude aesthetics and a knowing celebration of the efficacy of this aesthetics (regardless of, and in a way also precisely because of, what the trained eyes of the art world may think of them. Compared to any international artist whose work may have provided the art world with a steady stream of beauty, ecstasy and entertainment, these graphics have actually had a hand in determining the fates of many people around the world.
To that the end, I can’t help but wonder if there is be something fundamentally disingenuous at the heart of Denny’s work. Though titled Secret Power, Denny’s work seems also to function as a veiled mockery of the art world’s inefficacy and impotence, even while the artist goes on to add another blockbuster event to his growing / glowing C.V.. Perhaps Denny truly believes that this is the secret privilege of an artist. But this overriding sense of entitlement is also evident in Denny’s decision to co-opt the work of freelance graphic designer David Darchicourt, who directed and produced visuals for the NSA between 1996 and 2012, without seeking Darchicourt’s approval. All in the name of doing a “performance … which makes us think about how it feels to have work that we’ve done or things we’ve said on the Internet used in ways we’re not sure of and aware of.”
Yet, having said all this, I am for the moment trying to resist such a cynical indictment; that might be after all too easy a position to slip into. So while I may not fully agree with his “smarts,” Secret Power is nonetheless an important reminder that we cannot simply look at the leaked NSA documents for their informational “content” but we have to at least also consider their visual grammar and their mediated formats. And if anything else, Denny’s work did bring me to think further about the biopolitics of light.