Creative Capital

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Hasan Elahi is creating a multi-layered, multimedia art work with an unusual “collaborator:” the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The impetus for Elahi’s complex Creative Capital project, Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project, was an incident in 2002—just months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States. After FBI authorities were falsely tipped that Elahi, who is of South Asian descent, could possibly be a terrorist, he was subjected to a lengthy investigation and repeated interrogation between June and November 2002. After nine consecutive polygraph tests, he was deemed unthreatening.

Now that he’s no longer under immediate suspicion, Elahi is willingly documenting his every move, via digital photographs and related textual archives, posted on his website, www.trackingtransience.net. “I share everything with the FBI—and everyone,” he says. “Their currency is secrecy and access to information. Making information public devalues their currency.”

The project’s goal is to provide complete data on Elahi’s whereabouts and activities. “I am flooding the market with my information,” he explains. It’s an experiment in utter transparency—and an attempt at suggesting how absurd and Orwellian surveillance has become in the post-9/11 era, especially toward young Muslim men such as Elahi. Because Elahi’s digital images of his surroundings are time-stamped, as are the postings to his Web site, he is, as he says, providing himself with “the ultimate alibi” should he ever be questioned again. Self-surveillance protects him from further false accusations of suspicious activity.

The Tracking Transience site began as a rudimentary online map, to which Elahi uploaded his location regularly. He soon began compiling an extensive visual and textual database of everything in his life, updating it constantly. These records include an archive of flight information for every airplane journey he has ever taken and snapshots of hundreds of meals he has eaten, among other personal information.

Elahi then posts original images, along with coordinates of where the photos were taken. A network server sends the information to the United States Geological Survey, which provides an aerial surveillance image of the his location. A software application written by Elahi matches the map with the uploaded images.

With support from Creative Capital, Elahi is exploring new directions for Tracking Transience. While the website remains a key element of the work, Hasan is also creating films and videos related to the project, still photographs for gallery exhibitions, a limited-edition DVD, and video installations. He is developing an automated software program that would allow him to track and post his information in real time. And he’s exploring the possibility of releasing such a program commercially, as a tool for people to permit themselves to be monitored—by loved ones, employers, or, for those in situations like his, by themselves and the FBI.

While it updates the concept of documentation-as-artwork, Elahi’s work evokes certain contemporary art precedents, such as conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s voyeuristic cataloguing of other peoples’ lives and Chris Burden’s 1977 piece, Full Financial Disclosure, in which he framed and presented his cancelled checks, tax forms, and bank statements in a gallery. In Tracking Transience, Elahi deploys a similarly detached tone. First-time visitors to the site may be surprised to find no introductory text or explanation of the circumstances that prompted him to create the project. In fact, there’s very little text on the site at all. “The narrative is left out of this experiment,” Elahi says. As he points out, the main difference between his thought-provoking work and that of his predecessors is his motivation, which extends beyond the realm of art: to literally ensure that his own identity is protected, that he remains free from inaccurate accusations of terrorism, and, ultimately, that his own safety is maintained.

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