Total Information Awareness: 
Hasan Elahi, Mike Osborne, Jeff Thompson

Runs / May 6-June 26, 2022

Reception First Friday, May 6, 6-9 PM
Gallery Hours / Sat-Sun from 2-6 PM

Special hours during International Conference for Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 
Monday, May 23, 4-6 PM / RSVP here.
Tuesday, May 24, 5-7 PM / Tour with the curators and artists, + wine reception. Purchase a ticket for the exhibition tour here
Wednesday, May 25, 12-2 PM / RSVP here.

For our May/June exhibit Grizzly Grizzly is pleased to present Total Information Awareness, a group exhibition including Hasan Elahi, Mike Osborne, Jeff Thompson, co-curated by Ricky Yanas. Total information Awareness is part of a series of collaborative exhibits presented by the RAD Lab and the 2nd floor galleries of the 319 Building for the 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

Total Information Awareness was a mass surveillance program created by the United States Information Awareness Office and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 2002. Its mission was based on the concept of predictive policing, meant to gather detailed information about individuals into a core repository in order to anticipate and prevent crimes before they were committed. A controversial effort from its inception, Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington stated, “This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America.'' Although congress eliminated funding for the program in 2003, its data mining initiatives were dispersed to other programs, agencies and throughout the private sector. Today the collective assumption of privacy is long gone, personal information of citizens or otherwise can be bought and sold, the line between the public, private and corporate information state was and is irrevocably blurred. 

This exhibition, named after the now debunked program, brings together three artists who use information as material for making, processing and surveying. Hasan Elahi, Mike Osborne and Jeff Thompson shift our perspective from the sights of power to the point of view of the monitored subject, a site where we may again find our individual agency. Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience, first launched in 2003 after erroneously being the focus of an FBI investigation in 2002, is a real-time data mining program developed by the artist which monitors his own communication records, banking transactions and transportation logs for public viewing; the software was originally created to be shared with his FBI case agent. Elahi will present a new and revised iteration for the exhibition.

Mike Osborne’s Federal Triangle (2017) is a series of documentary photographs titled after the government complex wedged between the US Capitol and the White House, which traces the psychogeographic permimter of the nation’s physical center of power. In the artist’s own words, the images depict “Washington DC as a kind of bureaucratic Bermuda Triangle—an impenetrable place of mystery, danger, and disorientation…withholding more than they reveal.” A selection of prints will be on view along with the publication of the same name which presents the project in total. Federal Triangle (Gnomic Books) was voted one of TIME magazine’s best photobooks of 2019. 

Jeff Thompson incorporates data collection, programming, machines and machine learning into works that mingle personal, corporal experience with its techno-digital expression. Computer Clock Choir (2014), a sculptural work made up of the speakers of every computer the artist has owned or used regularly since 201, plays a distinct sound wave at the frequency of each computer’s internal clock. The work merges the autobiographical with the biometrical through the experience of sonic notes that sit outside of our physical perception yet define the background of the artist’s everyday, technology mediated experience. Pebble Data Set (2018), finds poetry in the rigidity of data-mining (and sorting) systems presenting, as the artist states, “the results of a poetic machine-learning dataset onto 5000 images of pebbles found” on walks by the artist.

2020-22 Grizzly Grizzly programming and residencies are supported by Added Velocity which is administered by Temple Contemporary at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University and funded by the William Penn Foundation. Additional support for this exhibition was provided by The RAD Lab.

Artist Bios

Hasan Elahi is an artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, citizenship, migration, transport, and the challenges of borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Sundance Film Festival, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Venice Biennale. His work is frequently in the media and has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, and has appeared on Al Jazeera, Fox News, and The Colbert Report. Elahi has spoken about his work to a broad range of audiences such as Tate Modern, Einstein Forum, National Geographic, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, TED, and the World Economic Forum. His recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert/MacDowell Fellowship, grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art, and he is a recipient of a Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award. He serves on the National Advisory Council at Creative Capital and on the Advisory Board for the New Media Caucus. He is part of the core faculty at the Chautauqua School of Art summer residency program and has previously been Resident Faculty at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He is currently Professor and Director of the School of Art at George Mason University. 

Mike Osborne is a photographer whose work touches on a range of themes including architecture, landscape, history, and technology, ultimately taking the form of books and exhibitions. His photographs are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Contemporary Austin, and the University of Virginia. Federal Triangle, a project set in Washington, DC, will be published by Gnomic Book in 2019. His work has also appeared in publications such as the New Yorker, Time, the New York Times, and the New Republic. He lives in Austin, Texas. 

Jeff Thompson is an artist, programmer, and educator based in the NYC area. Through code, sculpture, sound, and performance, Thompson's work physicalizes and gives materiality to otherwise invisible technological processes. Thompson has exhibited and performed his work internationally at venues including the Museum of the Moving Image, Tufts University, Fridman Gallery, Somerset House, Sheldon Museum of Art, Drugo-more, Salzburger Kunstverein, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Recent commissions and residencies include SPACES, Bell Labs, the Computer Laboratory at University of Cambridge, Abandon Normal Devices, Brighton Digital Festival, Impakt, Rhizome, Turbulence, Harvestworks, and Holland Computing Center, the supercomputing facility for the University of Nebraska system. With Angeles Cossio, Thompson co-founded the experimental curatorial project Drift Station, which has mounted exhibitions and publications across the US and online. Thompson earned an MFA from Rutgers University in 2006. He serves as Associate Professor of Visual Art & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology.