Didactic Disruption: Roy Ascott’s Models for Arts Education and Research

Keywords: Poetic, disruption, surveillance, counter-surveillance, art, appropriation, federal, documents, visualization, augmented reality

This paper explores artistic practices that reappropriate released and “leaked” United States governmental documents. The steady trickle of documents from Edward Snowden’s cache, alongside the massive disclosures from Wikileaks, are only a small part of the regular release of documents via the Freedom of Information Act. This trove of material provides much fodder for artistic investigations into open culture, surveillance, counter-surveillance, drone warfare, and torture, among other topics. Nevertheless, the historical and contemporary artistic approaches discussed will focus more on poetic responses that upset a purely instrumental, objective analysis of the material. Art for Spooks and the Crowd-Sourced Intelligence Agency (CSIA) will serve as the main catalysts for exploring the efficacy of the poetic in a time of objectification and quantification.