ISEA2015

This panel explores artistic practices that reappropriate released and “leaked” United States governmental documents. The steady trickle of documents from Edward Snowden’s cache, alongside the mas-sive 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. The panelists will explore a series of questions around the efficacy of the poetic in a time of objectification and quantification.