Visibilidade X Vigilância

O artista Hasan Elahi usa estrategicamente a visibilidade para desarmar a vigilância sobre a sua vida privada. Desde que foi alvo de suspeita de terrorismo pelo FBI, em 2002, o artista disponibiliza a sua vida online. Por meio de fotos e de um emissor GPS, Elahi documenta cada passo de sua vida, dos sanduíches que come a viagens que realiza, e disponibiliza tudo instantaneamente no seu site. "A melhor maneira de proteger a sua vida privada é torná-la pública", diz Elahi. Um filme realizado com fotos tiradas desde 2002 será exibido em junho/2007 no Festival Pocket Films do Centro Georges Pompidou em Paris.

O trabalho do artista me lembrou a aurora dos movimentos de liberação sexual, em particular a literatura homossexual, como nota Foucault, que "dizia" à psiquiatria: "vocês dizem que a nossa verdade reside em nosso sexo. Sim, aceitamos, somos o que vocês dizem, por natureza, perversão ou doença, como quiserem. Mas essa verdade nós mesmos a diremos, melhor que vocês". Inversão estratégica da vontade de verdade nesse caso. Inversão estratégica da vontade de tudo ver e antever, no caso do artista frente ao FBI.

Abaixo, trecho extraído da Wired:
The Visible Man: An FBI Target Puts His Whole Life Online

"Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he's keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we're drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone's touchscreen. "OK! It's uploading now," says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. "It'll go public in a few seconds." Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.

There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today — the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.

Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list — and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others".