When art interrogates surveillance

摘要

Images taken from hacked Israeli drones line the entrance at Astro Noise, the first solo exhibition by film-maker Laura Poitras. But the show, at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, doesn't hit high gear until you find yourself in the dark, confronted by a massive screen playing slow-motion footage of civilians gazing on the wreckage of the World Trade Center shortly after the attacks on 11 September 2001. As the distorted soundtrack unwinds - the US national anthem, sung at a World Series baseball game that November -it occurs to you that the people you're watching behaved in much the same way as you are now. Heads twist from side to side as they try to read meaning in the twisted material before them. Already, you feel implicated.