The first piece of Astro Noise is a screen with two faces. The first side shows the faces of horrified onlookers on 9/11 in slow-motion and without sound. All these people can do is look, and all we can do is see them. In this first image, Laura Poitras makes her thesis statement: the truth is right there in front of us, if we can only bear the horror of looking. Poitras shows us the horror of 9/11 not in the destruction of the actual attacks, but in the faces of the people forced to stand there and see a terrible truth they could do nothing to change.
Walk around the screen, and the sounds of frantic speech take form. Hooded figures are shoved into frame, interrogated in English and Arabic, and often violently ejected from the frame, the echoes of their muffled voices off-camera the only proof of their existence.
Turn the corner, and a carpeted slab sits below a projected star-field on the ceiling. The peace of the room is messied by the people shuffling around on the slab to make room for everyone who wants to lie down. Some people come into the room from the other side and laugh. This is confusing now, but will be clear soon. For now, Poitras only wants you to look.
The tools she uses to demand your attention are always simple, but always effective. Beyond the room with the slab, two dimly lit black corridors are spotted with small viewing rectangles. The content of the rectangles vary from leaked intelligence briefings, to footage from drone strikes, to leaked internal policy memos from a host of government agencies, to secret FISA court orders. But the content is less specifically important than the realization that for each of these items, thousands more exist just like it. Poitras is not interested in the details of the leaked intelligence here, but rather in the shape of it, in the experience of the truth that has been hidden by those we are supposed to trust. Each rectangle can only accommodate a single viewer at a time, and the light inside each is so bright that the moment you step away, you stumble in darkness until your eyes readjust. The truths we finally encounter, Poitras implies, are blinding.
Beyond those corridors is revelation. A large screen dominates one wall, and the odd familiarity of thermal footage of people lying down is unsettling until you realize you’re looking at you, or at least you ten minutes ago. So now you walk back to the room with the slab in the center, and you lie down, and you wave at the camera that was there all along. You look at all the fools lying here in the dark without knowing that they’re being watched, and you realize that you were supposed to come back. The privilege of the secret is intoxicating.
Walk back to the final room. The rest of Astro Noise is icing on the cake. Watch the innocuous footage Laura Poitras shot in Iraq that landed her on a no-fly list, and wonder why our government should be more afraid of being shot by photographers than soldiers. The truth is already so, Poitras’ work pleads, owning up to it doesn’t make it any worse. The final piece of Astro Noise is its simplest, and perhaps most effective. White text scrolls over a black field. “Abie’s iPhone” is one among many names on the screen. The wifi-sniffer is the size of a matchbox. Astro-noise asks you to look, but it never asks if it can look back. It doesn’t need your permission.