Made famous by her 2014 Documentary, Citizenfour, about the notorious Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras puts on her first solo museum exhibition, Astro Noise, at The Whitney Museum of American Art. Taking up the entire 8^th floor of The Whitney, Astro Noise examines themes of surveillance and war, forcing visitors to confront these themes head-on by becoming unwilling participants in the artmaking processes itself. Laura Poitras’ unfamiliarity with the museum space is made clear by the inconclusive nature of the exhibition, which seems to fall short of deserving consideration as art.

The experimental nature of the exhibition seems like a first attempt at a broad topic rather than a full-fledged exhibition on surveillance and war. The interaction between the viewer and the installation seems surface level at best and could have included a greater level of engagement in order to convey the theme of surveillance. The use of a dual video, double sided screen in the center of the room adds to the sense of space, requiring the viewer to walk from the front of the screen to behind the screen in order to see both films. On one side of the display there is footage of individual’s gazing at the ruble of the Twin Towers in the days after September 11^th, on the other side of the display there is footage of suspected terrorists being interrogated. This dichotomy is intriguing yet predictable and does not seem very experimental in its design. The connection between the two videos on either side of the screen is straightforward and does not leave me with any unanswered questions. The second part of the exhibition is a video installation, Bed Down Location, in this installation the viewer is drawn in through the use of a carpeted platform in which visitors lay down and gaze at a video projection on the ceiling. The video features starscapes and footage of distant military drones flying overhead. This section of the installation encourages us to do something we so rarely do: look up. By laying down and looking at the ceiling we obtain a perspective we don’t often see and we are forced to envision ourselves beneath the unknown, under the blanket of drone surveillance. This was the most powerful part of the exhibition and for me it had to do with the fact that I was laying down and looking up, it became just me and the video overhead causing me to forget that I was in a museum.

Astro Noise, does not consider themes of war and surveillance equally, leaving surveillance as somewhat of an afterthought, contributing to the exhibition’s disjointed feeling. What seems to be a visual chronological archive of the war on terror, ends with a thermal imaging live-feed of museumgoers watching the installation video, Bed Down Location, and a monitor that tracks and identifies the mobile devices of people in close proximity. Unlike other politically inspired artworks, Poitras’ message is not clear, Astro Noise does not have a conclusion. The exhibition does not propose a solution to the issues examined, nor does it try to expose or unpack the harsh realities of war or our government’s self-appointed right to track its people.