Laura Poitras’ Astro Noise is a multi-media exhibition that explores post 9/11 issues. Her background as a filmmaker and a journalist is reflected in her work. The piece stretches across several rooms. The first section, which I felt was one of the more impactful ones, features a screen suspended in the center of the room. We watch a looped video of a series of close ups of people as they marvel at the remains of the world trade center in the months immediately following 9/11. The footage is screened in slow motion; this combined with the proximity to the subjects create a very intimate experience. In class we discussed the concept of duration and the way in which the feeling of a piece changes as time passes although the content doesn’t necessarily change. In this situation, I was initially intrigued. What were these people watching? Is it possible that this is footage from September 11th? I think that it is important to mention that although it was not immediately clear what all these people were looking at, I never felt like I needed to see a POV shot. Watching the emotion on their faces was enough. Around the midway point, it begins to feel redundant. However, if you continue to watch, it begins to take on another meaning and that is one of connection. I found the choice to have this set up gallery-style (rather than in a theater setting) to be especially meaningful. The spectators in the film were very much similar to the spectators of the exhibit. We all watch with a certain intensity and then move along when we have seen enough.

As I reached the end of the exhibit a tour was beginning. I heard the tour guide explain that a major theme of the exhibit was lack of transparency regarding the U.S. government and their operations. It became immediately clear why certain aspects of the exhibit were structured the way they were. One of the first things I did when I entered the first space was look and the reverse side of the screen to see if it was playing to same thing. The opposite side was screening clips of interrogations. This exemplifies the theme of lack of transparency. As Americans, and even more so as New Yorkers, the World Trade Center was at the center of the entire situation. But there was so much more that we were unaware of. This theme is also demonstrated in another section that featured small rectangular cut outs in the walls. Inside were things like government documents describing surveillance methods.

Another section displayed the dynamic night sky on the ceiling. Viewers could watch this by lying on a large square bed. This section comes back at the end of the gallery where there is a monitor displaying a heat map of that room in real time. It is interesting to watch as people come and go, their warmth lingers on the bed and a new spectator lies on top of it. But then the realization comes that other people have been watching you as well. This is the artist’s effort to give us insight and a new level of understanding about these things that concern us, yet we know so little about.

I’ve watched the film Coffy over the weekend at Anthology Film Archives. It is a 35mm film written and directed in 1973 by Jack Hill and starring Pam Grier as the female protagonist. The genre of this film is Blaxploitation which is an ethnic subgenre of film in the 70s targeted for an urban black audience. Pam Grier played Coffy who was a nurse seeking revenge on drug dealers who got her young sister addicted. In the beginning of the scene, she lured a drug dealer using her sexuality to his house and killed him. After returning to the operation room at the hospital as a nurse, she had to leave the job because her hands were shaky. What also triggered her to go on a hunt and kill drug dealers was the scene when two men broke into her police officer friend Carter’s house while he and Coffy were catching up.

She then targeted King George who was a pimp at a prostitution business and wanted to work as a prostitute. She was at a party with other prostitute women who were jealous that she got the attention of George and spilled food on her purposely. Coffy went back and stuck sharp pins in her hair and when she went back, she got her revenge on the women and started fighting all of them alone. One of the prostitutes actually pulled Coffy’s hair and her hands bled everywhere.

The leader of a mob, Vitroni wanted Coffy to stay with him for a night. He was a racist white man who spit on her and called her names. She came prepared with a hidden gun in her teddy bear but was knocked away by Vitroni’s associates. Coffy told them King George sent her to kill Vitroni. The mob kidnapped Coffy and locked her in a room then killed King George by dragging him on a rope while driving their car on the streets.

Coffy again used her charm, sexuality and vigilance and escaped from the kidnap. She killed Vitroni and his associates then her boyfriend Brunswick, who she saw at Vitroni’s mob meeting and found out he was a part of it. She went to Brunswick’s place and when he begged for a second chance, a woman yelled upstairs for him to come back to bed. She fired her gun at him.

This film had couple of interesting experimental shots although not completely an experimental film. Some shots were filmed through a fish tank with an unusual, different perspective.

-Siyu Liu

Laura Poitras held her first solo museum exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art titled Laura Poitras: Astro Noise which expands on her cinematic work into a series of installations and immersive media environments. The exhibition’s title came from an encrypted file Edward Snowden gave Piotras for her previous work, Citizenfour, that contains evidence of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency and references thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang which what the museum’s goers ultimately views and experiences throughout the space. Not only does the exhibition include footage from NSA’s mass surveillance, but it also presents content from the war on terror, the U.S. drone program, Guantánamo Bay Prison, occupation and torture which expands upon her other projects to document post September 11.

In order to portray Poitras’ vision, the exhibition has been divided into five spacious sections. The first section of the exhibition is visible as museum goers exit the elevators: they are greeted by pigmented inkjet prints of distorted signals collected by the United Kingdom’s surveillance agency mounted on the wall. Although it is not images from the United States’ agency, it demonstrates how the events of September 11 caused deep fear among international nations to monitor possible threats sent through signals from satellites, drones and raiders. Following the prints is the entrance to one the large sections of exhibition which contains a large monitor that projects a double sided video for the installation titled O’Say Can You See. The monitor juxtapose scenes of people gazing at the unseen remains of the World Trade Center following the attacks in slow motion without live sound with military interrogation footage of two Afghanistan prisoners allegedly affiliated with Al-Qaeda as the national anthem is playing in the background. The inclusion of these two scenes powerfully shows how Americans reacted towards the tragic events back then and now through the live reactions from goers within the space.

Bed Down Location is the second large section within the exhibition. It features a mixed media projection of the night skies over Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan where the drone wars occurred along with audio from the sound of drones flying, pilots speaking and radio noses from the edge of the universe. The installation allows goers to get a sense of what the people within these areas heard and what the people who were targeting them saw.  The last two sections of the exhibitions titled Disposition Matrix and November 20, 2004 display videos, primary documents, interviews and diagloue within light boxes and window like slits. Poitras has been quoted to say that this section of her exhibition is “to evoke a notion of the deep state, of a hidden world, of something hard to see.” The pieces featured truly resonate with goers and allows them to reflect upon how their governments may view and target certain people or places based on information they have gathered from surveillance.

Overall, Poitras raises several ethical dilemmas through her exhibition’s narrative. She brings attention to the intelligence information not only collected by the United States’ government, but also by other government agencies across the globe. She asks the goers to take into consideration what they just viewed, decide what their position is and hopefully take a stand against the ongoing war on terror.

For the first outside screening assignment, I went to the Anthology Film Archive.  They had a paired showing of the experimental short, Film, written by Samuel Beckett and the kino-essay, Notfilm, by Ross Lipman.  Notfilm is an experimental documentary about Samuel Beckett’s experimental silent short, aptly named, Film.  Beckett’s Film, was directed by Alan Schneider and starred an aging Buster Keaton, it explored Bishop Berkeley’s idea of ‘esse est percepi,’ which means, to be is to be perceived. The short deals with perception and is told from two sides: one of E, the eyes of the camera, and of O, Keaton, our main character.  O’s perspective is marked by a blurred lens, giving the film viewer a sense of O’s blindness.  E’s perspective is not altered, but in contrast to the blurriness of O, appears extra clear and sharp.  Film matches Beckett’s style of unconventionality.  Silent era icon Buster Keaton, known for his face and deadpan expression is predominately filmed with his back to the camera.  While this might frustrate some Keaton fans, others might see it a nice departure from his earlier work.  Keaton himself was confused by Film and Beckett even described it as an ‘interesting failure’.  The short is worth the watch, especially for Avant-garde fans.  But do not expect a thought provoking bewitching experience as one would find with Waiting for Godot.

Lipman’s Notfilm takes Beckett’s meta film experiment and ratchets it up about fifty notches.  The kino-essay, almost plays as a Beckett love story. However, Lipman integrates the stories of different cast, crew, and Beckett enthusiasts. Lipman provides the majority of the voice narration; there are also rarely before heard tapes of a Film production meeting. The never before heard tapes and commentary from the people who knew Beckett and Keaton best are the charm of the film. Longtime collaborators, Beckett and Schneider came from the stage, and their laborious journey to the screen was quite touching and relatable to emerging artists. The 125-minute documentary is quite lengthy. But, the experimental quality of the editing certainly keeps the audience awake. The editing style resembles a pre-teen having free range on their computer and using every different type of transition possible. The mixture of conventional documentary techniques such as commentary, visual cutaways, and voice over narrations intermingled with blacked out screens, white flashes, and jump cuts was quite jarring. But, I feel that the non-conventionalism of the documentary matched the mania of the short film. However, three quarters of a way through, the film starts to meander. Lipman must have known how the daunting the film would be to some viewers because Notfilm comes complete with its own intermission. Although the intermission and varying act structure inter-titles seem to be a homage to the great playwright, they serve to parcel the seeming unyielding amount of information in the film. Information that after a while became highly repetitive.

One of the high notes about the film is that it does not glorify Beckett or Keaton. And openly admits to the failure of Film. The kickstarter-funded film appears to be a dream come true for film enthusiast Ross Lipman. Film and Notfilm are definitely recommended for theater and film enthusiast. The films commentary on film, the tireless art of creating, and of the inevitable aging process make them timeless must sees.

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.

For the outside screening, I decided to go the media collection at MOMA. In the second floor, tucked away in a corner from the bigger exhibitions is a screen with a few small benches. Screening in this corner is “November” by Hito Steyerl. The piece is a compilation of personal footage taken by Hito, interviews, and stock footage from Bruce Lee movies and Kurdish television. This combination of material blurs the line between what is true and what is fictional. The artist has refused to call her piece a documentary. Rather, it is a portrait of her deceased friend by associated her with different images of uprisings and revolutions.

Hito Steyerl starts her piece in these words, “My best friend when I was 17, was a girl called Andrea Wolf. She died 4 years ago, when she was shot as a Kurdish terrorist.” She goes on to show us a home video that she made with Andrea on her Super- 8. It is a Kung- Fu action film with strong feminist themes. Andrea plays the hero that gets to beat up every male in site. In voice over, Steyerl explains that in this world, only bad guys have weapons and only the hero uses their fists to fight.

The film was made when Hito Steyerl was very young. She made it with her friends without any particular intention. It is only after the death of Andrea Wolf that the piece took on a meaning. Andrea was killed by the Turkish army after she join a Kurdish army of women. Shortly after her death, she became a symbol of revolution. It is after this that the silly and tacky Kung- Fu video became a symbol of rebellion. With this perspective, Hito Steryl dissects her amateur video through the eyes of war.

It is interesting that something we create at an innocent age, something that we may not have thought much about after creating it can obtain a different meaning. To Hito, the video that she made with her friend meant freedom and justice after her death. These shifting meanings made me think about videos and artwork that I made when I was younger. It made me think about the possible ways in which I can interpret these pieces looking back after so many years and how the way I look at it defines me. I remember talking to an artist a few months back that spoke about the meaning of her art. She told me that after she finishes painting her piece, it doesn’t matter what her intentions were in the beginning. Different people in different generations will look at it in different ways.

Hito Steyerl redefined her film with her friend by associating it with the fighting mentality found in old- school Kung Fu featuring Bruce Lee and images of revolution taken from Kurdish documentaries.

My first outside screening of experimental film this semester was incredibly rewarding. I had still not been to the remodeled Whitney Museum, so I was excited to see Laura Poitras’ Astro Noise there.

I saw Poitras’ documentary, Citizenfour when it was first released, and was enthralled in the story of Edward Snowden. Astro Noise tells the same basic story as the documentary, but interacts with the viewer and imposes on them a visceral experience of America’s war on terror.

From the first instillation, (a drop down screen with close up shots of 911 spectators projected on one side, and US interrogation footage of men who are currently being held at Guantanamo Bay on the other) I felt as though I was being kept in the dark while simultaneously being fed information that I wasn’t supposed to see. Both the interrogation video and the video from 911 were presented without any contextualization, yet both videos are incredibly intimate. The interrogation of the two prisoners as a result of the 911 attacks, and more broadly the impulse of the Bush administration to launch into a poorly defined ‘War on Terror’ is felt deeply here.

The next instillation consisted of a raised platform in the middle of the exhibition space, where spectators could lay down and watch videos (projected on the ceiling) of drone airspace in Syria and Iraq. This was perhaps my favorite part of the exhibition. I got to relax, put down my heavy backpack, and look at serene images of the sky, although the knowledge that these areas were under military surveillance was at the front of my mind. The relaxation and vulnerability here is perhaps the intended effect, since the exhibit culminates in an exploitation of this space.

Continuing through the exhibit, many of the documents leaked by Snowden are on display, deep in small rectangular holes in the gallery walls, so that you need to put your eyes flush against the wall in order to see them. Also inside these rectangles are different videos filmed by Poitras. These items are presented without context, and require the audience to do some ‘digging’ to see what secrets are behind the walls. I was particularly moved by a video of a small village celebrating the arrival of a dignitary of some kind (no other details are given), then an inter title saying “the next day”, and images of the same village completely destroyed, with villagers trying to make sense of the wreckage. Here is another example of how the lack of context leads to a deeper, more visceral understanding of the ways in which the War on Terror functions.

The end of the exhibit culminates in a handheld video shot by Poitras of a US invasion of a small Iraqi town. Only in this instance does the artist provide a context and fully explained details. Poitras tells via voiceover the circumstances of the US occupation and explains the consequences she faced after the filming – namely being flagged by the NSA. In addition to Poitras personal account, there is a mounted television broadcasting an infrared live stream of museum goers as they lie down to watch the Syrian/Iraqi sky. I think this was the perfect way to end the exhibition. The audience is filmed and broadcast without their knowledge or consent. The viewer is personally betrayed by Poitras, just as the NSA betrayed the trust of the American people.

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.

This past Sunday in the late afternoon I visited the Whitney for the very first time to see the Astro Noise exhibit by Laura Poitras on the very top and entire floor of the gallery. It was an exhibit based on government surveillance and increased presence post- 9/11. The exhibit is based off of Poitras’ documentary film, Citizenfour. It was both an interesting and kind of spooky exhibit to walk through and, at times, to be a part of.

The exhibit begins in a large room with a tv screen in the middle, and two different projections on each side. One side is looping footage of close up shots of people staring off in front of them and their reactions. The reactions are supposed to be of the people staring at ground zero. It was almost chilling to sit there and stare these people in the face, and to see the emotions in their eyes. On the other side of the screen was looped footage of interrogation and torture of a man accused of having weapons and explosives in his car. Military men are seen questioning him, their tactics growing more severe as the footage rolls on.

The next part of the exhibit was unique in the way that it was a large dark room, with footage of the night sky and stars projected on the ceiling. For viewing, people could lay on a carpeted raised surface in the middle of the room, as if they were star gazing. An interesting thing about this is how at the end of the exhibit, before you exit, you see that there is a large tv screen of thermal heat footage of everyone who was laying on the platform in the other room. It’s spooky because, at the time, you didn’t realize you were being watched by other people. And, this forces you into the position of “big brother” aka the government that is watching over unsuspecting people. It was a very powerful image to take away from the exhibit.

I’m glad I got the opportunity to visit this exhibit, and it makes me want to investigate Poitras work further on the subject. It’s very interesting to me how she received information about government surveillance by Edward Snowden. Also, being an aspiring documentary filmmaker, I would like to watch her documentary Citizenfour to learn more about her work and the topic.  This kind of topic is very interesting because it has everything to do with our everyday lives as American citizens. I also find it interesting the information that is withheld from us concerning our freedom and civil liberties. It takes a government official to become a traitor to his country just to spread the information kept from the general public. Interesting and scary are two words to sum up what this exhibit evoked from me, and I’m sure others too.