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.