by Rachel Kaufman
published in Express, 2/11/09

YOUR IPHONE EMBEDS geodata into every picture you upload to Flickr. Facebook posts your address without your permission. Your E-ZPass knows where you’ve been driving.

Scary, but is this art? A show at Arlington Arts Center asks, why not?

“Public/Private,” featuring work by Matthew Sutton, Richard Saxton, Lisa Blas, Satomi Shirai, Mandy Burrow and Stephanie Robbins, raises the question of privacy in a public world, where everyone stars in “The Me Show” and almost everything can be found online. Christian Moeller’s MOJO addressed the issue in 2007 by putting a spotlight on a street corner and recording footage of the beam following the movements of passersby. Most of the subjects seem to enjoy their fleeting fame. The light — an actual theater spotlight — makes each person a star, if only for an instant.

If your Facebook mini-feed’s more important to you than CNN’s news feed, watch “Everyone That We Know News.” Endearingly earnest Chris Barr and VÃ(c)ronique Cote dress as newscasters and present updates from their friends and family, while Facebook-style status updates scroll across a “news ticker.”

Not even pen and paper is safe: Anissa Mack posted pieces of her sister’s diary on a public bulletin board. The aptly titled “My Sister’s Diary” promises to reveal a private life, but Mack redacted most of the words, making the diary read more like a top-secret FBI document than a journal of personal feelings. Viewers can respond to the diary or post their own flyers, almost like a proto-blog.

Perhaps you didn’t know that a picture of the front of your house is on the Internet. Google’s Street View probably captured a detailed image from their camera on wheels, which has photographed most major U.S. cities. In “Street With a View,” Ben Kinsley and Robin Hewlett learned when the camera car would be visiting cramped Sampsonia Way in Pittsburgh, so the artists staged a parade, a marathon and a sword fight along the car’s route. It wasn’t entirely a prank (Google was in on it) but their whimsical results can now be seen from any computer.

The artists weren’t interested in the privacy concerns raised by Google’s photographs. “[They] tend to have pretty rosy outlooks on these things,” says Jeffry Cudlin, who curated the show. Rather, the project’s stated purpose was to get viewers to “start exploring [nearby streets] and then not be able to know” what was staged, Kinsley told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

But the piece serves as a reminder that even if Big Brother isn’t watching, anyone could be.
You can’t beat Google, after all. You can’t hide from the GPS satellites forever. So why not have a little fun? “We’re going to throw a parade,” Cudlin jokes. “Put flowers in the barrels of their guns, basically.”

Read it at Expressnightout.com