Individual Vulnerability and Collective Resistance Under Surveillance: Claiming the Right to Existence against Discriminatory Suspicion

Abstract

Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience (2003–2020) was an artistic performance of hypervisibility. Initiated in response to being misidentified as a terrorist, preemptively arrested, and interrogated by the FBI, the artist created a comprehensive life log documenting his everyday life for all to see. Despite transformations to the surveillance environment, the performance raised a question that remains relevant today: How can ubiquitous surveillance be resisted when the technologies of capture and control are pervasive, but being visible is normalized? I argue that through his performance of countervisual aesthetics, Elahi claimed the right to existence and reassessed the need for the collective refusal of surveillance. I make two contributions to the theorization of aesthetic resistance. First, against the tendency to romanticize resistance, I reaffirm the impossibility of evasion. Surveillance is ubiquitous in the current datafied society, and being under surveillance generates vulnerability. Yet it is from this located, contingent position that we need to theorize resistance. Second, by theorizing how aesthetic performance mobilizes its public, I demonstrate that resistance to surveillance needs to move beyond the individualism of privacy. Through rereading Tracking Transience, I show how visibility enables collective resistance to the normalization of surveillance control and hierarchies.