Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency
Edited by Marieke Drost and Joes Segal
Contributions by Marieke Drost, Ken Gonzales-Day, Paul Reuvers and Marc Simons, Joes Segal, and Liat Segal
Designed by Content Object: Kimberly Varella, Art Direction and Design; Gabrielle Pulgar, Production Designer
Softcover with flaps, 240 pages
Publisher: Wende Museum, 2024
ISBN: 979-8-218-41844-1
Dimensions: 8.75 × 12.5 in.
Managing Editor: Deirdre O’Dwyer
Separations: Echelon Color, Los Angeles
Printing: Verona Libri, Verona, Italy
The exhibition and publication Counter/Surveillance traces the historical roots of surveillance devices and methods, and the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them.
The cover for the book features a bright red line that redacts both the face on an historical Stasi document (already redacted in original) alongside part of the title, SURVEILLANCE—both become redactions of the redacted. The specially mix red-hot ink echos the palette of the cold-war while bringing it forward into a contemporary palette the kind of fluorescent paint one would find in a spray canister. A reminder that these histories are not so far away from our current truths.
The large oversized trim size flops around like a reference manual, divided into two parts—Surveillance: portraying page after page of odd inventions to spy on, gather, and incriminate people; and Counter Surveillance: eight contemporary artists that essentially "look back" with a critical outlook of these inventions, asking questions about privacy, control, and individual agency.
The red-hot type screams with urgency, with the rest of the visual vernacular of the book is monochromatic and images are treated with half-tone screens that act like traces of a former documents—scans of scans of scans—that haunt the pages from little seemingly innocuous "bugs" to larger full-spread blown up details, that deteriorate in their scale. Nothing but pixels are left, like little crumbs to be deciphered by future generations.
