Transcript
Jennifer Berglund 00:04
Welcome to HMSC Connects!, where we go behind the scenes of four Harvard museums to explore the connections between us, our big, beautiful world, and even what lies beyond. My name is Jennifer Berglund, part of the Exhibits Team here at the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, and I’ll be your host. Today, I’m speaking with Aaron Gluck-Thaler, and Carolyn Bailey, PhD candidates in the History of Science and Visual Studies Departments at Harvard, and two of the guest curators for a new exhibition on surveillance at Harvard’s Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, which is slated to open on September 21. The exhibit makes the argument that to understand the history of surveillance, you have to look at the data of surveillance, how it’s produced, who produces it, and how those data are interpreted and used, sometimes in very surprising ways. Here they are. Carolyn Bailey and Aaron Gluck-Thaler, welcome to the show.
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 01:23
Thank you for having us.
Carolyn Bailey 01:24
Thank you, Jennie.
Jennifer Berglund 01:30
How did the idea for an exhibit on surveillance come about?
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 01:34
The idea to do an exhibit on surveillance had been percolating in my head for a few years. When I applied to do my PhD at the Department of the History of Science at Harvard, accepted students were invited to tour campus, and as part of that welcome weekend, we visited a Harvard Museum, the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments. This is a collection whose instruments feature very prominently in the exhibit that we’ve been working on. When I first saw this collection, I was really struck by how extensive it was, both in terms of the historical periods that it covered and the range of scientific instruments that it had. And I think starting around then, I knew that I wanted to organize something around surveillance, something to show and something that could use these instruments to really get at how embedded surveillance is in everyday infrastructure, and something that could work through the very complex history of surveillance. I should note that this history has many local points of intersection at Harvard, on campus, and in Boston. For example, in the exhibit, we feature the work of some Harvard scientists who were working for American intelligence agencies in the Cold War. From that point on, I began discussing potential ideas with Peter Galison, who has supported this project from the very start. After learning about Carolyn and Matt’s work, I hoped that they would also join the project, and I’m very glad that they did.
Jennifer Berglund 03:00
So Carolyn, can you talk a little bit about when you joined the project?
Carolyn Bailey 03:05
I joined the project about a year ago, I believe, after Aaron got in touch with me saying that he had this idea to do this exhibition, and I was really fascinated by it. So that’s about the stage that I came on board, the same time that our co-curator Matt Goerzen did as well.
Jennifer Berglund 03:21
You mentioned Matt Goerzen, who’s also a team member. Can you talk a little bit about what each of you focuses on in the exhibition?
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 03:29
I think we’re largely in agreement about the core premise of the exhibit, which is that to understand the history of surveillance, you really have to look at the data of surveillance: how data is produced, who produces data, how data is interpreted, how data is used to justify existing political projects, and how surveillance data is used in sometimes very surprising ways. The history of surveillance is what I focus on, and maybe unsurprisingly, several parts of the exhibit have focus points that come directly from my dissertation research. And my approach, and what really interests me about the history of surveillance, is how surveillance is often supported by really mundane forms of scientific knowledge production, and instruments that on first glance seem really benign and innocuous. So what do I mean by that? Scientists routinely collect data, they devise techniques for analyzing data, and then they use this analysis to construct claims about the world, to construct claims about people. One of the main provocations of the exhibit is that this everyday form of knowledge production has, at times, acted as a practice of surveillance. When scientists are studying the physiology of different people, it’s not just about publishing research in a journal. Scientific projects often have a cozy relationship with existing political projects. For example, the exhibit shows how scientists routinely bring existing socially situated assumptions about race to the data they collect. When they collect data, for example, by measuring the bodies of certain people with calipers or craniometers, scientists have recurrently understood that data in ways that are framed by existing social norms. Scientists use these instruments to, for example, reduce the body to a series of measurements, and then based on these measurements, they create different typologies. But I think what we really want to impress with this exhibit is that this isn’t just a decontextualized form of producing knowledge. It exists in context. That, when you’re in a historical period, where certain social and racial hierarchies are very entrenched, scientists are in that context. They see that data through the lens of existing social hierarchies, and then when they produce truth claims about it, those hierarchies become naturalized; they become grounded in something seemingly factual, like bodily data. I think one of the things that we try to do with this exhibit is to show that surveillance exists in a context, and that one context, which has largely been unexamined, is scientific work across many disciplines that is thoroughly social, scientific work that is thoroughly political. We have several objects that get at this directly.
Jennifer Berglund 06:32
So Carolyn, can we talk a little bit more about your focus?
Carolyn Bailey 06:36
I’m coming at surveillance more from the approach rooted in Visual Studies. When I did my master’s degree, I was really interested in thinking about the ways in which video technology as a sort of consumer object emerges in the 1960s until today, and tracing that along the lines of contemporary surveillance technologies like CCTV, or even the beginning of digital surveillance that we see online through social media platforms. I was really interested in thinking about the ways in which we have this sort of problem that’s thought about as being very new, very contemporary, but it has more historical antecedents, right? It goes back to the history of photography at the turn of the 20th century where you’re thinking about people understood a photograph as being, in some ways, this very neutral, very objective way of knowing someone or knowing something, and then thinking about how that shifts at the beginning of the 21st century when seeing is no longer sort of attached to knowing. We have these new forms of visual representation, these new forms of digital media, and we’re more aware in the ways in which they can be manipulated and be challenged, so I was really interested in that aspect of surveillance.
Jennifer Berglund 07:51
And Matt Goerzen, who isn’t here currently but is also a member of the project, what is his area of expertise?
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 07:58
Matt studies the history of technological vulnerability, particularly in relation to cybersecurity and hacking subcultures in the late 20th century. I think Matt’s approach to this exhibit has drawn a lot on his background before he started his PhD, a few years before then, as a visual artist.
Carolyn Bailey 08:16
He was interested in art that speaks to newer forms of technology.
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 08:25
And he included and drew our attention to a number of artworks that we feature in the exhibit, including some interactive ones by local artists, as well as existing projects that have engaged critically with surveillance.
Jennifer Berglund 08:40
And how do you see yourselves as sort of complementing each other in the creation of this exhibit?
Carolyn Bailey 08:46
I think we work really well together, because as Aaron has noted, he has a very rigorous grounding in historical issues around surveillance and thinking about it from a very specific lineage that’s rooted in the discipline of history of science, and I think that Matt, I don’t want to speak on his behalf but from what I’ve gathered, he has this really nice medium between the two of us where he is very much thinking about the history of technology, but also has this amazing background as a visual artist and has thought about these two issues from fields of art history and communication studies. And then you have me as someone who’s very much interested in this more visual side [of surveillance]. I’m also really interested in the effect that surveillance has on people emotionally and socially, so I think if you put all that together, you have a diverse set of perspectives and viewpoints.
Jennifer Berglund 09:46
Aaron, I’m very interested in your expertise leading up to your entering this PhD program because you do have a bit of a history in activism.
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 09:56
Before starting my PhD, I was involved with a few privacy oriented activist organizations. One is Privacy International, which in the wake of the 2013 Snowden disclosures, was litigating challenges to the mass surveillance practices of UK and US intelligence agencies. I also briefly worked with the ACLU on more domestic surveillance issues. And I think through this work, maybe drawing a straighter line to this exhibit than how it actually played out in practice because it was much more circuitous, I think what I was really shocked by then and what I continue to be just astounded by, is how pervasive surveillance infrastructure is. When I was working for these organizations, I was poring over the Snowden documents. I was reading about technologies that are tapping fiber optic cables, about specially coded malware that sits undetected on iPhones, about these warehouses of computer memory modules that are sitting in the desert in NSA facilities in Utah. Surveillance always struck me as something that is just so large, that runs so deep. But at the same time, it’s very difficult to hold in one’s mind how deep this infrastructure goes, and just how extensive the work that sustains it is. I think my experience working for these organizations prior to my PhD added another perspective to this, which is that the abstracted quality to surveillance is especially shocking when you consider its real, lived effects. In these advocacy organizations, we worked on legal cases where human rights advocates were targeted by surveillance, where journalists’ phones were being hacked, where data on protests was being siphoned up by police, and where entire populations were surveilled. Despite these real forms of persecution, which I should emphasize are not equally borne, some groups always bear the brunt of surveillance, despite these real lived effects of surveillance, surveillance still remains this very abstract thing. I think one of the reasons why surveillance has remained very abstract is because we still have a very limited vocabulary for understanding it. We continue to understand surveillance through its most visible forms, or its most visible metaphors: we think of CCTV systems, we think of body cameras, we think of snooping government officials, we think of Big Brother. And I think the exhibit tries to move beyond these often very limiting framings of surveillance by, instead, focusing squarely on data, squarely on surveillance data, and the instruments that are used to produce it, to store it, to analyze it. In that way, I think we go some way towards challenging this notion that surveillance is just about Big Brother actors, or that it’s just about the panopticon. It’s also about mundane computer systems. It’s also about surveying instruments. It’s also about the scientific work that has created these instruments and the scientific work that is continuing to lend surveillance data this era of facticity, or objectivity. Part of my intention with this exhibit has been to materialize surveillance to the extent possible, to take it away from this abstracted infrastructure, and to bring visitors through certain episodes within the history of surveillance that really show the stakes and really show the material supports that surveillance has been sustained by.
Jennifer Berglund 13:33
The fact that we’ve always been surveilled throughout history, except today it’s kind of in this unbelievable way where everything about us can be tracked and surveilled. It’s just so hard to wrap our minds around that. I think a lot of us just kind of throw our hands up and are like, “Well, you know, I know all my information is being recorded somewhere and utilized by someone, but what can we do?” Carolyn, what you’re sort of getting at from the artistic perspective is “How can you contextualize it? How can you show what it means to be surveilled?”
Carolyn Bailey 14:08
Yeah, I think that one really valuable perspective that art and artists, in particular, offer is the ways in which they’ve sort of gotten at these questions a lot sooner than perhaps other people like academic researchers, or even an everyday person has. And it’s very striking to me in looking at the range of art that we have in the exhibition, that the way in which they’re thinking about surveillance is both something that can be challenged and critiqued, but also subverted, I think, first and foremost, and so in that way, art really opens up these new possibilities for having a way more nuanced and layered view of surveillance and what it might mean in terms of its social and psychic impact.
Jennifer Berglund 14:53
Can you provide an example?
Carolyn Bailey 14:55
Yeah, so in the exhibition, we have a video projection by the artist Bruce Nauman from the 1960s. He’s one of the people working around that time who’s really fascinated by video technology. In the piece that we have in the exhibition that’s called “Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the Perimeter of the Square,” he’s simply recording himself walking around his studio, his artist studio in a square, and he’s walking in a very predetermined manner. It’s kind of weird, he goes back and forth. You don’t really know why he’s recording himself or what we’re supposed to get as the audience out of this video, but I think he was really interested in playing with this fact that you could now record yourself in a time that predates Instagram or predates social media, and thinking about what insights that footage might offer himself. I don’t think he’s necessarily interested in what other people are going to get out of it, but it’s really telling that even at that early stage, I think he’s really interested in self-reflexivity of visual surveillance.
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 15:56
The Bruce Nauman video is placed alongside this panoply of instruments that have been used to measure people throughout history. Those instruments have had a pretty consistent underlying assumption, that by observing the surface, you can understand the interior. By measuring bodily data, you can understand and settle questions of identity. I think the Nauman projection really complicates this underlying assumption that has been very resilient in scientific work. The inner meaning of what Nauman’s trying to get at is completely indecipherable to the viewer. Why is he walking in this weird way? What does this algorithmic pattern of these strange movements mean versus another algorithmic pattern? I think this piece in particular really interrogates the viewers’ own desire that when they see data being presented, that it has to have some inherent meaning. But then in watching the video, visitors might be very frustrated in trying to decipher that inner meaning. When Carolyn introduced this piece, I was very excited for the sort of argument that it could open up for the exhibit.
Jennifer Berglund 17:11
There are so many objects in the exhibition, and Aaron, you were mentioning before that Harvard has long been this sort of hotbed of surveillance technology and research for such a long time, so the collections in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard is just vast. Can you talk a little bit about a few of the objects in the exhibition, and perhaps some of your favorite objects that we’re going to have on display?
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 17:40
One of our objects is a roll of coding instructions for an early computer, the Mark 1. They were created by a Prof. at Harvard, James Baker, to optimize the design of lenses. This sort of computationally intensive way of optimizing lenses was then extended towards more traditional, at least now, surveillance systems: satellite surveillance, aerial photography surveillance. This, to me, was a very clear example of the cozy relationships that scientists often have with intelligence agencies, that they produce work that is very amenable to military priorities. Their work isn’t determined by those priorities because they’re also taking what they see as inherent scientific value from the work, but it has this clear applied focus. That’s a very conventional story of surveillance. That the US government or a military intelligence agency want something, that scientific work is happening that’s very amenable to it, and then there’s a happy marriage between the two. One object that builds a more complicated story, and that encapsulates a lot of what we’re trying to do with this exhibit, also has a local history, just down the river at MIT. In the end of World War II, in the early 1940s, anthropologists were working for the Chemical Warfare Service Development Lab at MIT, and they were trying to help the US government design gas masks. The anthropologists used the usual repertoire of instruments from physical anthropology like calipers that could measure different head shapes, and then constructed representations of different types of heads. That’s again the conventional story of surveillance, the kind of clear applied model. But then the story becomes more complicated, and it starts to really show its political and social context. The data that the anthropologists collected was from 3,075 men who were enlisted in the military. These were white men, specifically and exclusively. And the anthropologists created sculptures based on the measurements of these men and probably fitted masks on them. We have three of these sculptures on display on loan from the Peabody Museum. But these anthropologists were not just interested in using this data to design gas masks. They also sought to identify whether there were different types of heads within the data they collected. They identified six. And the scientists published on this research, saying that they had identified six distinctive, quote unquote, “American types.” But I want to reiterate that this dataset only included white men. It assumed whiteness and maleness by default. Scientists then extended this claim that different American types exist. But these American types excluded all other groups, which had no place in this typology of national belonging. I want to emphasize that this wasn’t a group of scheming, nefarious scientists. This argument based on typology was not unusual. But their data and their analysis of it had consequences. There’s this New York Times article that covered the scientific research that the scientists soon published based on these experiments. And the New York Times article began reiterating this very fraught claim that there are six American types based on these head forms. But as I’ve been saying, this typology was very exclusionary. All of that came from the data that was used. The ways in which the data were selected reflected existing political and social norms at the time.
Jennifer Berglund 21:15
Carolyn, I’m curious, are there any objects in the exhibit that you find most compelling?
Carolyn Bailey 21:21
The object that I find most fascinating in the exhibition is the pedometer that we have that was made by the watchmaker William Fraser in the 18th century. Fraser held a Royal Warrant at the time given by King George III. Pedometers were used in the 17th century to survey land and then in the 18th century, they become a consumer object, so Fraser is one of the first people to market pedometers as a consumer object and sort of start the transition from pedometers being used to survey land to becoming an item of self-tracking, or an object that can track the self. We’ve leaned heavily on the media historian Jacqueline Wernimont’s work on pedometers, and she has this really fascinating argument where she looks at the history of the pedometer and says, “We can look at it as having started with this imperial project of surveying land and mapping territory, and then it transforms into an object of mapping the self and tracking the self.” So she has this really fascinating story from her archival research that she conducted on the time period of the 19th century where you have this story of a Boston woman who plants a pedometer on her spouse to make sure that he’s really telling her the truth about what he’s doing after work, and so in the news media, Wernimont quotes from the article, and it says something like, “she softly planted this pedometer on her spouse.” So there’s this sort of like playfulness and harmlessness in it, but obviously, if you look at the pedometer as it’s now used today, you can see that the sort of act of planting a pedometer on someone, which is seen as sort of playful and perhaps humorous, sort of points to the phenomena that we’re experiencing now where you have something like an AirTag, or you know, a Fitbit, or a watch, and the data that it collects is entertainment in some way. It’s a way of knowing yourself better, it’s a way of tracking your health, but it also has this sort of twist where it could be used as this form of incriminating evidence, right? You can look at that arc from the 19th century to today, and I think the pedometer really encapsulates that as an object.
Jennifer Berglund 23:34
Another story that you highlight in the exhibit, kind of along these lines, are some apps that are used today. You have a period tracking app that you highlight where there is some concern these days that the data gleaned from this app could have consequences.
Carolyn Bailey 23:52
So the period tracking app is a consumer product that I think was first seen as a way of empowering people, empowering users, empowering women, people who menstruate, to track their health in a way that was very easy. It was very accessible, but in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade, there’s been concerns in the reproductive justice community that the data collected by these apps could be used in court to prosecute someone for an abortion. In states like Texas and Oklahoma, there has been discussion about the admissibility of data from period tracking apps in courts that would be prosecuting these cases. So this is something that really demonstrates how something that starts out as a sort of positive object or positive tool can suddenly flip when the context changes, and possibly have very serious, very negative consequences for the user.
Jennifer Berglund 24:51
I think it’s a really interesting way to just get visitors to think about the unforeseen consequences of data in our everyday lives and in our modern world. It’s the same thing that surveillance data has done since the beginning of people being surveilled, which you all show very well in the exhibit, I think. So Carolyn, I want to get back to you. Can you talk a little bit more about the story art tells in the exhibit that you can’t necessarily tell with objects?
Carolyn Bailey 25:26
The story that art tells in the exhibition, I think, really gets at a lot of the histories and problems with the historical instruments that Aaron has referenced earlier in the conversation. We have one piece of art by the artist Mimi Ọnụọha, which is called “The Library of Missing Datasets.” She’s thinking about how data is something that is always described as being either present or missing, and that has different consequences for different people. So she’s thinking about the ways in which data is a precondition for political recognition. Her piece is basically a filing cabinet that opens up. If you go into the exhibition, you’ll see this filing cabinet. The doors open. There’s files in the cabinet that are labeled. She has several empty folders that are sitting at the front of the open file cabinet. So she’s really sort of confronting the viewer with the very physical idea of what it means when a data set is missing, or even when it is present, and it also opens up a lot of questions of like, who collects data, what do they choose to collect in these datasets, and what is actually missing and what the very different consequences that that has for different people. In the version that we have in the exhibition, she’s focusing more on issues that affect Black and Pan-African communities. I think an object like “The Library of Missing Datasets” really hammers home the material consequences of a lot of the objects—like, we have a server rack. That object in itself is interesting, historically, but when you combine it with Mimi’s piece, you’re really sort of forced to think about what this history, what these objects, the ways in which they act in the world have these very real consequences, and so I think that that’s one of the most valuable ways in which art can sort of function in the exhibition.
Jennifer Berglund 26:26
What do you want the audience to come away understanding from the exhibit?
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 27:35
I think one big takeaway of the exhibit is that surveillance isn’t just about high-tech spy gadgets. It’s not about the NSA reading your emails. Surveillance is about power, and to understand that power and surveillance today, we have to look at very complex and sometimes very difficult to discern histories. Histories of colonialism, histories of race, histories of labor. And by looking at these histories, we hope that visitors can start to develop a more sophisticated vocabulary for understanding surveillance. This is the difference between saying, “facial recognition is just a nifty tool wielded by governments,” to saying, “facial recognition is tied directly to older attempts to recognize race and to reduce identity to biology.” So I think it’s really bracing and powerful to place these seemingly technocratic objects that are pervasive today within overlapping and very complicated historical contexts. Many instruments that are, on first glance, very benign then suddenly become politicized, and the stakes of these instruments and the stakes of everyday forms of scientific work, everyday forms of scientific knowledge, become much higher.
Carolyn Bailey 28:54
And sort of a continuation of what Aaron said, I really would like the audience to think more deeply, more critically about the ways in which we understand surveillance technologies as tools of control, as Aaron said, but they also are sort of tools of witnessing, of entertainment. They have different uses and different outcomes, and so I think this kind of gets at a question of why do we continue to use apps that violate our privacy? Possible answers can be because they’re fun, or they give us new insight to allow us to know ourselves and others better. I’m very interested in tracking my sleep because I have insomnia, so I think that while I have zero clue of what Garmin, the company that makes my watch, is using that data for or the potential long-term consequences of that data are going to be. In 20 years, are they going to say I am going to be ineligible for health insurance to cover my elder care when I have dementia because I slept so poorly for the last 30 years? You know, that’s a little bit extreme, but I think that this question of why we sort of voluntarily submit to these practices, these technologies, really gets at this sort of very perplexing question of, what do we get out of them? I think I’d like the audience to think about that a little bit more.
Jennifer Berglund 30:14
Carolyn Bailey and Aaron Gluck-Thaler, thank you so much for being here. This has been fascinating.
Aaron Gluck-Thaler 30:21
Thank you, Jennie.
Carolyn Bailey 30:22
Thank you, Jennie.
Jennifer Berglund 30:24
Today’s HMSC Connects! Podcast was edited by Eden Piacitelli and produced by me, Jennifer Berglund, and the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. Special thanks to the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments, and to Aaron Gluck-Thaler and Carolyn Bailey, for their wisdom and expertise. And thank you so much for listening. If you like today’s podcast, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, or wherever you get your podcast. See you in a few weeks.