Artists from the exhibition, Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic, discuss their work with Brendan McQuade, author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision.

Surveillance has become an inescapable part of daily life. Our phones record our every movement, call, and contact; cameras record our passage along the street. Collected data streams to fusion centers, and predictive policing targets specific communities for more intensive monitoring. Siri and Alexa listen in. Connected to the economy and mass surveillance, from the high-tech to the low-tech and the mundane everyday, how are artists looking back at, contesting, and revealing the systems that monitor our daily lives? Monitor: Surveillance, Data, and the New Panoptic explores the ways in which our lives are being influenced and determined by visible and invisible actions of “watching over”, allowing viewers to reflect on the prevalence of surveillance in contemporary contexts as well as its historical antecedents. Artists in the exhibition include Christoper Gregory-Rivera, Margaret Laurena Kemp + Abram Stern, Yazan Khalili, Kapwani Kiwanga, Ann Messner, Orphan Drift, Trevor Paglen.

The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art & Design (ICA at MECA&D) (Portland, ME) cultivates engagement and dialogue regarding contemporary visual art practices, aiming to foster discourse on the critical conversations of our time, and to enhance understanding of visual culture. Located in stunning galleries in Maine College of Art & Design’s landmark Porteous Building, the ICA at MECA&D presents an exhibition calendar of ambitious work by living artists, operates as a learning laboratory for MECA&D students, and a center for public programming regarding contemporary art that engages with the local, national and global art community.