🍄 The Informers

Meet the citizen scientists spotlighting secrets hidden in plain sight. They uncover, discover, explore and restore—all for the greater good.

Dec 08, 2023

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Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn't.
—Alice In Wonderland

Hello, we’re Alice, and we are always in a state of wander. Citizen cartographers, covert photographers and sleuthing geographers are charting new territory. These civilian superheroes code-crack, track and map … sometimes from the streets, frequently from their phones. Eagle-eyed they discover new planets and turn tools of art into investigative tools. Artist and geographer Trevor Paglen legally digs into CIA black sites and secret satellites as part of his work. Turner Prize-winning artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan has founded an audio investigation group “Earshot,” which recently discovered new details of a French teenager’s fatal police encounter by enhancing audio from a witness’s video.

Others civilians simply help by happenstance. Following the Haiti earthquake in 2010, rescue workers used real-time data uploads on Open Street Map, via text and cellphone messages, to create up-to-date maps of Haiti and find the injured, reported the New York Times. Engineers from around the globe gathered “virtually” to assess the damage.

Great surveillance and the state unknown

Paglen highlights things hidden in the open. “There are these things that are built in such a way to actively be hidden,” Paglen told ALICE in 2006. “For example, when we’re talking about secret military bases or prisons themselves, both of which are in very remote parts of the state or in the desert or very poor places that are far from urban centers, that’s not a coincidence. One of the reasons why these kind of bad things are far from sight is because we don’t want to be reminded of them. So that becomes interesting to me.” And then he closes in. “You can’t really see some of these places with the naked eye even, you have to use binoculars or telescopes or something like that. In thinking about ways to represent these landscapes, I thought wouldn’t it be cool to do like landscape photos of them, like Ansel Adams or something.” He created a series of images using techniques from astrophotography, “people who take pictures of the moon or planet Jupiter or distant galaxies, nebulas, things that are extremely far away, use giant lenses to do that stuff. I said, let’s take those techniques and apply them to landscapes which are on the ground that are also very, very far away.”

Portrait of Trevor Paglen. Photography by Axel Dupeux. Source: Pace Gallery

Art of espionage

Paglen exhibited, ‘You’ve Just Been F*cked by PSYOPS’ at PACE gallery in New York, this summer. The presentation examined the enduring effects of military and CIA influence operations on American culture. And present day problems. “This feels like a very upside down moment to me where there’s no consensus on the truth, where manipulation operations seem all pervasive, where we are building technologies that will only amplify that,” Paglen says in ‘Known Unknowns,’ (May 10, 2023), a film that’s part of the project. “As an artist I think I am trying to respond to that and not so much try and make sense of that, so much as distil that into a series of sharp points. Not far into the future, we are looking at a world that will be characterized by ubiquitous psychological operations.”

Paglen has a hobby collecting memorabilia from classified military operations, from which the exhibition took its title. “There is this subgenre of military insignia that are referring to covert and classified programs and projects and whose iconography and imagery are self-generated by the people involved in those projects,” says Paglen, who made a glaringly bold sculpture inspired by one of these “challenge coins” originally created by an army psychological operations unit. “It’s an exhibition of works around a theme of perception broadly, not only the fact that our perception is malleable, but that that malleability of our perception, can be weaponized.”

It also includes his photographs of unidentified objects in the night sky. “In some cases its incredibly likely that they are some kind of operation designed to deceive you,” says Paglen. A video projection features counterintelligence official Richard Doty, “who would penetrate UFO research groups and run disinformation and misinformation operations in them, to look at the places he wanted them to look and to believe the things he wanted them to believe and to guide their attention in the way that he believed would benefit the air force.”

Source: PYLON-Hub

Citizen gain

There are double agents less dubious than Doty out there today. Like Paglen, they are artists-turned-inquirers that are gaining exposure—from exposure. “Clearly, we’re living amid a crisis of storytelling,” Jordanian artist and audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan tells ARTnews. “The conventional ways in which stories are being told seem not to land effectively. So I think its necessary to experiment with forms as we speak to issues, hopefully allowing them to be better felt and understood.” Abu Hamdan was a joint-winner of the Turner Prize 2019 for his ‘Earwitness Theatre’ exhibition, ‘Walled Unwalled’ video installation and ‘After SFX’ performance. His projects evolved out of earwitness interviews that Abu Hamdan undertook with former detainees of the Syrian Regime prison Saydnaya, as part of an audio investigation by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture. Subjected to total sensory deprivation and forced to live in darkness, Abu Hamdan used sound effects to help six survivors recall their audio memories, to map the unknown architecture of the prison and to understand what happened there. “Most of my long-term projects exist in multiple forms: they aren’t shown just in exhibitions but are also part of investigations and human rights reports. When broader political and cultural reflections emerge through investigations, that’s typically what ends up in the galleries. What’s most interesting and rewarding is when some piece of knowledge you put into the world has an effect on something else.”

Highlighting history

“A huge chunk of my recent practice revolves around the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” American artist Crystal Z Campbell tells ARTnews. Campbell uses light, sound and digital film projection in ‘Flight’ (2021), to explore the physical, architectural and cultural residue of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre into the present. “Even though I grew up in Oklahoma, I was not taught the history of that tragedy in public school, or even in college. I found out about it through another artist when I was living in New York, so I want to acknowledge the role that artists play in relaying histories that are maybe not shared in the institutions that are supposed to educate us.” Video in ‘Flight’ comprises archival material selected from 16mm film footage taken by Solomon Sir Jones to document African American communities in Oklahoma from 1924 to 1928.

Believe the hypervisible

In ‘System Azure Security Ornamentation’ (2002), American artist Jill Magid bejewelled security cameras in Amsterdam to create a hypervisible state surveillance system. Magid calls it the perfect example of an open secret. “I saw these giant beige cameras everywhere in Amsterdam, but when I asked people about surveillance, they’d often reply, ‘What cameras?’ I highlighted them, but it’s not as if they had been hidden,” the artist tells ARTnews. “In my work, I’m interested in understanding and posing questions to systems of power; usually, the work is indexical to that system, whether it’s a surveillance system or copyright law.”

Holding to account

Architects also use their skills to scour for detail. A waterproof camera attached to the wrist of a Lesvos shipwreck survivor was analyzed by Forensic Architecture, a research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Led by British-Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, the group uses architectural techniques and technologies to investigate cases of state violence and violations of human rights around the world. The unique video footage of the 2015 shipwreck incident north of Lesvos, Greece, where 43 people died, showed how the long-term militarization of Europe’s borders impeded rescue efforts. The survivor was Syrian artist and filmmaker Amel Alzakout, who was documenting her journey. She asked Forensic Architecture to help her construct the incident in its aftermath and the results of the investigation were published as part of Berlinale 2020, and displayed at Forum Expanded in Berlin. You can watch the film here.

An artist’s rendering of gas giant TOI-2180 b, which is roughly the size of Jupiter but 3 times more massive. Source: Eos

Citizen stargazers (do a stellar job)

It seemed a shot in the dark but citizen scientist Tom Jacobs discovered a giant gas planet nearly three times as big as Jupiter. He spotted significant star signs of ‘TOI-2180 b,’ and reported them to astronomer Paul Dalba at the University of California, Riverside, who confirmed the planet last year. Jacobs, a member of The Visual Survey Group (VSG), was scrolling publicly available data from NASA’s TESS satellite, when he noticed light dim from the star. “This beautiful light curve came across the screen, and it had all the ear-markings of what a planet looks like,” Jacobs told NPR podcast Short Wave. The group then informed Dalba. “So I wake up to an email one morning with the term, seems too good to be true, and I thought it was too,” says Dalba. “It was the—the light curve of this exoplanet was just that pristine. But, indeed, it was true.”

Professional astronomers use algorithms to scan data automatically while the VSG uses a program they created to inspect telescope data by eye. The group appears on 67 peer-reviewed science papers and has detected many objects overlooked or discarded by automated search programs, uncovering some of the rarest stars in our galaxy.

It’s a vibe

NASA has numerous citizen science projects, from “Cloudspotting on Mars,” to “Active Asteroids.” The latest string to its bow is HARP—or Heliophysics Audified: Resonances in Plasmas. The project focuses on low-frequency magnetic waves surrounding Earth and encourages volunteers to decipher the vibrations. “What excites me most about the HARP project is the ability for citizen scientists to make new discoveries in heliophysics research through audio analysis,” said the project’s principal investigator, Michael Hartinger, a heliophysicist at the Space Science Institute in Colorado. “We need their help to understand complex patterns in the near-Earth space environment.”

NASA launched five satellites in 2007 to fly through Earth’s magnetic “harp”—its magnetosphere—as part of the THEMIS mission (Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms). “THEMIS can sample the whole harp,” said Hartinger. “And it’s been out there a long time, so it has collected a lot of data.”

While the wave frequencies measured are too low for our ears to hear, the HARP team has sped them up to convert them to sound waves—audible crunches, whistles and whooshes. Using an interactive tool you can listen to these waves and pick out interesting features you hear in the sounds. “The process of identifying new features through deep listening feels a bit like treasure hunting,” said Robert Alexander, a HARP team member. Unexpected features have already shown up, such as what the team calls a “reverse harp”—frequencies changing in the opposite way than what scientists anticipated.

We live in an electromagnetic world.

The energy that sustains our technology can no longer be seen as separate from us or from our environment. If you’re familiar with the work of Nikola Tesla, you’ll know that we are surrounded by natural electromagnetic frequencies—from Earth’s invisible magnetic field to visible spectra of light. Scientific theories once stated that changes to these frequencies had no effect, but thanks to space travel (and other observations), scientists now know that electromagnetic frequencies in microgravity cause the human body and cell cultures to respond differently. You are resonating with these electromagnetic frequencies. To learn more: Electric Humanity, or Tuning into Frequency: The invisible force that heals us and the planet.

What else we are wandering…

🔍 Infinite opportunity
Who wants to research the universe? “Redshift Wrangler” is a project led by researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), New York, calling on citizen scientists for help. Digging deep into data, the study looks back at the early days of the universe, using “spectral analysis” to learn more about the galaxies that formed then. Using different wavelengths of light, researchers can break down how far away the galaxies are, and their different components. “Right now we have an archive of existing spectra that’s the light from galaxies. That’s about 70,000 galaxies all already collected that we want to be able to work through and identify features in their spectra,” says Sadie Coffin, a Ph.D. student at RIT. “The ones we’re looking for right now are called spectral lines, emission lines, and absorption lines. So these are features in the light that are brighter and dimmer spots in that spectrum. From where those spots occur in the spectra that we actually look at, we can tell how far away the galaxy is.” Want to get involved? Click on the website, select a task and get started. There’s plenty to go around…

A hydrophone underwater monitoring corals. Carmen del Prado / Google

🪸 Finding Nemo a home
Click bait at it’s best, “Calling In Our Corals,” is an initiative from Google and marine biologists, calling on citizen scientists to help regenerate damaged coral reefs. In just a couple of clicks you can contribute to critical ocean restoration and biodiversity research. The project aims to create an A.I.-powered “library” of all the types of sounds that you get from deep inside the reef. Click here for the reef brief.

🧠 Still here? How about six more. One Earth offers six tools to become a citizen scientist here.

A marmot, hidden in the contour lines of the Swiss Alps, was the secret work of a cartographer who specialized in rock illustration. Photo: Eye of Design

🔍 Rogue-runners
A cartoon face peers through trees and a spider appears over an ice field, but it’s not a children’s storybook. Clandestine drawings remained hidden within Swiss maps for decades, from a fish swimming in a French nature preserve along the Swiss border, to a hiker stomping through mountain peaks. According to Lorenz Hurni, professor of cartography at ETH Zurich, these illustrations are part inside joke, part coping mechanism.

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