Total Information Awareness was a mass surveillance program of the United States Information Awareness Office that began 2003. Based on the concept of predictive policing, TIA was meant to gather detailed information about people in order to anticipate and prevent crimes before they were committed. TIA is a group exhibit that brings together artists use information as a material, strategy for making, observing, and bringing awareness.

Hasan Elahi is an artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, citizenship, migration, transport, and the challenges of borders and frontiers. An erroneous tip called into law enforcement authorities after 9/11 subjected Hasan Elahi to an intensive investigation by the FBI and after undergoing months of interrogations, he was finally cleared of suspicions. After this harrowing experience, Elahi conceived Tracking Transience and opened just about every aspect of his life to the public. Predating the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program by half a decade, the project questions the consequences of living under constant surveillance and continuously generates databases of imagery that tracks the artist and his points of transit in real-time. Although initially created for his FBI agent, the public can also monitor the artist’s communication records, banking transactions, and transportation logs along with various intelligence and government agencies who have been confirmed visiting his website.

 Mike Osborne is a photographer whose work touches on a range of themes including architecture, landscape, history, and technology, ultimately taking the form of books and exhibitions. His book, Federal Triangle, is a series of images shot in and around Washington, DC. The project looks at the city–its sites of power and its margins–from a perspective that speaks to our current iteration of the paranoid style.

 Jeff Thompson is an artist, programmer, and educator based in the NYC area. Through code, sculpture, sound, and performance, Thompson’s work physicalizes and gives materiality to otherwise invisible technological processes. Computer Clock Choir, is a project that contains speakers from every computer the artist ever owned or used regularly, each playing a square-wave at the frequency of their processor’s internal clock, scaled between the average resting human heart-rate and A440.