This exhibition was interesting. I was confused about how each piece connected to one another but I think at the end it somewhat made sense. When you got out of the elevators, you are welcomed by visuals of colorful sounds waves. As you come into the first piece, there are videos of the prisoners of war and the US military interrogating them. Then they have shots of people looking at the fall of the twin towers. You see the many emotions of many people looking up at the twin towers as they are coming down. I personally had tears in my eyes. Until this day, I really feel sad to see anything to related to 9/11. As that footage ends, you go into a very dark room. In the middle of the room, there is a place where people are laying down and looking up at the screens on the ceiling, displaying the stars in the middle east. It shows footage of different countries in the middle east. The skies are filled with bright stars. It is so beautiful and calming. After you are done, you go into a room where there are several horizontal slits on the walls, and as you look into these slits, you see footage of Top Secret documents, prisoners, and cartoons of how the government does its business and videos of people who live in the middle east. After you are done with this piece, you go into another room and this is where Laura Poitras showcases FBI documents where it states that she is being watched by the government for filming footage in Pakistan? (I think) and the constant fear these people in this country lived in. You can hear bombs and the people in this country are use to the constant bombing from the US military. Before you leave the exhibition. There is a screen that says that your identity (through the use of your phone and the wifi) is being recorded. You also notice that there is another screen that shows the peoples body heat who are lying on the bed in the darkroom where they are seeing the stars.
http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/LauraPoitras
“Laura Poitras: Astro Noise is the first solo museum exhibition by artist, filmmaker, and journalist Laura Poitras. This immersive installation of new work builds on topics important to Poitras, including mass surveillance, the war on terror, the U.S. drone program, Guantánamo Bay Prison, occupation, and torture. Some of these issues have been investigated in her films, including Citizenfour, which won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and in her reporting, which was awarded a 2014 Pulitzer Prize.
For the exhibition, Poitras is creating an interrelated series of installations in the Whitney’s eighth-floor Hurst Family Galleries. The exhibition expands on her project to document post–9/11 America, engaging visitors in formats outside her non-fiction filmmaking. Instead she will create immersive environments that incorporate documentary footage, architectural interventions, primary documents, and narrative structures to invite visitors to interact with the material in strikingly intimate and direct ways.
The title, Astro Noise, refers to the faint background disturbance of thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang and is the name Edward Snowden gave to an encrypted file containing evidence of mass surveillance by the National Security Agency that he shared with Poitras in 2013. The Snowden archive partially inspired Poitras’s presentation at the Whitney.
Laura Poitras: Astro Noise is organized by Jay Sanders, Curator and Curator of Performance.”