James Bridle
FILTER: DESTRUCTIVE FORCES AT WORK
Waterboarded Documents are a pair of documentary installations which illustrate the complicity between information, geographical, and physical violence, and between historical imperial, and contemporary virtual, networks.
The installation consists of a pair of custom-built steel and glass-topped tables, which present maps of Diego Garcia and the Chagos Archipelago, together with documents detailing the role of the islands in human rights abuse, torture and rendition, and electronic surveillance. A second set of documents details the ongoing recuperation of these events through electronic networks.
The presented documents have been defaced in the manner of water damage, as per the UK Government’s claim that crucial evidence about the British territory of Diego Garcia’s role in the CIA torture program had been “damaged by water”
artwork
Waterboarded Documents
installation 2015
James Bridle (UK, 1987)
James Bridle is a writer, artist, publisher, technologist with a special interest in artificial intelligence. He introduced the term New Aesthetic, by which he alludes to the ongoing fusion of the digital and the analogue world, with the drone as symbol.
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