Unconditional Support
2014
An installation featuring a SCIF for public and personal use.
Unconditional Support is an installation inspired by a photograph of Barack Obama taking a phone call inside a communications security tent known as a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility”. After procuring large quantities of military grade electromagnetic shielding fabric from the Chinese website AliBaba.com, I constructed my own SCIF as the centre piece of an installation in the former headquarters of the now liquidated electronics company Micro‐Anvika. The structure was made available for public use throughout the duration of the exhibition and used for discussions about data-privacy, tech support and i Ching divination.
The intention of the installation was to offer a perma-sunset desert escape from contemporary data temptations, aiming to interrupt everyday flows of wireless information as a form of sensory deprivation ‐ a technique used to both stimulate visionary experiences and as a psychological interrogation technique known as ‘white‐torture’ used in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
During the show an 800% slowed down version of the song ‘The End‘ by The Doors played on loop. By the end of the exhibition, after almost 11 straight days of exposure I began to experience fairly severe auditory hallucinations.
