Wikileaks: A Love Story, 2016

10,000 pages of printed Wikileaks documents, iPad, augmented reality application

Wikileaks: A Love Story (2016) is an interactive installation incorporating augmented reality. Scraping Wikileaks to find an unlikely story of love in the workplace, data from real emails between two people are used to construct tales of romance, falling in and out of love. Over 10,000 pages of documents from Wikileaks lay in stacks across a long table. The documents are viewed through an augmented reality app installed on an iPad to reveal their hidden stories that lie within lay in stacks.  

Exhibited in Agency, NOME, Berlin, Germany (October 27 - December 7 2018). Sheffield Documentary Festival

Process & Research (2015 - 2017)

Wikileaks: Radical Transparency

This text formed part of the catalogue for the 'Spheres of Influence' exhibition in November 2016 and describes the background and process to building the Wikileaks: A Love Story Installation.

Wikileaks is a collection of documents comprised of secret information, news leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. Founded in 2006, and managed by Julian Assange, whose story has become inextricably linked with it, its intention was to create a new kind of reporting, “scientific journalism”, where readers would be able to check the data that sat behind a story in the way that scientists peer review each others research. Information about the Afghanistan and Iraq war and Guantanamo Bay was leaked and turned into award winning stories by outlets such as New York Times and The Guardian. It was seen, as Slavoj Žižek writes, as a ‘good’ secret group attacking a ‘bad’ one (US State Department), upholding transparency and the right to know against the powerful and potentially corrupt. 

However this view is becoming more and more nuanced. There is an enormous amount of information that sits in Wikileaks (over half a million files in the past year or so) organised into 37 rough databases. The website states it will only upload documents that are of “political, diplomatic or ethical significance” but huge amounts of personal and private information has also been published including details of sick children, rape victims and mental health patients. This is because only a small amount of information is read by moderators before being uploaded to the internet by the site in what is increasingly described as being “needlessly reckless and invasive” by a number of commentators. This “hostility to curation” means that for every top secret presentation, there are also hundreds of thousands of more personal, smaller, mundane, everyday stories that have been uploaded and published: HR complaints, gossip, shopping lists – hints of the lives of the people who work at government departments, who, for the most part, will be middle management or administration personnel.  Wikileaks is a complex system, trying to balance freedom of information against the right to know. It criticises power without accountability yet through its own failure to address its curation system, perpetuates it, creating an inherent paradox.

This installation shows this collision of public and private that sits at the heart of the Wikileaks project. Stacks of printed paper – emails and documents and photographs – show the macro political machinations that most people assume are being revealed by the database. When an iPad is placed above the top of the papers a hidden narrative is revealed to the viewer, a deeply personal love story of a couple who fell in love and then broke up, all found in the emails that were released as part of a data-dump in 2013. The ipad allows the viewer to see the data and information being shifted and parsed before their eyes, before being constructed out of the mess that is the classification system of Wikileaks into a coherent, structured, easy to understand and universal narrative.

The images of women in the film are from the Saudi Cables data dump from Wikileaks. The photographs are grainy. Coarse. Unflattering. Undetailed. They are found images, taken and scanned and blown up. The women in this film are wearing the hijab or the niqab, possibly Middle Eastern, possibly Muslim. Knowing their source, there is some expectation in the viewer’s mind that these women must be dangerous and transgressive in some way. The images might be mug shots or taken from police files or a newspaper headline. The women are terrorists or on their way from Syria or some kind of illegal activity. Western media tends to portray women in hijab almost exclusively a negative context, playing into a wider simplification of the conflict in the Middle East as being a narrative of good (the West) versus evil (the Middle East). There is very little nuanced coverage. These “types” of women are bad and dangerous and in the UK to do damage, either in an implicit (e.g. bombing) or explicit (e.g. stealing jobs) way. Parts of the British press in particular have been so inflammatory that in 2015 the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights issued a statement calling on British authorities to take steps to curb hate speech found in the media against minority groups. The media portrayal is incredibly important: it not only transfers information and ideas but also shapes opinions and presents particular versions of reality (as in “Culture, Society and the Media”, ed. Michael Gurevitch). Because of this, for many people the concept of a woman in a hijab or niqab will always be linked that of a “bad” otherness. However, this is not the case. As this short film progresses and pans out it shows that the grainy images are merely passport photos and that all of these women are diplomats’ wives, subverting our expectations of what might have initially have been expected.