This article was taken from the April 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
The 32,000 photos pictured here are just a few of those the FBI has of Hasan Elahi's life. Don't panic: the American artist sends them himself. In 2002, Elahi was detained by FBI agents at Detroit airport after an erroneous tip-off linking him to terrorist activities. During the six-month investigation that followed, Elahi started informing the authorities of his every where-abouts -- first by phone, then by continually posting photographs and GPS co-ordinates online. "There was a very pragmatic need for me to tell the FBI where I was," says Elahi, 43. "It's amazing how culture has changed. Now if you're not doing this you're weird -- we've embraced being watched, whether it's by the government, commercial interests, or each other."
For Thousand Little Brothers, on display at the Open Society Foundation in New York until May, Elahi combed through tens of thousands of images by hand to create this 8.5m-tall collage of his overly documented life. The coloured strips are a tribute to television test screens, a play on the static created by our constant deluge of data. "In putting all my information out there, it becomes noise," he says. He is now fascinated by the impact of social media on memory: show him almost any image and he'll be able to tell you where and when it was taken. "What happens to a society that doesn't need to forget?" It worked, by the way: he's not had a problem getting through security since then.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
