Hasta La Ideas

After new media professor Hasan Elahi was falsely accused by a neighbor of being a 9/11 terrorist accomplice in 2002, the Bangladesh-born American underwent six months of scrutiny from the FBI. Turning the tables, he personally documented the minutiae of his everyday occurrences now on view in a project called Tracking Transience at the Santa Fe art space SITE.

Elahi photographs his meals before he eats them, toilets before he uses them, and a GPS tracker (updated several times a day) shows his precise location. Elahi’s montages made from the snapshots of the banal details of everyday life create a statement about erosion of privacy in our daily lives. The project has attracted a flurry of media attention from CBS News to Wired.

”I’ve decded that if the government wants to monitor me that’s fine. But I could do a much better job monitoring myself than anyone else.”

Part of a larger five-person show, husband-and-wife team McCallum & Tarry, Kaari Upson and Terry Allen will also show. The show runs through 9 May 2010 at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico.