THE SEARCH DRIVE (2015, Warren Neidich)

Warren Neidich – THE SEARCH DRIVE

2015, 17’, English OV

The video takes the perspective of an anonymous internet-user making contingent decisions based upon speculative linkages of information on the web, asserting that the internet itself contains an inner subjectivity that can be interrogated. In THE SEARCH DRIVE, “software programs utilized by the NSA to spy on Americans and foreign nationals, residing in America and abroad, are used by an autonomous agent to search through the web for personal and classified information about myself. Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Instagram are hacked and ransacked. As such it traces over time an autobiographical sketch of my comings and goings, activities and friendships. I am calling this a Hack-ography. […] That I am a radical artist with anarchistic tendencies who has worked in Egypt with many Islamic musicians, as well as Franco Berardi, the political activist, and have wired [my assistant] Ashiq money, creates a narrative of implied guilt by association to popular fears confusing Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. A fiction based on unconfirmed facts is thus built and now substitutes for any actual portrait I might actually have or have had. An uncorroborated story of a fictitious life grows into a kind of monstrosity the result of a program gone haywire. This picture is full of flaws and leads to the necessity of my eradication. ” (Warren Neidich)