UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation considers oversight and [counter]intelligibility in order to to rethink questions of surveillance and militarism, through media theory and critical art practices. At the center of this work are two media art projects, Operational Character Rendition and Unburning (a collaboration with Margaret Laurena Kemp). Through the creation of these projects, I consider how infrastructural and institutional contexts inscribe themselves into media related to surveillance and its oversight. This dissertation activates both denotations of oversight: as supervision and surveillance, but also the failure to notice. The contradictions of seeing and not seeing inform a close reading of torture memos, aerial surveillance videos, and media art. This work draws from feminist media art due to its investment in embodiment and making hidden labor and abuse intelligible, even if abstracted or otherwise distanced. I read and perforate through this media and meta- data as sites of intelligibility through technologies of making-sense, but also as sites of obfuscation, concealment, and redaction. These are explored through case studies that consider technologies and cultural practices of making-public through interfaces and archives of US Intelligence Community related documents, and also by artists whose work redeploys, countervails (and counterveils) these assemblages.