Counterintelligence, 2003

models constructed in the studio, while others are actually produced by the remote-controlled aerial cameras. Even the careful viewer will have difficulty telling them apart.Moreover, the images that appear to be documentation of the sets used to produce the photographs are decoys, in that they do not necessarily represent how the photographs were made. Each a stratagem in a continuing

investigation of counterintelligence, these objects and images refer not only to an earlier point in the history espionage, but also to tactics as recent as Colin Powell's notorious Powerpoint presentation to the UN last February.To realize the paranoid fantasy of being watched, I staged a performance wherein I followed myself with a wireless aerial surveillance camera supported by a tethered 7-foot diameter latex balloon hovering at an altitude ranging from 100 to 500 feet; in effect, saving “them” the trouble. I traced my daily commute by bicycle from my home to my studio to my office in the last four cities in which I have lived and worked. It was in my research into helium balloon flight more than five years ago that I came across the compelling story of Larry Walters (the “Lawn Chair Pilot”). I found in the various versions of this story that exist on the web (few of them accurate) apt analogues to the dovetailing of fact and fiction-of extrapolation and interpolation-that occurs in the intelligence community and which initially held my fascination and motivated that earlier work.

In an inversion of the signification of the character Peter Stillman's movements around New York City in Paul Auster's story City of Glass, the resulting shapes of the trace of my daily movements confirm my suspicion that I am scarcely different from the ant I resemble from this height: the microstates to which I confine myself form remarkably similar shapes and provide little insight other than to spell out

Home of Paul D. Wolfowitz, Chevy Chase

the same mantra. In my most recent work, I have photographed models of the homes of some members of the current Bush administration. Derived from satellite imagery, the models are far from accurate, but represent a flat-footed and frustrated attempt to invert the lens of the authoritarian surveillance apparatus.- Danny Goodwin, 2004. All IMAGES COURTESY – JACK THE PELICAN PRESENTS.