Now for the part about the Pentagon. If the moon production stands at the summit of Hollywood’s camera, then the Pentagon is the cylinder of another lens—one that the world can’t get enough of. If you set out to fake an event in ‘69, then you stage it in the grand old tradition of the studio setup. But if you want to fake an event in 2001, you do it in front of a surveillance camera. This is the space odyssey we’ve travelled through in the last thirty years.

There is something else implicit in Chaitin’s definition: the program (or the sign, or the coded message) is a meeting point where writer and artist encounter reader and viewer. The sign—or combination of signs—is therefore not only a product or an object; it is also a space of passage. In this sense, perhaps one of the faulty notions picked up in the course of my schooling was that a text or a piece of art is a thing and not a place. And further, that this thing exists only in order to tell me about other, already known things.

The detailed shots of my face feel intimate. I let those linger. Over these images, I described to the committee my process of working closely with government institutions to identify with them personally and locate their human side. I inferred that I could do the same for The Organization. I then thanked the committee and the advisor escorted me out of the room. Before attending to the next candidate, he squeezed my arm and whispered, That was very good.

Within the institutionalized terrain of art, Rosler staged a temporary experimental format that called on people to step outside of such a “habitus,” raising the broader question of whether a person whose position is defined by homelessness actually has the ability to step outside of their place in the social order. With If You Lived Here..., Rosler used institutional space to delineate a porous sphere within the system of social spaces, diverting the white cube’s auratic, aesthetic, elitist, and exclusive properties into a social space for communication and information.

But unlike the Trojan Horse, activist art is not instrumental in the violent overthrow of a regime, but works rather by subverting the very idea of an aesthetic object. Obviously, in (art) activist circles and beyond, the debate continues as to whether this subversion is merely a masquerade—a purely strategic universalism that pretends to be “art” in order to gain access—or whether we are dealing with a Janus-faced identity: at once activist and aesthetic. And then there is the possibility of activist art masquerading as a Janus!

In another art school last year I researched in the physical archives of an online archive assisted by a German student from a curatorial studies program and found a series of publications with the shredded documents left behind after the takeover of the American Embassy during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The ‘revolutionaries’ put the documents back together and just printed the books to expose what was going on inside. Even the Israelis were annoyed with what they were up to in there.