Stepping through the threshold of one of the Pompidou’s newest exhibits, Networks-worlds, I entered a room packed with eye catching pieces. The exhibit focuses on the many networks that shape the world from bodily systems to social media to the interconnectedness between people and other living things. My eyes moved from bodily systems colored in bright hues that created beautiful shadows on the walls to a gargantuan sculptural piece of copper wrapped into a cylinder and tangled like loose yarn to two art pieces that resembled the iconic and brightly colored game, Life. Not only were the art pieces in the exhibit very bold, but also the relatively open layout of the exhibit made it slightly overwhelming, but not in a negative way. Rather, it was hard to spend too long with one piece with the visual stimulation and excitement of other pieces in the periphery.

The second room offered a similar sensation of overwhelming excitement; however, it was slightly more intimate, which offered more ability to focus. Entering the second room, most people were mesmerized by the very instagrammable lights hanging from the ceiling close together to combine to form a sort of twisting wave in the sky called Flylight by DRIFT. After taking pictures or simply taking a long look at Flylight people mostly drifted in the direction of a video that was playing on loop with sound or to a pink and purple lava lamp shaped like a head. After seeing the many art pieces in the other room, it seemed that not as many people entered this second room and many of them did not give as much attention to each piece, so the three pieces described, the lights, video, and lava lamp, were the main draws.

Unlike most other museumgoers, I was intrigued by three medium sized photos of clouds by Trevor Paglen that appeared behind the lights, which were quite beautiful in their soft hues, each slightly different, the use of a central light that draws your eye to the center of the cloud, and gives the clouds a three-dimensional look. The first, called CLOUD #603 Watershed, had a bright spot emanating from the center left from which light to dark blues colored the bottom of the page, while having the light blues and the most subtle of pinks colored the top, particularly the top right. The next painting, CLOUD #135 Hough Lines had white and grey clouds on the top half of the page that looked as if they were about to storm before being blending into dark grey clouds with a streak of red underneath. The last print, CLOUD #865 Hough Circle Transform shows a bright white cloud that looks soft to the touch, and it fades into light grey clouds above and below it. It looks to be in a dark sky without stars or alternatively as if it is fading into a stormy cloud. While it was easy to see them from across the room, I chose to get a closer look and traverse the thin walkway that bordered the light art piece.

Upon a closer look at the three paintings, it was revealed that the paintings were not simply beautiful scenery photographs, but there were little lines in the photograph each charting a different path, which according to the plaque next to the photographs represents how technologies used for surveillance perceive airspace. The lines, which were convoluted or chaotic, display the artificial intelligence’s inability to comprehend the cloud mass, which is a subtle win against the surveillance space. I found the positioning of the photographs to be powerful in that it emphasized the power and omnipresence of surveillance, which highlights the importance of even a small defeat. Very few people would be able to understand the meaning of the artwork because so few people were able to get close enough to the pieces to be able to see the lines, perhaps due to the many other intriguing pieces in the room or perhaps because it seems that the paintings can be fully seen from far away or perhaps because of the added required effort of traversing around the lights. In fact, in the 20 minutes I was in that room, I did not see a single other person venture around the lights to see these photographs up close.

While at first it may seem that the hidden or very innocuous nature of these photographs may be bad, as the work is not getting much attention, I think that the concealed nature and the positioning of the artwork serves to emphasize its meaning. First, since most people do not get close enough to see the lines in the artwork (or read the plaque) it is unknown that this work is about surveillance. This lack of knowledge or obliviousness reflects the general population’s lack of awareness with the relatively constant surveillance we experience. When confronted many people take issue with surveillance but are easy to forget or fail to realize the omnipresence of surveillance in their own lives. Additionally, the positioning of these pieces is very powerful because the people who look closely at these pictures are most obviously subjects of a certain level of surveillance. While of course there are cameras all around the room, the most obvious ones are in the hands of museumgoers taking pictures of the artwork. Because the very instagrammable Flylight is in front of the CLOUD works, people who look closely at the photographs are inevitably part of the background of people’s photographs. While I did not stand in front of the CLOUD works very long, at least two people pointed their phones at the lights, which thus also captured the CLOUD works and me. The more obvious surveillance like experience, as well as the realization that most people in the room are unaware of the artworks’ message and only see it as three pretty photographs, drives home the message of the omnipresence and omnipower of surveillance, which serves to emphasize the feeling of a small defeat of surveillance due to artificial intelligence’s inability to understand clouds. Ultimately, I found this work quite compelling in both its message and how it was displayed in the exhibit.