The Orwell Project

One Muslim artist responded to his mistaken FBI investigation by creating an online record of his every move, meal, and travel. That artist is Hasan Elahi.

From a piece in the Daily Beast about him and his work...

Elahi is a 37-year-old conceptual artist who teaches art and visual theory at San Jose State University in California. He was born in Bangladesh and grew up in New York. Like many other Muslims in the days following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Elahi found his name on the government’s terrorist watch list. In response, he decided to open nearly every aspect of his life on his website, TrackingTransience.net. At that site one can find a record of the coffee he has bought or the amount of cash he has withdrawn in the past week. Over 20,000 images on the site are time-stamped and give information about the places he has been and meals he has consumed. In May 2007, when I met Elahi in a restaurant for lunch, he took a picture of his salad—smoked salmon with strawberry dressing—and then of the urinal in the men’s room. The pictures were uploaded on his site. Having beforehand perused the list of his recent purchases, I was able to confirm that the camera he was using, a brand-new Canon G7, was one that he had acquired the previous week at a shop in New York City.

Book Cover - A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb. By Amitava Kumar. 232 pages. Duke University Press. $21.95. The Orwell Project, which is the name that Elahi has given to his exercise, is in reality a work of collaboration between the artist and the FBI. It was the latter who inspired this work that is part performance, part protest.