Special Exhibitions Gallery

"Surveillance is often understood through its most visible forms, from cameras to prying eyes. This exhibition foregrounds a more complex history. Surveillance depends on data: technologies for producing data, techniques for analyzing data, and ways of making sense of data. Surveillance: From Vision to Data assembles a diverse collection of scientific instruments and places them into their multiple historical contexts. What emerges from their intertwined histories is unmistakable. The history of surveillance is inseparable from scientific knowledge production about data, with enduring consequences for how people and the world become known today."

"Surveillance: From Vision to Data explores how the data produced through surveillance practices can serve a range of outcomes. A single dataset can be made to mean different things—as when measurements of human bodies are used to support contradictory conclusions, or when an individual’s self-collected health data is suddenly deployed against them in a legal proceeding. The historical narratives and artistic works in the exhibition help us tease out other provocative questions: why are some data acted upon and other data conveniently ignored? And what is at stake when data are not produced at all?”

"Surveillance mediates many aspects of public and private life. While we tend to think of surveillance technologies as tools of control, they are also tools of witnessing and entertainment. Many of us knowingly use digital apps that violate our privacy because they are fun or offer new insights that allow us to know ourselves and others better. In questioning the historical role of data surveillance practices in shaping the world around us, the exhibition also examines how we adapt to them. Collectively, the works and artists in Surveillance: From Vision to Data explore how these tools and technologies can be used, critiqued, and subverted.”

The Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments
The Harvard Museums of Science & Culture
The Department of the History of Science, Harvard University

With Additional Support From:

The Peabody Museum of Anthropology & Ethnology, Harvard University
The Warren Anatomical Museum, Countway Library, Harvard Medical School
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Harvard Art Museums

Special Thanks To:

Aaron Gluck-Thaler, Curator
Carolyn Bailey, Curator
Matt Goerzen, Curator
Peter Galison
Hannah Marcus
Jan Sacco
Diana Loren
Gabriella Coleman
Evelynn Hammonds
Rebecca Lemov
Brandi Collins-Dexter
Lachlan Kermode
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society