VAHAN M. MISAKYAN

“Christian Armenia” Complex | Sculptor: A. Papoyan | Lead Architect of the Project: Vahan Misakyan ©

The main charge of the project was to develop a master planning concept (including spatial, infrastructural, and programming propositions) for the site in Armenia (679 ha). The programming rationale is about creating a gradient of active spaces distributing the fleeting and dwelling citizens of the site (examples of programming include the expo spaces, visitors’ and congress centers, museum and a sculpture garden, campus spaces). [more here]

The exhibition was built upon scales. It included three maps (1, 3, 4 on the drawing). The exhibition also included a sousveillance installation, in which the captured footage of visitors was processed through the object detection algorithms and displayed on a large screen.

The first section was exploring the genealogy of the mass surveillance/dataveillance within the U.S. by mapping the legal acts, techniques, and lists associated with the public surveillance of private citizens and the private surveillance of private citizens.

The apparatus of mass surveillance, operating inside self-identified environments of crisis, successively materializes suspicion within the face of a spy (The Alien and Sedition Acts 1798), an anarchist (Anarchist Act 1918), a communist (Smith Act 1940, Voorish Act 1941) and a terrorist (PATRIOT Act of 2001). In this successive evolution of the crisis, the human subject delineated the boundary between two territories of operation: suspicion and accusation. The emerging rationale of delineation, however, generates a new fluid suspect based on its capacity to influence.

This section of the exhibition elaborated on the concept of the surveillant city, the city suspended in between the control structures and the democratic civic processes that are endemic to its counter-hegemonic constitution. Democratic political processes in the City of Yerevan are set against the state security infrastructures and its control rationale. This section explored the human agency and the capacity to compose a sovereign act out of the chaotic resistance, using the very syntax of control employed by the government for two decades.

This section explored the cloudy measurements of personality traits of psychometric profiling popular in direct marketing and propaganda campaigns in recent years. The presupposed human of these systems is a mutable and controllable entity, statistically generic and manipulable because the measurement of these algorithms is primarily of the psychological dimension of the human agency and its particular social networked emplacements.