Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency

This is the catalogue of a Wende Museum exhibition on the Cold War roots of present-day biometric surveillance.

The book accompanies the 2024 show in Culver City, California, part of the Getty-led PST ART: Art & Science Collide programme. Its illustrated pages follow two sections, Surveillance and Countersurveillance. They cover manuals for police and border guards, forensic portraiture, early computer facial recognition, and the miniature cameras and listening devices used on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Texts include an interview with Paul Reuvers and Marc Simons, and essays by Ken Gonzales-Day and Liat Segal.

Artists include Sadie Barnette, Paolo Cirio, Graham Fink, Yazan Khalili, Nedko Solakov and Xu Bing, with mail art from the archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt. Marieke Drost, a science historian, and Joes Segal, the museum's chief curator, curated the exhibition and edited the volume.