Source Code

Source Code is Mishka Henner's print-on-demand archive of the raw HTML source code behind the home pages of U.S. intelligence agencies, harvested on a single day, 24 June 2013. The United States Intelligence Community, the network of agencies established under Executive Order 12333 to conduct research, produce intelligence, and support espionage and military planning, presents a public face online; Henner's book strips that presentation down to the code underneath it, the invisible scaffolding a browser normally renders and hides. The book was made as a contribution to Kenneth Goldsmith's Printing Out the Internet, a crowdsourced exhibition at LABOR gallery in Mexico City (26 July–30 August 2013) that asked participants worldwide to print out and submit pages from the internet, ultimately filling the gallery with roughly ten tons of paper. Henner's submission turns an act of bureaucratic transparency-theater into raw material, using print-on-demand publishing, a recurring method in his practice for bypassing traditional gatekeeping, to make the agencies' own code physically legible as an object.