ITLP Research Group: Counter/Surveillance Wende Museum Tour
The Institute for Technology, Law & Policy is hosting a special off-site visit to the Wende Museum's exhibition, Counter/Surveillance: Control, Privacy, Agency. The event features a guided tour with Chief Curator, Joes Segal, and a group discussion on surveillance and research. Priority access for members of the ITLP Research Group.
About IRG:
The ITLP Research Group (IRG) is a fortnightly meeting of tech law and engineering faculty and students, visiting scholars, and tech and society researchers from across the UCLA community. The IRG provides a forum to present and discuss new scholarship and works-in-progress at the intersection of technology, law, and policy.
UCLA students and faculty interested in joining IRG for Fall 2025 can request invitation by submitting this form: bit.ly/IRG_Fall2025
About the Counter/Surveillance Exhibition:
In recent decades, technological advances have supercharged surveillance. Online, personal data are automatically collected and analyzed on a mass scale. Algorithms watch, listen, track, and identify people, complementing and sometimes replacing human eyes and ears. Powerful combinations of surveillance software and hardware, such as surveillance cameras outfitted with real-time facial recognition, are conquering public spaces. These technologies are often misleadingly presented as though they were pure innovation and have no history.
The exhibition Counter/Surveillance traces the historical roots of such surveillance devices and methods, and the Cold War dynamics that shaped and spread them. It explores the precursors of current biometric surveillance in Cold War manuals for police, border guards and spies; in forensic portraiture; and in the little-known early history of computer facial recognition, revealing links between forensics, science, art, and popular culture. It also traces similarities between Cold War surveillance devices and methods used in East and West, from miniature cameras and listening devices to forensic composite kits. These not only point to a shared technical history, but are also indicative of exchange, inspiration, and imitation across the Iron Curtain. Technical exchanges with allies in the Global South ensured further international dissemination.
The exhibition includes artwork from Sadie Barnette, Paolo Cirio, Asya Dodina & Slava Polishchuk, Graham Fink, Ken Gonzales-Day, Damara Inglês, Yazan Khalili, Verena Kyselka, Gerhard Lang, Francisco Masó, Decebal Scriba, Liat Segal, Nedko Solakov, Xu Bing, Yang Jian, and Mail Art from the Mail Art Archive of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt and Robert Rehfeldt, Berlin.
About the Wende Museum:
The Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and archive that preserves history and brings it to life through exhibitions, scholarship, education, and community engagement. Wende is a German word meaning “turning point” or “change” that has come to describe the transformative period around the fall of the Berlin Wall. Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds an unparalleled collection of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate the political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in the personal and social changes that will shape the future.