Anson Wigner: Floating in the Clouds of the Cold War
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photo / Anson Wigner
Floating in the Clouds of the Cold War is an installation of photographs and video mined from Cold War-era satellite surveillance, atomic-age propaganda and snapshots. Film-based satellite surveillance started with a partnership between the CIA, Kodak and the US Air Force to produce high-resolution images of foreign military targets. These satellites offered the cutting edge of disembodied high-altitude objective vision and were the first step toward totalized panoptic planet-wide surveillance. However, they also inadvertently exposed our fear of the hidden and the insights gleaned through an obstructed view.
Mission 9024A, shot on 17 May 1962, five months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, shows sublime images of swirling clouds: no Cuba, no missiles. The coordinates were correct, the camera pointed at Cuba; the film, successfully jettisoned from the satellite, was caught midair by the Air Force and processed perfectly by Kodak. Yet the resulting images only rendered clouds. This was a common and unremarkable failure. It was also an unrealized opportunity to shed the ideals of totalized state surveillance and its inflexible taxonomy of enemy and ally. Instead, enjoy an accidental view of clouds and abandon the nuclear mantra of mutually assured destruction.
The Cold War is a war of gesture and imagination. Stockpile statistics, projected military capacity, and satellite surveillance of clouds are as fundamental to this style of war as bullets and bodies. It's a war based on the inescapability of perpetual war and the desire for unattainable totalities of vision and power. Satellites have rendered the world as indexical abstraction, a visual topography where legibility shifts from unintelligible shapes and tones to suburban homes and secret military bases. Floating in the Clouds of the Cold War offers a view of secret sites and a moment in the clouds to contemplate the value and cost of sight.
Biography
Anson Wigner is a creative producer at Cornell AAP and a visual artist who utilizes photography, video, mixed media, and sound to critically explore the development of modern visual ideologies. This exploration is focused on the interaction between institutional looking, the technologically mediated gaze, and our lived visual experiences. His recent work uses images from the infancy of satellite surveillance and Cold War propaganda films to propose a link between faux visual certainty and ideological totalities like mutually assured destruction.
