UBERMORGEN.COM: “Superenhanced – Interrogation & Tribunal Room”
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UBERMORGEN.COM: Superenhanced – Interrogation & Tribunal Room
Superenhanced – Interrogation & Tribunal Room
Participative mixed-media-installation, 2009
Superenhanced V1E1 – Familiarization
Video, 2009
With this installation we find ourselves in a classic interrogation situation, and we are invited to join the game. The room is a replica of a military courtroom of Guantánamo (the so-called CSRT, combatant status review tribunal room), but at the same time an interrogation room. The computer features the interrogation software Superenhanced Generator with the help of which the interrogator (or, if there’s no interrogator at hand you interrogating yourself) can also ask private questions like: Is it okay to step onto an ant? Or: What is more important, the system or the individual? What, at first sight, seems like a familiar quiz programme or a questionnaire as used in virtual shopping or dating turns out to be an autonomous mechanism that hardly acknowledges the answers. Once trapped in this system of obscure dynamics it is almost impossible to escape these so-called ‘enhanced interrogations’ in the course of which Superenhanced Generator also uses Google and Facebook. These users’ data, furthermore, are entered into the database and, thus, potentially become part of the power of control of those having access to it.
The software developed by UBERMORGEN.COM after having extensively researched the CIA and other secret services draws us into a net of inescapable, culpable entanglements that are brought to light by such ‘enhanced interrogations’. The term ‘enhanced interrogation’ is so-called ‘newspeak’ used by Americans in order not to have to talk about torture. The language used in the interrogation is mixed with common, cool Pop and PR language, thus unveiling the sophisticated mechanisms of control.
At the end of the game, with the “form of rendition orders”, i. e. the order to secretly transfer an unofficially detained prisoner to some other jail, in our hands we realise that this interrogation game could be played with each and any of us. “We can simply let the software decide everything by itself”, the website of Superenhanced Generator reads, “that way no human will be responsible for any acts committed any longer during any interrogation in the first place.”