Total transparency is its own form of concealment.
Hasan Elahi
Tracking Transience (2003–ongoing)
The page loads as chaos. Every entity in CivicGraph, every relationship, every dollar, every date, rendered as a 30-million-point particle field. Unreadable by design.
At the bottom of the page, one small input: your postcode. Type it in. The particles that do not relate to your postcode fade. What remains is the civic landscape of your own place, at full resolution, readable only because you asked for it.
The argument is Elahi's inversion from his post-9/11 self-surveillance project. If you demand I be seen, I will be so thoroughly visible that the view becomes useless. Then you choose what you want to see, and only that stays. Consent is the only transparency that is not surveillance.
- ·Full CivicGraph entity graph (587K entities, 1.5M relationships)
- ·All contracts, donations, grants, board positions, postcode-tagged
- ·ACNC charity register for completeness
WebGL instanced particle system. Custom vertex shader with postcode uniform for filter. Three.js instance for millions of points. Progressive rendering to keep frame rate above 30fps.
Transparency at maximum resolution is noise. Transparency at human resolution is consent.
Artefact 005 — The 22 (all public facts about the government's named First Nations-led organisations)
Every episode ships alongside a printed, news-pegged ledger. The artefact proves the episode's point at the scale of one specific recent event. See the full artefact series at aesthetics.act.place/artefact.