Global Intelligence files

Global intelligence files is a piece of poetic computation through a synthesized version of the children’s game Chinese whispers, only instead of human ear-to-ear retelling, the content is taken through the widely spread Google Translate service. It's form is an homage to Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, in which he retold one story through various modalities and to Alvin Lucier's I am Sitting in a Room. The work retranslates leaked content from the secret service agency STRATFOR, that Wikileaks made public in 2012-13 through multiple languages, eventually returning to the original one, to find the meaning in an altered, sometimes unrecognizable state.

The source content of this remediated exercise in style are emails referring to STRAFOR's many peculiar strategies of generating intelligence. Apparently they had been Google Translating large amounts of data, while investigating confidential information of interest to their clients in the East and Middle East. They were also not encrypting their emails, which allowed the content of the emails to be accessible in the first place, making this a peculiarly unsafe practice for an agency which builds its work in generating intelligence from confidential data.

Using this common algorithmic way of translating, the work questions the ever more common relying on technology and techno-positivist belief in a computerized substitution of every human task on an example of a precise and delicate matter that the human language is.

Fun fact: STRATFOR continued using Google translate for the translation of sensitive information after this information became publicly known, which lis visible due to leaks that happened in the period that followed.