Open Access Security (1,2) is a datagram series focused on Aaron Swartz’s life and federal investigation, which led to his premature death. Aaron Swartz was an internet pioneer who played key roles in the development of Creative Commons, RSS, and RDF. He created technologies that are inherently about making information accessible to more people. Aaron brought an online petition and alliance-building campaign that eventually helped defeat the infamous internet censorship bill known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a proposed US congressional bill that would have allowed the US government to censor and control the Internet.

Prior to Swartz’s involvement putting an end to SOPA, he was caught and arrested at MIT campus for downloading a large number of academic articles from JSTOR, the “not-for-profit” digital library. Stephen P. Heymann, an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, decided to prosecute Swartz even after JSTOR and MIT dropped charges, and use Aaron case as a deterrent. The prosecution came to an end with Aaron’s tragic suicide in January 2013.

Open Access Security was brought as part of a large project on augmentation at MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, where Yucef has been a fellow, researcher, and collaborator. The data obtained for these two datagrams highlights a Federal investigation about the involvment of Swartz on PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records). Aaron learned of a program which enabled free access to PACER via a small group of libraries across the country, and coordinated with a friend to download millions of PACER documents. The FBI didn't like it, and investigated him for a while, including surveillance at his parent's home.

Datagram is a term coined by Merhi in 1998 from the basic protocol of data transfer on the internet. Here, the information is laser printed and organized using a mathematical-geometric pattern that fills the aluminum support with a dense textual mass. The result becomes an abstract landscape that extends the geometric abstraction tradition initiated by Venezuelan artists in the 1950s.

At the same time, Open Access Security emphasizes the act of intercepting information as an instrument for art production. Some of the works that employ the datagram structure include Security (1998), Maximum Security (1998-2004), Minimum Security (2006), Divine Security (2010), and Interior Security (2016), among others.

Collection: Private

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