Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin For more than half a decade after World War II, Soviet spies beamed powerful radio waves at the United States embassy in Moscow. The energy penetrated the beak of an American eagle carved into a Great Seal hanging in the ambassador's office, powering a hidden microphone and transmitter. Presented to the ambassador by Stalin’s Young Pioneers, the carving was a typical diplomatic gift of the era.
The apparatus it concealed, in contrast, was so futuristic that it took the combined efforts of the FBI, CIA, and MI5 just to figure out how it worked. The Thing (as the bug was dubbed) became an icon of the Cold War when the US presented it in a 1960 United Nations Security Council meeting, seeking to deflect international censure after the Soviets shot down an American spy plane and captured the pilot. The ingenuity of the listening device was self-evident.
But nobody imagined that the inventor was one of the 20th century's most famous musical innovators. The Thing was invented by Leon Theremin, whose previous investigations of radio waves resulted in his namesake musical instrument. A new exhibition at the Wende Museum, Counter/Surveillance , explores connections between surveillance and the arts, and their shared focus on observation.
Although few crossovers are as direct as Theremin’s, the convergence of art and technology is a common theme, as is the attention to affordances – the ability to notice how techniques might be.