(b)(6) (b)(7)(E): Redacted Bodies
2025

Demo. 4k quality available for this video.

(b)(6)(b)(7)(E) Redacted Bodies is a hybrid installation and web-based interface that explores how systems designed to protect information can also produce disappearance. The work is grounded in the political and emotional landscape of the United States–Mexico border, a region where movement, identity, and risk are shaped by surveillance and documentation technologies. While rooted in this specific context, the installation speaks to global practices that regulate visibility and determine what can be seen, recorded, or withheld.

The experience unfolds through a sequence of questions that prompt visitors to recall ordinary situations related to movement, recognition, safety, and self-presentation. Rather than imitating bureaucratic forms, these questions foreground everyday moments in which a body becomes readable, questionable, or exposed. Each response appears briefly in full view before being distorted or obscured in real-time, echoing redaction procedures used in public records systems, such as the United States Freedom of Information Act, where data is withheld through coded practices.

In the exhibition space, a live camera masks the participant’s face with shifting redaction blocks. No images are stored; the masking occurs only while the viewer is present. This real-time intervention extends the logic of redaction from language to the body itself, merging the participant’s presence with projected fragments of archival FOIA documents and their own disappearing text. The installation forms a constellation in which personal and institutional forms of disappearance coexist.

A sound score by Karima Walker shapes the temporal experience of the work. Built from voice, field recordings, and the turbulence of water, the score treats fluid motion as a procedural model for how data moves through administrative systems, appearing, circulating, or dissolving.

Through this environment of text, sound, and live redaction, Redacted Bodies reflects on the architectures that govern visibility and asks how individuals come to appear, or vanish, within contemporary information infrastructures.