What is hasan elahi?

Hasan Elahi is a Bangladeshi-American interdisciplinary artist, privacy activist, writer, and associate professor of art and technology at the University of Maryland. He is best known for his ongoing project, Tracking Transience, in which he obsessively documents every detail of his daily life and shares it publicly on the internet, in an effort to subvert government surveillance and reclaim control over his personal data.

Elahi was born in Bangladesh in 1972 and immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of 7. He earned a BFA in painting from the University of Georgia and an MFA in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In 2002, while flying from Newark to Detroit, Elahi was detained by the FBI on suspicion of terrorist activity. After being cleared of any wrongdoing, he was inspired to create Tracking Transience as a way of preemptively disclosing his movements and making himself a visible, non-threatening presence online.

Elahi's work has been exhibited at museums and galleries around the world, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Venice Biennale in Italy. He has also been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Elahi continues to use his art as a means of exploring issues of surveillance, privacy, and data collection in the digital age. He has written extensively on these topics and is a frequent speaker on the subject, advocating for greater transparency and accountability in government surveillance programs.