Airports are the (non)places where the surveillance apparatus shows off its muscles. Airports are where security systems are first tested and fully employed. Airports are where privacy is immolated on the altars of control. Airports are the physical version of an information network. As such, airports have always fascinated artists, and they are the perfect playground for an artist who also happens to be a graffiti artist, a hacker and an open source coder, an artist such as Evan Roth.

Since 2007, Evan Roth – an American artist currently living in Paris and often traveling around the world – has been using airports as a platform on which to make art and deliver it to an audience in the form of micro-interventions that locate themselves between conceptual art, activism, media hacking and sabotage.
Skymall Liberation (2007 – ongoing), for example, is a series of collages using Skymall – a magazine distributed for free on American flights – as their source, and the small seat trays as their support. Roth organizes the images found on the magazine as starting points for ironic ethnographic data visualizations, such as “White vs Non-White”, or “Apple Products vs Non-Apple Products”. How To Keep Motherfuckers From Putting Their Seats Back (2008) is a short video tutorial showing us how to resist against economy class discomfort. See You See Me (2009) is a two-channel video taken from inside airport security X-ray devices.