Emissaries of the Letter, 2007, 16mm Film loop, approx. 13 min.

Emissaries of the Letter essays on the encipherment and decipherment common to the detective story, criminal photography, biometrics, statistical analysis and cryptography as these fields and forms develop from the 19th to the 21st century.  A paranoid voice weaves a constellation of affinities across figures in this genealogy--Poe, William Friedman, (a founder of modern cryptography and the NSA influenced by Poe) William Herschel (the British magistrate who first implemented fingerprinting in colonial India), Alan Turing (a father of modern computing and AI and the head of the team that cracked the German Enigma code), and Alphonse Bertillon (the 19th century French police officer and purveyor of biometrics)--as we traverse pertinent sites, artifacts and technologies. Here, the viewer briefly assumes the role of a sort of epistemological detective, following the paranoiac in deconstructing the forms of violence and criminality that technologies and agents in question have, consciously or unconsciously, helped construct.