“One day in June 2002, US artist Hasan Elahi presented his passport at Detroit Airport. To his surprise, he was held back and brought to Immigration and Naturalization Service’s interrogation room. His name had been flagged, and during the interrogation it became clear that he had been mistaken for “an Arab man”, reported to have a storage unit with explosions and to have fled on 12 September 2001. The suspicions were all false, and as Elahi happens to be “neurotic about his record keeping” he could account for his exact whereabouts for months before and after September 2001. So he thought the mistake would be corrected and over with. It wasn’t. A few weeks later he was called into further questioning by the FBI, and the interrogations continued over the next six months. Finally Elahi was cleared of suspicion but, as he was travelling abroad shortly after, was advised to inform the FBI about his flight and travel details — to avoid trouble when re-entering the country. To be on the safe side Elahi chose to report all his whereabouts, and this endeavor gradually turned into a life/art project. Elahi began to compile all the data about his movements combined with photographs of airports, meals, hotel beds, parking lots, train stations, toilets etc. and to upload everything onto his website, trackingtransience.net. Since then he has continually updated and expanded this project, which is still ongoing to this very day.”

http://globalcontrol.rixc.org/1-11/ (18.01.2022)