Hasan M. Elahi

It's incredibly disturbing when a country, particularly your own country, uses discrimination as a basis for an investigation.

To this day, I get very nervous coming back into my own country.

You can accuse me of being a terror suspect, but I can prove to you that I'm not.

You hear these horrible stories about the FBI just doing all these nasty things to people. And you know what? In my case, I didn't experience any of that, probably because the way I treated them. I was like, 'Okay, what do you want to know?' So I kept going back to their offices on a regular basis.

Despite the barrage of information about me that is publicly available, I live a surprisingly private and anonymous life.

We're all creating an archive of our own lives, whether we're aware of it or not.

Information agencies operate in an industry that values data. Restricted access to information is what makes it valuable.

If 300 million people were to offer up the details of their private lives, you would need to hire another 300 million people just to keep up.

I've pretty much accepted the fact that you're going to meet ignorant people, and that's okay. You can't control that. You can't change that.

We don't know what the next generation of art is going to look like. We're kind of making it up as we go along. Not unlike the tech industry.

How do you manage your online identity? It's something I talk about with my students all the time.

I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, 'Do you paint?' or 'What kind of medium do you work in?'