Remote Viewer explores the “psychic spying” units run by the KGB and CIA between the 1970s and the mid-1990s. These units tasked people with supposedly exceptional psionic abilities to mentally travel to covert enemy sites and, through drawing, sculpture, and speech, describe their contents: nuclear missiles, new models of submarines and tanks, etc.

While Coburn and Hatcher are skeptical about the veracity of remote viewing, they recognize a parallel with the “black boxes” of contemporary surveillance and data capture. By considering the structural opacity of remote viewing, could we better understand how obfuscation and mystification have come to render the current mechanisms of power unintelligible to the average user?