Museum conferences do not usually attract the attention of the National Security Agency. But Rhizome’s Seven on Seven is not most museum conferences. The annual event at the New Museum in New York pairs seven artists with seven technologists and asks each duo to create a project from scratch. This year, organisers paired the dissident artist Ai Weiwei with the hacker Jacob Appelbaum, who is currently under investigation by a grand jury for his involvement with Wikileaks. Because Ai is unable to leave China and Appelbaum is in self-imposed exile from the US, the two met for a 48-hour art-making blitz at Ai’s studio in Beijing. The artist and Oscar-winning director Laura Poitras, another high-profile dissident, was on hand to document the meeting. “When I was writing those three names in one email, it’s a red flag immediately and you have to assume [surveillance is] happening,” Rhizome’s director Heather Corcoran told Fusion. (In an article on the collaboration, Fusion described the trio as “three of the most justifiably paranoid people in the world”.) The fruits of their collaboration will remain under wraps until a presentation at the conference on 2 May—that is, unless the NSA gets wind of it first.