“It really does not take much at all to get arrested,” Steve Kurtz told Oberlin students at the Cat on Monday. “A policeman could come into this room right now and arrest anyone.”

Kurtz, a professor of art at the University of Buffalo and founding member of the Critical Art Ensemble. Since 2004, he has crisscrossed the country to foster awareness about civil liberties from a victim’s perspective.

When his wife died of a heart attack on May 11, 2004, the emergency workers who responded to his 911 call discovered Petri dishes that hosted harmless bacteria cultures in his house. The bacteria were part of a CAE art project. The next day, Kurtz was detained by the FBI on suspicion of being a bio-terrorist.

When bio-terrorism proved to be a dead end for the FBI, the Federal Department of Justice indicted Kurtz for mail and wire fraud on the basis that he violated a material transfer agreement when he purchased the bacteria. He faces a sentence of up to 20 years in prison, the same as he would have faced if he had been charged for bio-terrorism.

Kurtz came to Oberlin this past week with fellow CAE member Lucia Sommer as part of Oberlin’s New Media Lecture series. In the CAE’s publication “Critical Art is Under Attack: Defend Civil Liberties,” the group writes that if the Department of Justice wins the case, it would set an “extremely dangerous precedent.… It would mean that any discrepancy in a civil contract that involves the Internet or mail...could be prosecuted as a federal crime.”

As a part of the series, Oberlin screened the award-winning documentary, Strange Culture, directed by Lynn Hershman Leeson, which focuses on Kurtz’s legal travails.

Kurtz said the documentary has been very helpful with accruing sympathy for his case.

“It captured the tone and emotional economy extremely well,” he said. “[Hershman-Leeson] made it so that people could see what happened…. People that we otherwise would never have known to be sympathetic to the case.”

Kurtz added that his late wife, Hope, was played by Academy Award-winning actress Tilda Swinton. “To me that was one of the great monuments of her life.”

Kurtz also explained his involvement with the CAE, both before and after his prosecution. The group, which he founded as a “disgruntled college student” in 1987 in Tallahassee, FL, exhibits art displays that challenge information and biotechnologies that are prominent in the public sphere. Kurtz says that many of the group’s members are involved in academia.

One of the CAE’s projects was called “Marching Plague.” On February 24, 2007 in Leipzig, Germany, the group simulated the U.S. military’s 1950 anthrax test done on the city of San Francisco. Bacillus Subtilis, a bacterium commonly found in soil, was sprayed from the top of the local American consulate building. Afterward, “human guinea pigs” were swabbed and the results tested for contamination.

The performance criticized the German government’s recent biowarfare initiatives, which the group claims are an exploitation of “the potential threat of germ warfare.”

“We believe that biowarfare ‘preparedness’ is a euphemism for biowartech development and the militarization of the public sphere,” says a position paper published on the CAE website.

When Kurtz described the German government’s nonchalance about the project, the audience laughed.

“See — we laugh,” said the quirky, long-haired professor, “but this is how much we’ve internalized the police state…. You’re the ones that are really going to face the legacy of this. You’ll have to face it on a daily basis.”