goodbye body

I’m travelling for work this week.

Work is co-facilitating lectures and tutorials for communication design students… teaching? Anyhoo, we’ll be talking about research which has reminded me of my own MA thesis project which—for a time—was going to be based around passports as designed objects and how to materialise borders (sort of in support of this). Realising there were a few fellow students researching very similar fields I veered off into another direction before completing the project but the initial research was extensive.

Somewhere along the way I made a spontaneous visit to Varia in Rotterdam for a discussion from an artist called Heath Bunting (I remember their name now but have spent most of the morning writing this trying to remember). I think this was after I had shifted the focus of my thesis but pertained very closely to previous research and therefore I became quite excited about it.

Bunting had travelled from the U.K. to Rotterdam for this event without flying and generally avoiding stringent border crossings to avoid legal issues pertaining to his artistic research around country boundaries. Namely a project called BorderXing which Bunting describes as “An online guide for crossing borders without legal documentation, highlighting issues of mobility, state control, and identity. Access to this project is restricted, emphasizing the control over digital spaces.” But Bunting’s interest wasn’t necessarily in pushing the limits inter-national codes of conduct… it was and appears to have always been about the permeability of identities (and systems of identity).

In May 2010, Annet Dekker interviewed Bunting and asked, “What differences do you see between the virtual and physical domains? In our ‘digital age’ has the former become more important than the latter in relation to our identities?”

To which Bunting responded:

“I think that there can be a hierarchy between the physical and the virtual but it can also be inverted. It works both ways and that’s what interests me. It’s about different ways of analysing, taking a different slice, portions of knowledge, really. I guess at the moment the virtual ranks higher than the physical in the hierarchy and I think that’s because it’s in certain people’s interests. Before the Internet, you knew where your virtual body was—it was at the tax office or the police station, or at school. And if a revolution did take place you could go and burn those records, but now people put all their data on different platforms and different machines and think it’s fun. All the hype about Twitter and online identities is nothing new, except now it’s on a different platform whereas before it would have been on a stone tablet. But what happens if the police knock on your door, as they do in Iran or elsewhere and even in the UK, and say, ‘You’ve been on these websites and are involved with certain activities so now we’re arresting you’. So, the virtual is more important, because it’s actually becoming more difficult for people to see their traces. Their actual true nature gets misrepresented or codified or enslaved through the Internet. Things happen in a much more sophisticated way, whereas before you could burn a piece of paper or tear it up: Goodbye body.”

Read the complete interview here: http://aaaan.net/heath-bunting-the-world-of-an-administrative-content-provider/

More mash (sometime) next week.

— Michael