Flagons Den

Thanks Pete Hotchkin for spotting this….

from dpinteractive

James Spader - in Boston Legal - delivering a concise speech about apathy in America.  Couldn’t have put it better myself (courtesy of puppetgov.com)

However - as much as there is a silent, complicit majority - there is also a noisy minority, a little pocket of resistance which is raising critical awareness and comment on the established oligarchy who prosper in the existing hegemony.  In the USA, where blissfull ignorance is beginning to wane, hopefully the change of leadership may also herald a new policy in the dissemination of facts and truth - becuse the last administration were questionable on that front….

Well - here’s some ideas for my project, I have painstakingly drawn some plans to illustrate the possible set ups I could utilise to get my idea of surveillance and monitoring and digital signatures across.

1 Digital Signature

RFID reader and projector set-up

The concept is a projected representation of the tag wearers online persona - as they enter the range of the RFID reader a program will search online for information about them, pictures and comments and display it via the projector, to surround them in their digital signature, colliding the real world and avatar version of themselves.

2 Checkpoint

Checkpoint mock-up

A highly conspicuous checkpoint, manned with a security guard which the public walk through and are displayed on the monitor, which will add suppositions about them on the screen.  This would hope to jar them out of the delusion that in their normal day to day lives they are not being monitored.

3 Door Camera

door camera mock up

A camera triggered by a person entering a door, their picture captured and displayed on a monitor in a mock ID card layout, with spurious and assumptive information.  This is intended to comment on the nature of surveillance which makes assumptions on it’s observered persons.  Also the person on the ID card will not be able to see the monitor showing them - only ID cards of other unwitting participants.  This brings up the concept of being both the observer and the observed - and the nature of digital voyeurism.

4 Peephole ID

peephole ID card mock up

A slightly playful idea for an installation, a peephole which people pop their head through to create an oversized ID card - with the info either drawn from a net search or arbitrarily selected and projected onto the surface.

I saw David Rokeby’s installation “Taken” in Berlin in 2007 at Transmediale, and was extremely impressed and engaged with the piece. It dealt with issues of surveillance and labelling of members of the public which is the same area I would like to explore with my final year project.

Looking at his other works, he has created other pieces which examine the same topics as well as more generative art works. I especially like the work “Sorting Daemon” which creates montages from capturing public faces and sorting them via their hue.

It’s a bit beyond me for my project but his work could inform my development of my own idea - I wanted to create some sort of reader/checkpoint which portrayed users on a monitor and found info from the net about them and displayed it, occasionally adding spurious information and even misinformation, making random judgements and accusations/presumptions - maybe as an over reaction to “hot” keywords found during the internet spider search?

Living My Life Faster - 8 years of JK’s Daily Photo Project
A nice and simple - and very disciplined - life logging piece of work.

I have devised a cunning plan for my project, a comment on the apathy of those in my generation that have succumbed to the status quo and regime that exists in our society. I am going to create the Apathist Cookbook - a modernday counterpoint to the Anarchist Cookbook of the 1970’s. Whereas the latter attempted to incite the public into action, my piece will reinforce inaction, disinterest and compliance. A similar ironic stance was utilised in the Dont Vote campaign.

So far I have drawn up a fake End User Licence Agreement and begun working on a table of contents as a pastiche of the original Cookbook. I may develop it into an app or swf - still in the design process though.

sooner or later, had to happen it did….

I thought I could look around for some other RFID and biotech projects - the area I am looking into - for inspiration and to ensure I’m not retreading the same ground of other artists. The projects that caught my attention were the following;

i-Tea An idiosyncratic and quirky take on RFID, which places the idea of surveillance into a tea party scenario with info on tag wearers elegantly rippling out from a porcelain cup over a quaint tea table.

Angelo Vermeulen who has made a number of works, but I particularly liked Skanner - which used biofeedback to create a real time horror film, responding to the audiences in a closed feedback loop.

Doria Fan’s Trace which adds RFID to personal objects to encase memory into the artifact. A bit like Bruce Stirling’s Spimes in his proposed “Internet of things”.

Meghan Trainor’s Transmission which utilises audio triggered by RFID implanted objects in an interactive installation.

I couldn’t forget the Ludic Society - seeing as they came to Plymouth for their tagged city project. I checked out their exhibit ( but chickened out of having an implant!).

Swipe - an RFID bar which serupticiously harvests patrons personal data. I like the hidden aspect of the data theft… I guess they could have been to this guy’s bar -

Paula Roush’s Arphield Recordings project which captures audio from people utilising Oyster cards, and uses it for in situ performances and/or soundscapes.

I also liked Straightjacket/Embrace which invited audience members to be dressed in a straightjacket and placed in a mediascape of audio and projected imagery.

I also looked into some biotech art - and I really liked Gen-Pets by Adam Brandejs. Which makes a salient point about the future of biotechnology and the potential misuse of this technology.

I also couldn’t forget Stelarc, after seeing him in Berlin in 2007 and hearing his aussie twang and chuckle punctuating a keynote speech depicting him partaking in naked suspended body experiments, electrocuting unsuspecting volunteers and revealing an AI avatar of his head rapping Cannibal Ox lyrics. The piece of work which piqued my interest was Ping Body which plays with the man machine symbiosis and also has Stelarc doing robotic dance. Priceless.

It’s been a while since I posted anything, as I have been doing lots of other stuff and then forgetting to blog it!  Other than gigs, Dartington Campus last Saturday rocked by the way, and doing the dad/family thing I have been mostly racking my noggin for a handle on my dissertation…till today.  I think I could be getting somewhere finally - I have a meeting with Mike Punt on Friday to thrash it out and hopefully he will like my new approach.