Project

ID/entity: Strangers to Ourselves

The makings of identities: personal identity is guided by an invisible apparatus. This apparatus is ever-changing. Surveillance data is continuously being gathered about each of us as we move about in the world. From grocery tabs and credit card transactions to cameras in highway tollbooths and face recognition systems on telephone poles in major cities, we leave ever-more coherent sets of traces. Unknowingly. Perceptions and presentations of selves are assemblages continuously updated as one interacts with people and things. There is not such a thing as a being; there are only projections, interpretations, idealized memories, idolized constructions. A person exists through autorecollections, and knowingly surrounds herself with self-defining tokens. Autotopographies. A pulsed laser hologram takes hours to set up but only six nanoseconds to shoot�a portrait capturing self-conscious poses while revealing details more minute than could ever be planned. Bacteria on the skin and the location of every tiny hair. Digital voyeurism. How do we respond to these unsolicited incursions?