Commissioner: Exit Book Deadline: 05/10/2007 10,000 characters (including spaces) Fee: 300.00 Euro Theme: The relationship between art and technology, specifically net.art First read, but not proofed by the operations police at Gatwich Airport 24/09/2007. Originally for this text, I was thinking of contrasting mass impersonal communication with individual human contact, by responding to all the spam I received in one week with hand-written letters. This approach, potentially absurd, didn't interest me further. I was then inspired by the text commissioned length being defined in characters as opposed to words. I thought of making an ascii-art text collage of 10,000 characters. I would have produced it by hand, one character at a time. This would have been heroic and crafty, but ultimately pointless. So I decided to adopt my usual method of producing projects. Firstly, any paid work must be for something I am already doing. It is easy to be constantly distracted from one's projects. Success can be defined as consistently being yourself. I think it is not only wrong for artists to be lead by opportunities and administration, but also inefficient. Secondly, any action I make I try to make multiple use. Just like components of weapons of mass destruction. So I thought about what I am doing already. Currently, I am working on my status manual: a map of The System. This will need an introductory text, perhaps this text can serve as that. I am also thinking about presence and how we destroy this through networking, the making links across time and space. There once was a time when I had no future as a result of refusing to make appointments. I was happy where I was. I would like to make some work to explore this and perhaps return to a time before financial and social networking. One thing I have to do though, is prepare a presentation for an event organised by Kate Rich in Bristol. Something about travelling and art production. I have been thinking of talking about train-jumping and art-world travel expenses scams. So I will write about the about these three interests and hopefully, weave them all together in an text that is both interesting to you and useful to me and my commissioners. First off, lets talk about train jumping. I made a piece of work a few years back called Unfare. This was a fake letter from a train company detailing how to travel on their trains for free. When I was more radical, I would travel all over the United Kingdom on trains without paying. This I considered a form of martial arts; an attack on capitalistic services using personal positioning strategy. I will show framed copies of this during the train talk. As a general rule, I think it is a bad idea for artist to write about their work. I also always feel like a dumb-arse compared to the great theorists out there, so prefer to let my work speak for me, in its own unique language. Anyhow, hopefully, this text might reveal to the struggling youth some of the tricks used by an established professional artist. You can see the train letter on my website (http://irational.org/heath/). It basically details how to move around a train to avoid payment in an undetectable manner. I should add that I love to hitch-hike. Its not just fucking radical to stand by the side of a road and not paying for the privelage (a provocation to private space and property), but it is also often the most practical method of transportation. The best thing about it, is that only great people pick you up these days. All the dorks and cunts are either to afraid or too prejudiced to engage with you. Onto art world travel scams. I have two that I remember. Its important, but hard to spot one's compulsive behaviour. The first one, I call The Golden Triangle, being similar to the atlantic sugar and slave trade. This would be best illustrated in a diagram, but I am not being paid per square inch. So we have three locations or more, call them A, B and C. This scam works best if you don't live anywhere and is best deployed against institutions that suffer from salary blindness, ie do not pay fees well assuming you have a paid job somewhere else. Lets imagine location A is your home. Institution B will invite you to travel from A to B and back again, they will pay your travel in both directions. Likewise, institution C will invite you to travel from A to C and back again they will pay two journeys for you also. If you do not go home in between each institutional visit, you can keep the cash from one of the saved journeys, which you can use to buy back your own time. Lets not forget that ultimately time is all we have. This will make up for the tax deducted and other bullshit the institutions will dump on you. Now imagine not living a location A, in fact not living anywhere. You will then profit from 3 out of the four journeys. This brings us onto my favourite travel scam called Back Again And there. Often organisations like television companies will pay everything except a fee, arrogantly thinking you want to appear on their show so much that you will do it for free. Lets imagine you are in location A, the host is at location B and you have always wanted to visit location C. When invited, tell the host you are not currently living at location A, but have a temporary residency at location C. Ask them if they can afford to fly you in from location C for their event. Make sure its somewhere at least 10,000 km away and hot. All you have to do then is get yourself to the hosts location B, fly to location C for a nice amount of time and then come back to location B for the event. Get a friendly travel agent to issue you with a travel receipt without dates or with them reversed. This is a great way to continent-hop when invited by a local or regional host. Do you think its bad of me ? Does the order of events matter when there is no cause and effect ? So how can I tie all this together into an article about net.art. Networking is all about tying things together. It comes naturally to humans and probably most animals. Our minds have evolved to make associations, whether that be between food and satisfaction or fire and pain. Most of art practise seems to be about creating symbolic links. Personally, I do not like this kind of stuff. For me art should be about informing and freeing us from conditioned thought and behaviour. Pictures of people with pig heads is base trickery fit for low life such as advertisers. Creating associations in the minds of others is the first step to domination. How does this strong feeling against associations inform networking ? Can you look at an image of a car without thinking of sexy women ? For me its important that things are themselves. Never trust anyone who says something along the lines of something is something else. Have you spotted me making associations yet ? I try not to, but I am still flawed. Perhaps we could make some rules. One - its bad to create associations between two things of different levels of abstraction. Damb ! in writing that sentence I forgot the greater point. We experience birth and death every moment. Every time we shift our attention we suffer loss aswell as discovery. This somehow makes me feel more casual about bodily death. On a side note, there are no opposites in nature, only in our minds and language. Its no wonder we have poor understanding of the fundamentals of nature such as life, sex and time. Just because there is life, doesn't mean there is such thing as death. Anyway, back to where we were before. Is that possible ? Its worth noting here that most arguments are caused by people trying to come to resolution on some conflict, but using differing levels of abstraction, and hence no chance of connection. The other thing I remember now though, is that exchange seems only possible between two entirely differing objects. I have seen so many failed attempts to create networks between similar sized and structured organisations. It is forgotten by mistake or by intention that these organisations are in competition with each other for either cash or attention. Something could be said about the phrases both 'holy' and unholy alliances'. We spend too much time in language, whether that be in own personal thought narrative; using linguistic machines such as computers; or immersed in language coded landscapes. New vistas or local interuptions resulting from mismatching, breaking or radical alignment offer escape exits from language. Hopefully, the boring and stupid parts of this text will be edited out for your comprehension and enjoyment. I am not sure I have succesfully linked disparate and distant concepts in your mind, but what do you expect from a fast food filosopher ? ciao for now. heath x -- Since writing this previous section of text two significant events have befallen me. The first happened on my way into the United Kingdom (UK). I was stopped at Gatwich Airport passport control and detained under the terrorism act. This is the third time this year; both previous detentions were at the Waterloo Eurostar Terminal, London. During the questioning my mobile phone and paper-work were copied including my manuscript for The Status Project Manual (http://status.irational.org). I was eventualy arrested on suspicion of planting a hoax bomb and refusing to answer questions whilst detained udner the terrorism laws. It is illegal for terrorists not to answer questions. I was held a total of 24hours, during which time my home and studio were searched by armed police, who removed artwork and canabis plants. The police officers were upset most by my army manual of bunker construction, which was of great use during our Bristol tunneling project. As a result, I was unable to talk at Cardiff and Nottingham, my reason for travelling to the UK, thus loosing valuable terrorist funding. I am currently out on bail and due to appear at Crawley Police Station on 28 November 2007. I have good reasons to believe that the security services suspect me of working on the borderXing project (http://irational.org/borderxing/), specifically attempting a dry run of provocative materials across UK borders as a method of testing and documenting the strength of security. Infact, I was only returning home from a short writing holiday break. The other significant event this week was that I joined Facebook, out of curiosity after being invited by 'friends'. Facebook has hit on a winning formula. Evolved firstly from porn then dating sites, it exploits people's instincts for collecting, mapping and need for social status. Users enthusiastically volunteer information about their relationships with others in the hope of increasing their personal social capital. Willing workers constantly attempt to recruit people both on and off the system. It has the hunger of a pyramid scheme, but is less declared. Even if you never sign up, facebook becomes aware of you, your friends and your influence through other's attempt to befriend you. Facebook, is building a map of the social network, illustrating influencial hubs and isolated and vunerable members. This is a map for colonisation and exploitation. The security services have similar systems, but individuals are targeted for assasination or torture instead of special offers and free gifts. Facebook is interesting in that it is an attempt by the machine to hack the social. Conversely, The Status Project is an attempt by the social to hack the machine. Is The Status Project dated, belonging to a time when machines were the embodiment of relationships or do we have a dialectic here ? Is The Status Project (the social) against the machine and the machine against the social ? From what I remember from the net.art scene, much of it was social networking and hacking, but disguised and/or reinforced with machinic discourse. How to respond to being tracked and targeted by both security and profit extractors ? especially when your friends are betraying you to the enemy. I do not live in London as I find the social and security scrutiny repressive. I live in a smaller city that takes interest in things other than human social status. Perhaps its time to return to the animals further. Yesterday was the day that data concerning my telephone conversations can now be accessed by over 700 different organisations in the UK. I will stop using my mobile phone. Has this text fullfilled its stated aim of mutli use ? Does this text serve as a script for my severn beach talk ? or an introduction to The Status Project ? Both borderXing and The Status Project have been examining mobility in terms of location and identity. Corporate networks offer velocity along pre-defined vectors, whilst progressive networks let you link unjoined nodes. I take great pleasure walking off-path, especially on private land and enjoy most standing or sitting still, watching the animals pass by. I will start eating them soon. Hope all is well Heath Bunting.