New Identity Workshop

Heath Bunting's Status Project shows how easily almost all of our movements and activities can be traced, whenever we supply seemingly innocuous data such as our name, e-mail or post address, credit card and bank account number etc., be it to apply for a library card or a BahnCard, to enter a mobile phone contract or to shop online. By matching and combining different databases, any person can be attributed with a social status, generated from all data available about that person - usually without the knowledge of the person in question. This status literally determines the person's future freedom of action, off- and online.

The Status Project, initiated in 2004, is an expert system to mutate identities. It consists of a database containing 5.000 entries of different identifying features, available on the website irational.org. From their interconnections in relation to specific topics, Bunting generates maps depicting networks, each of which documents a certain social status.

The workshop offers a tutorial on how to construct a new identity. In Great Britain, this is unprohibited – as long as it is not used for illegal purposes.