Territory is a continuation of Psyche Techne and is in reference to the original intended use of the holographic media by the US military as a way of mapping battlefields and contested territories. Our bodies and minds themselves are new frontiers, self-identity and mind are malleable forms, and their borders are under constant bombardment from the city-states, corporate entities and the Other. My body is depicted transfigured by the scanning lasers and reconstruction algorithms of an industrial replication process as our collective bodies and minds are refigured by the all seeing eye of the digital panopticon.

Since the initial production of this work an American multinational software corporation, Autodesk, has co-opted this technology and offered it to consumers as a novel way of creating ‘selfies’. The next generation of privacy invasion is the pirating of our bodies, the measuring and quantifying of our bodies by the military, homeland security and private entities. These biometric tactics are no longer reserved by the police and international border patrols. They have been domesticated and turned into user interfaces. Examples of which include Apple’s iPhone 5 thumbprint scanner and the Xbox One’s depth sensing camera in millions of living rooms worldwide which is constantly connected to the internet. We willingly carry GPS, microphones and accelerometers with us everywhere we go which track our location, communications, the way we walk and move, where our eyes rest and look while we read (self-facing cameras), our facial patterns and more.

These amount to a strategic invasion of our bodies as means of not only controlling, but predicting our behavior. The body is a battlefield and the invasion is well underway. Anti-colonial thought can start by subverting this vision of the future, refusing to be remade in the eyes of the paramilitary but to rather remake ourselves. We must strive toward a revolution of the self fueled by a pleroma of digital, and inner light.

"Many of today’s conflicts occur in urban settings, making the ability to visualize conditions in urban areas increasingly important to commanders and mission planners." - Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

Exhibitions:
"Sneakerotics" at Edouard Malingue Gallery