How to Create a New Legal Identity

An identity is a mutable object. It’s negotiated between people, organizations, and institutions, formalized in documentation, actions, and possessions. In this workshop Heath Bunting (UK) shows how you create your own legal identity. As Bunting demonstrates, identities can be constructed over time by developing relationships to place a given “person” within a web of shopping cards, cell phones, bills, government correspondence, and other “personal” data. Identity Bureau challenges the idea of personhood by showing how materially produced an identity is.

Heath Bunting explores the porosity of borders. Often performing as an interventionist or prankster and finding form within everyday acts of resistance, Bunting’s work reaches its public through systems of documentation and distribution including photography, print publishing and the web. Dismantling the divisions separating art and everyday life, Bunting prioritises information and action. His work is based on creating open and democratic systems by modifying communication technologies and social systems.

Heath Bunting‘s work straddles various modes of action, documentation and visualisation. Bunting is best known for his involvement in the formation of the net.art movement in the 1990s and as a founder of irational.org. His practice may be viewed in parallel with the tendencies of historical movements such as Conceptual Art or the Situationist International.