Draft Text on Method

Describe recent work:

“Adopt a Walk” is a work I made for the publication we’ve developing during the past three months in collaboration with “De Player”. The work consist in an audio-guide for an experiment of gait analysis, and a digital interface. The work is functioning thanks to the series of tools that are parts of the “Tetra Gamma Circulaire”, our publication. The series of walks are recorded and archived temporarily with a local browser on a webpage. The web-interface I created invite users to observe the archive of the foreign walks and start using one of them. In this way, people are potentially able to escape detection from biometric surveillance of gait, technique recently developed to recognize individuals in public space. The question I wanted to raise is : What happens if I start to walk like somebody else? Would I look like somebody else under the “eye” of a surveillance camera?

Describe current work:

“Interfacing the Law” is the name of the last publication we are going to work in this last trimester of the year. The core of the thematic project is an inquire and research on different digital public libraries and their state of legality or illegality. In particular, the research will focus on which are the legal restrictions and conditions applied on these tools for sharing freely cultural materials.

Describe the relation between the two:

In both projects there’s a common interest in looking at current regulative tools used for different reason, but with a common belonging to the structure of power. The common denominator of every law in an interest in domination over individuals. From the surveillance technologies, used to provide visibility and sampling populations, to the laws of authorship and copyright, which are used for insure to certain actors the privilege of being author of something which is naturally collective and make profit out of it.

How are the works different?

The difference lies in the different kind of regulations I’m researching, and in the different kind of spaces where those regulations are applied. In “Adopt a walk” I was focused on the regulatory tools of identity recognition and in the second project the interest is directed to laws of authorship and intellectual property. The gait analysis furthermore is a biometric applied in public space (particularly on public transports), while the copyright laws are “immaterial” restrictions on the abstract possession of a piece of culture.

Who can help you and how? Which expertise?

As the new project Interfacing the Law just started, I think for this preliminary stage I have to focus on researching case studies and theories. I’m interested in analyzing which are the exceptions from the state of the laws that are possible to exist. I will certainly read books like “State of Exceptions” from Agamben for example, and look at semi-legal situations and platforms (like Tor and the Deep-Web) where exceptions from copyright laws are existing.

Future work:

My plan for the future, considering the common characteristics of the works I’ve been done until now, is to focus on how “structures of power” are destroying possibilities of human connection, knowledge and resilience. Which “state of exception” we should start to develop in order to escape the nowadays ordinary drift of the neoliberal mentality that is visibly not able to represents us as human being.