Re: Paul Somerson's account of Kevin Warwick's biochip implant (Cybersocietyhttp://www.unn.ac.uk/cybersociety)

Reader's might like to check out the interactive artwork/performanceundertaken by Eduardo Kac of the Art Institute of Chicago, who had a pet-locatorchip implanted, registering himself with a commercial finding agency (species/breed:human; you will have to look yourself to see if he has been spayed).

Eduardo homepages are at http://www.ekac.org

This project, Time Capsule, is at http://www.ekac.org/timec.html

and there is a bibliography on the project at http://www.ekac.org/tcbiblio.html

For me the difference between Warwick and Kac's interventions lies inthe critical stance Eduardo brings to the work, an act at once of severeirony and of extreme generosity, of giving his data. This action, the donationof one's _data-image_ to the net community, is also a kind of preemptivestrike against the increasingly desperate attempts of liberal humanismto retain, under the guise of protecting privacy, the increasingly redundantlegal category of private property. Warwick's device as I understand itplaces him, via the machine, in a one-to-one relation with the corporateworld, in effect making him a biochip of the corporate cyborg. Kac's interventionin an existing database as a public act of submission, on the other hand,concerns the relation between people. Incidemntally, insofar as anythingrouted through the corporate dimension is subject to intellectual propertylaws, it is slowed down. Private property is a mode of delay (the contemporaryform of censorship): public action, in contrast, is faster, and speed,as John and Paul Virilio are all too willing to remind us, is the natureof the beats with which we grapple.

Digital artists are, in certain cases such as this one, our best analystsand commentators on the philosophical, ethical and aesthetic ramificationsof our communicative strategies.