SATURDAY NIGHT

Chaos Out Of Order

With a background in fine arts and a lot of hacker friends, most of
Bunting's work is recognized in the new media, performance art and hacker
communities. Hailing from Britain, he has travelled most of Europe,
spreading his ideas and discovering new ways of 'performing' his politics.
Always on the verge of getting into trouble with authorities, Bunting never
stays in the same place for more than four or five days. With no fixed
address, he's hard to keep track of. Even his email address changes monthly. 

Bunting delights in creating chaos in everyday life. A couple of years ago,
he disseminated a whole slew of public pay phone numbers from King's Cross
station in London. He sent the numbers out on the net and asked people call
the numbers at a specific time. Then he went to the station and stood back
to watch as people tried to figure out what was going on. Now he's aiming to
compile a worldwide directory of pay phones.

Bunting will be here in a few weeks for Toronto 7A11D: JAWA: Machines That
Perform, a performance festival that begins Aug. 7. He's hitting the subways
to subvert surveillance cameras.

"If I find a surveillance system disagreeable and then smash it, I end up
reinforcing that they need them," he says. "You have to create illusions by
adding information that's not really there." 

Bunting plans to paint posters on the subway floor that bounce off into the
camera to make it look like people are standing around the station. "There
will be 20 of me on camera all around the subway systems. Nobody will know
if it's me or just a picture."

Bunting's artistic installations are guerrilla tactics for subverting
capitalistic ideals. He has used pirate radio stations, bulletin board
systems, graffiti, the arts and fax machines to get out his message: His
main focus is capitalistic exploitation of the net, and surveillance.

Bunting says subversion is a good tactic for anyone who's feeling controlled
-- even children. "Being oppositional is never effective," he says. One day
he hopes to write a book telling children how to subvert their parents. "You
have to create a void. Use fictional characters and events. For example, in
school, you could create a fake pupil who's always absent so that the
teacher is busy with that problem, rather than concentrating on you."

The Internet, he says, is a wonderful forum if you use it right. "You have
to fight your enemies using the same weapons." 

Watch for him around town in the next couple of weeks or check out
www.irational.org on the web. The index page is all in UNIX files: nothing
flashy or super high bandwidth from this nomad. Disinformation, grassroots
or rather root information is where Bunting is at. In a way, he's even
subverted himself.

Ingrid Heim