THE GUARDIAN (P.14) Sept 11/96

Imogen O'Rourke Meets Terrorist Heath Bunting


Heath Bunting and his mum set up a bogus Glaxo website and
send workers out on ficticious jobs.

"That's me on my roof having a think. And that's me with my
art. Oh? and the big pic is me and Mum- she's a sabotore,
too."



Art and sabotage have gone hand in hand since Marcel Duchamp
pasted a little moustache on the Moni Lisa's ever-inviting
lips. So it's only logical in an  electronic age, that a
hacker can be a conceptual artist at the same time.

Heath Bunting, a 29-year-old cyber-artist with claims to
special powers of telepathy, has propagated his multimedia
communications projects all round the globe (his emailing
list would wrap around it twice), via the Internet, fax,
phone post, pirate radio and even graffiti. He dabbles in a
bit of digital terrorism too (he could hold several
international corporations to ransom) and gets regular
messages from ordinary people telling him he has changed
their lives. He affects chaos theory on a daily basis. In
1990, Heath was just another artist trying to scavenge a
living in London with a qualification in stained glass
windows and a dodgy haircut. In 1993 the Institute of
Contemporary Arts contacted him. They told him to stop
sending his artwork to them because he was wasting their fax
paper.

In 1996 they contacted him again. They wanted him to talk at
their trendy Tactical Media conference (part of their
Aesthetics of the Future programme) about his latest
project, sabotaging the pharmaceuticals giant Glaxo. What
happened in those three years is something of a quantum
leap.

His CV (which he sends out complimentarily together with
printouts of his work to non-wired journalists) doesn't shed
much light on the matter. At 13, Heath built his own
computer from a kit and spent his time BMXing around Bristol
and "surfing hard edges of the street". He became obsessed
with communication, or lack of it, after his sister Julie
was born with severe autism.

Indeed, he believes himself to be mildly autistic. He worked
for BT for a couple of years got sacked several times and
did a iot of graffiti. Then "sometime during the 20th
century," he writes, he embraced "the electromagnetic
struggle" and "chose success".

That moment was in 1992 when he began a computerised
bulletin board called CyberCafe. The idea was to create a
focal point for the electronic community in London, from
hackers to housewives. The site became a forum for would-be
anarchists giving and receiving tips on writing viruses and
bomb-making. The Net media hot-footed it down to his web
site and Heath's King's Cross phone project in 1994 received
wide coverage: At 6pm on a hot afternoon in August, he got
everyone on his mailing list to dial the numbers of 20 phone
booths in the station, at random or in a pattern, and to
strike up a conversation with computers and passers-by. The
result, he reported, was "a massive techno crowd dancing to
the sound of ringing telephones".

CyberCafe exists as a permanent play space for old, new and
continuing art experiments. If you dropped in now, you could
call up a site specific public phonebox somewhere around the
world and, theoretically, chat to a pimp from San Franscisco
or an Inuit. Or there's the message service, which was set
up as part of his commission for the IC95 exhibition in
Japan last year (for which he was paid one million Yen
around £6,000), whereby if you fill in the multiple choice
boxes provided you can fax or send a postcard message to
anyone around the world. It could even be a placard to be
held up at an airport or station, eg: "To the can in a suit
in Shinjuku station. What's it all about?ÑGeoff in London."
It's hardly Interflora.

His latest projects, which take the form of questionnaires
about their hates/dislikes and what people would do if they
were to die tomorrow, sound more like a front for a consumer
database. Clues to his meaning are hidden in the condensed
text, which reads like verse smattered with hypertextual
meaning Ñ "Desire for unification via language" is a typical
example.

Heath has been called many things: Cyberguru,
art-provocateur, anarchist, even Robin Hood of the
Technoworld (a title he earns from teaches people to raid
corporate skips and make use of old hardware and inventing
an "Internet beggar" which hangs around corporate sites
begging hunks of plastic). But he hates labels.

The guru looks pretty ordinary in surfing shorts and old
T-shirt drinking herbal tea at his flat in Soho with his
Mum. They are discussing her latest clash with the security
guards at Glaxo at the pharmaceutical giant's headquarters
in Stevenage. Anne, an ex-Greenham activist and bus driver,
switched Heath on to the idea of using the Net for
environmental sabotage this year. Together they set up a
bogus Glaxo website using the chairman's portrait, signature
and seal from her shareholder's literature and a picture of
a fluffy rabbit asking employees to send in their nice pets
for cutting up. It has been found and destroyed but only
after scaring Glaxo into a public statement that it was not
alarmed.

The latest plan is to send members of staff out on false
assignments, using the database Heath has built up on
employees. "The idea is to waste their time and money," he
says with a voice that is half physics teacher, half
schoolboy. "Reality is maudlin. It's good fiction to think
you are fighting against these big monster -like
corporations . . ." Anne raises her eyebrows and says she
hope he won't get in trouble. She remembers having to rescue
him from the police station for putting a fake bomb in a
friend's car as an art project.

But is it art or activism? "I'm not the activist. Mum's the
one who climbs over fences. If you called me anything it
would be an artivist, no, make that an an-artivist, adding
in the anarchy," he postulates. Heath likes inventing new
words and fancies himself as a pirate, surfing the
electronic waves and subverting any text that comes his way.
Better still a magician: "Most people don't understand
contemporary art. Normal people understand magic shows," he
says.

Heath adjourns to his studio to show what he calls his more
serious art as opposed to his "public work which is just
trying to create a space where other people can play
around." Velocity is his largest inner-city project. "It's
about the ideology of speed and social political history
over periods of time as  deduced from the streets. If you go
on a road without any signs it's a nice space, but if you go
on a road with white lines it makes people go faster
outlawing low velocity presence like loitering. I see
grafflti as inverting the language of the street signs," he
explains. "Most people go too fast, full of future plans."

He still enjoys working in what he calls the self-help
media: "I love wandering around the city, with a piece of
chalk in hand, doing graffiti. It's just suits and
anarchists. I try to poke holes in the perfect business
world. In Tokyo, the businessmen loved my work. They have a
rigid language system and like someone to play games with
it."

His newest text-based work, The Pleasure Project, is a
reaction against being rushed. "Many things prevent us from
seeing things as they are. It's about seeing, perceiving,
feeling." The first stage to the pleasure epiphany is
gaining what he calls Presence: "It's being here and now.
You have to be static in order to observe pleasure. You have
to make yourself vulnerable."

His research has involved "a lot of eating, sleeping and
fucking Ñ I hope I can get a government grant", which has
been expressed in an international postard and grafflti
project and Project X, a kind of mystery treasure hunt which
he says has been ruined because the media joined in.

So what does it all mean, if any thing? Is art the same as
anarchy? "Art is a formal language that is ever expanding
and needs to subvert its more simplistic past," says Heath
methodically. He and his circle of self-anointed
"Net.artists" have been inventing their own critical canon
by hijacking the words of famous art critics and putting
them to their own uses. In the words of Apollinaire and a
Dutch hacker called Akke, "Net.art ... is a noble and
restrained art ready to under take the vast subjects for
which post modernism has left media artists today totally
unprepared."


Net. artists of the future may, like The Hacker in Gore
Vidal's Live From Golgotha, rewrite the gospels and turn
prophets into paedophiles just for fun. Can't wait.

Heath Bunting will help form the alternative Orange Order,
the Lemon Order, in Dublin on September 21 at the Paleo
Psycho Pop exhibition, and will be defacing the Canon Marsh
Station House in Bristol on September 27.

imogen o'rourke