X marks the Spot: Portals to Place

  When Josephine Bosma entitled her 1997 interview with Heath Bunting "Street
  Artist, Political Net Artist or Playful Trickster?"  she linked together
  some of the key issues at work in Bunting's tactical use of the Net. Were
  the word 'or' to be replaced with 'and', dispensing with the false problem
  of choosing between three not incommensurate identity types, we would have
  a description of the artist which hits upon the crucial attribute of his
  art: the creation of friction between real and virtual space through the
  indeterminacy of play.

  In the same interview Bunting discusses a work that he would later title
  CCTV - World Wide Watch. His deadpan tone conveys very well the essence of
  the tactical mode; at once self-unimportant, throw-away and serious:

  "At the moment I am working on a closed circuit television camera project
  across the Internet whereby you can watch various city centres in various
  countries of the world, for instance Tokyo, Dublin, LA and London. Each of
  these cameras is linked to a webpage and on that webpage you are encouraged
  to watch these street locations for various crimes. If you see anything,
  you can type the details into the text box, click a button and this
  information will be sent directly via fax to the local police station, for
  instance at Leicester Square. So it's somehow encouraging people to police
  themselves and save the police some labour, so they don't have to watch
  other people."

  In the final version of the project, Bunting confronts the viewer with a
  sequence of near-aerial CCTV views of 5th Avenue, New York; Broadgate,
  Coventry; the Marktplatz, Guetersloh, Germany and Oviedo, Spain. But the
  viewer's giddy sense of voyeuristic power, derived from the ability to view
  four city scenes simultaneously, laid out in their unconscious legibility
  for our scopophilic gratification, is undercut by the invitation to
  intervene. The viewer is confronted with the choice of converting the
  implicit power of the gaze into its explicit enactment (I am choosing to
  believe that the fax numbers are what Bunting says they are); a choice
  which splits the viewer's subject position between an occupation of the
  legible space of strategy and the tactical and partial space of everyday
  life. The contradictory nature of the spaces conflated in this work (both
  God-like and on-the-ground) - a spatial multiplicity which the Internet's
  networked expanse and digital malleability indifferently accommodates -
  becomes unbearable when the viewer's potential affectiveness looms into
  view. In contrast to the Digital Hijack where the hoped for moment of
  awakening is instantaneously neutralised by virtue of its inability to step
  outside the dominant simulacral economy, Bunting shocks the viewer awake
  with the unsettling possibility of cutting through the simulacral field of
  equivalences and precipitating an intervention into the particularities of
  place and its inhabitants. The viewer is accustomed to occupying both
  subject positions independently of each other. It is also usual to forego
  agency when occupying the God-like vantage point (perhaps a precondition of
  the fantasy of legibility?) and legibility when occupying the 'writerly'
  position of Wandersmann. In short, the shock delivered here is the shock of
  occupying the position of power where legibility and agency are combined.

  But if CCTV - World Wide Watch playfully and critically insinuates the look
  of power, it also implies the reciprocal gaze of its subject. Next to the
  form which, in its generic simplicity, invites the viewer to reflexively
  dash off a note to the ever attentive forces of law and order, are set the
  words:

  "Improve self policing
  with further absented
  police force."

  This exhortation to internalise the burden of policing and thus further
  atomise and virtualise the forces of discipline until no external display
  of power remains, ironically articulates the ultimate Foucauldian dystopia;
  a dystopian order against which de Certeau's antidiscipline of tactics is
  practiced. Here the viewer, who can perhaps be cast as unconsciously
  assisting the spread and perfection of Foucault's 'political technologies
  of the body' by incorporating them seamlessly into the fabric of his/her
  life, is confronted not merely with those technologies but their
  articulated discourse. As with the conflation of spaces and gazes, CCTV
  also collapses the normally silent functioning of the technology with its
  explicit enunciation. Here we have a concise example of the self-conscious
  adoption of tactics which differs significantly from those tactics
  described by de Certeau.

  De Certeau's point of departure is Foucault's analysis of the historical
  development of a diffuse set of disciplinary techniques (an overwhelmingly
  optical and panoptic mode of observational discipline) whose development he
  traces back to the advent of the rationalist discourses of the
  Enlightenment. An origin from which, Foucault argues, the technical
  modalities increasingly diverge:

  "Foucault thus distinguishes two heterogeneous systems. He outlines the
  advantages won by a political technology of the body over the elaboration
  of a body of doctrine. But he is not content merely to separate two forms
  of power. By following the establishment and victorious multiplication of
  this 'minor instrumentality,' he tries to bring to light the springs of
  this opaque power that has no possessor, no privileged place, no superiors
  or inferiors, no repressive activity or dogmatism, that is almost
  autonomously effective through its technological ability to distribute,
  classify, analyse and spatially individualise the object dealt with. (All
  the while, ideology babbles on!)SThis gallery of diagrams has the twin
  functions of delimiting a social stratum of practices that have no
  discourse and of founding a discourse on these practices."

  So as the techniques of power lock tight, so too does their ubiquitous hold
  over society grow silent. But, ponders de Certeau, once their silent
  history has been uncovered and their primary (panoptic) technique
  articulated, have they then fallen into decline? Was their successful
  ascendance not a consequence of their silent technical advances and lack of
  dogma? This questioning causes de Certeau to cast around for other
  'technological practices', which lack the coherence of the panopticon,
  which may be scattered, heterogeneous and 'polytheist' but whose silence or
  existence outside dicourse endows them with the potential to "produce a
  fundamental diversion within the institutions of order and knowledge."  And
  herein lies the paradox of de Ceteau's undertaking, namely to articulate a
  practice of resistance whose very status as such, not to mention efficacy,
  relies on its resistance to articulation. But for de Certeau, it seems, the
  guarantor of their survival is their imbrication in the very heart of
  regulatory disciplines such as consumption. They constitute the unerasable
  indexes of alternative or bygone historical technological practices which
  return, like the repressed, in the disciplinary regime which attempts to
  dispel them.

  A project by Bunting that seems to lie closer to this understanding of
  tactics, and yet perhaps exemplifies the difference of tactical media all
  the more, is his X Project  begun in 1996(?). Combining his predilection
  for wandering about city streets and  tagging in chalk with his interest in
  the emergent social space of the Net, Bunting began a systematic programme
  of tagging the URL 'www.irational.org/x' in strategic places, primarily in
  London but also in other sites such as Bath, Amsterdam and Berlin. If a
  passer by, on observing the URL, was moved to look it up on the Net they
  found a white page with minimal information on it. Underneath a JPEG
  derived from the chalked tag are the following three questions: "Where did
  you see this chalked? (Please include city and country)"; "Why do you think
  it was done?" and "Who do you think did it?" On filling out and submitting
  the questionnaire, a page which collates all the answers is downloaded.
  Today there are some 300 odd entries. The sites that the artist chose to
  tag were by no means random either; in London Bunting primarily chose
  bridges (Hungerford and Waterloo) as well as international sites of
  significance to new media culture such as Clink St. (the site of an
  independent media laboratory Backspace where Bunting and Rachel Baker often
  worked), the Hub in Bath and De Waag in Amsterdam. It is likely that the
  bridges indicate the notion of crossing between zones - the central
  activity of X Project - and that the media centres also intimate concerted
  initiatives to depart local geography and enter into series of remote
  collaborations.

  By means of the chalk tag, Bunting has created a portal between virtual and
  physical space. In contrast to Digital Hijack, X Project taps into the
  contingencies of wandering. Rather than manufacturing a shock for the
  viewer, caught unawares in the midst of their impervious passage through
  the regularised space of the search engine, Bunting positions his tag to be
  caught by the corner of the eye in the midst of an awkward climb up the
  steep steps of a bridge or in the nooks and crannies of back streets. The
  chalked tag catches the walker in the midst of a tactical traversal and the
  project's completion relies upon the viewer's alertness and curiosity to
  pursue this index of virtual space in the midst of an actual place. Rather
  than reinforcing the sense of the homogeneous order of virtual space,
  Bunting hybridises physical and virtual space and creates a tear not only
  in the latter but also in the former. Interestingly, it is by making this
  incision in the self-containment of each - or rather making explicit the
  impossibility of such self-containment - that the contingent and
  self-erasing nature of wandering can be mapped, recorded and co-ordinated.
  This suggests the potential of a view from above that is created from below
  and a reversal of the power implied in this same reversal. Rather than the
  fantasy of legibility implying a disengagement from the everyday, here
  legibility is created by and for the walker, the subject of the gaze.
  Perhaps this text is written blind, but it promises the eventual
  possibility of being read. The series of correspondences which 'emerge' on
  the website brings into being the consciousness of the cumulative potential
  of individual wandering. Tactical media art is here shown to be not only
  the coming to self-consciousness of those silently resistant ways of
  operating, but also the power resident in this coming to consciousness. A
  recognition that precipitates an aggregation, and hence the realisation of
  the power which these myriad movements compose. The first in a long series
  of answers to the question "Why do you think it was done?" encapsulates
  this notion very well: "to collide the known with the emergent."