1.

Objects: Two bunkers cum photobooths cum time
machines with two-way surveillance.

They are also, to me, like blemishes or eruptions from the
ground below, where here, ground is to be taken in a rounded
sense to include both geophysical as well as discursive
values. The vestiges of earth upon and about them work as
traces, but also as camouflage. Either way the earth reinforces in a similar fashion insofar as earth elementally
fortifies construction in areas both geophysical and symbolic.
Of course, as blemish or eruption, the earth is like traces of
skin broken away, and indeed there is a -general sense of
breaking away from earth literally and figuratively. The site
Passport Sized Interference, an installation involving two sites linked by live
internet video, took place simultaneously at the Museum of Science and
Industry, Manchester, UK and at the Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International
Airport from October 1 to October 31, 1996.

locations (see 2. Locations) of the booths would seem to
reassure this indication. However, as bunkers they are all
the better dug in for it, and so not so much hailing from earth
as fortified by it and lodged within it—using it, in effect.
Either way it is a disruption of earth (ground).

S3

attacking force within hits with alterity and absence.

Of

This disruption has a couple of trajectories (or conse-

course, this is done with a degree of humour. Or at least I

quences). It is at once the indication of a disruption unso-

find it funny. If you go into a photobooth and end up with

licited and damaging and a perpetrator of it in defense. In the

someone else's photo, how do you feel about it? I suppose it

service of earth (the concrete) it is an active/reactive

could be cause for concern; it may even challenge your basic

machine engaged at some aggressive level with institutional

sense of identity. But what if the whole idea was to grab a

abstractions, particularly around notions of space and time.

print-out of the other person to begin with? The booth

The bunker, after all, is a martial housing (and this, then (?),

appearing to be a photobooth (although granted, a highly

would be a martial art).

militant looking one) is a disarming feature of what in fact is

Ground departure is shown as implicated with respect to

speak). Of course persons in either booth can play tit for tat

an intrusion and theft of someone else's identity (so to

motive, despite recent cybernetic rhetoric making similar

in this respect so the central agent (or agency) of surveil-

departures with claims to structurally undetermined and non-

lance is once again vague; and once again this is appropri-

complicit relations to ethics. Whether or not this latter claim

ate—at least insofar as it draws to my mind Foucault-like

is correct, probable or possible, it is to specific institutions

notions

who ride the wave of this discourse's euphoria that the piece

surveillance/control/management mechanisms (eg. you are

is addressed. In those arenas, departure and flight from

your own liquor control board, or you are at once prison,

(the) ground is the occasion for a more efficient territorial-

warden, guard and prisoner). Perhaps, then, the point is the

ization of communications and general socio-political man-

readily acceptable level of amusement contained within the

agement, made more fluid by embracing at a discursive level

process of getting someone else on file (as it were). That

more ethereal notions of time and space while at a corporate

is, the banality of it all bespeaks the degree to which a

of

individual

internalizations

of

social

85

level rutting for control of as many entry points and metering
the duration of as much occupation as possible. The institutions per se remain vague, which is important to do;
although there are specific sites (see 2. Locations) which
belong to specific corporations, it is not, it would seem,
about name-calling, so much as it is about the institutional
machinery—or what might be oxymoronically called the
corporate spirit—itself.

The object as photobooth is surveillance under the guise of
narcissism. Like a trojan horse invited into expectation of
self-gratification and the reassurance of presence, its

cynical relationship towards inhabiting space (to the very idea

the future or the past; technically you look into the present

of presence) has become socially endemic.

(i.e. because the booths are located in different time zones
and are crossed into one another—see 2. Locations). In this

The presentation of this relation remains as the bunker does

respect, the technical remains interstitial; it remains between

interstitial inasmuch as it is at once the condition or conse-

time lines.

It also manages geographical coordinates as

quence of an exterior program/agent/agency as well as a

copresent; it is the same space though its content shows a

practitioner of the same strategy. It inverts the relationship of

variable. You are both there and not there, you and someone

presence and absence (taking the strategy of digital territori-

else. And the space you are in is both where/when you are

alizing which offers you a presence or comfort zone in

and where/when you are not. Officially, this is displacement;

emptiness and flipping it to secure the presence of that

technically, it is fusion.

emptiness) at a structural level which results in an ideological expose.

Time is as much subject to property rights as space. Perhaps
the more unbounded by borders the globalization of com-

There is an inside view and an outside view. The interior is

munication pretends to be, the more specific, secured and

personal, presenting another body (if there happens to be

local the borders actually are.

one in the booth at the time), the outside one is contextual—
presenting a view of your space superimposed within their
space. Of course if no one resides in the booth at the time

2.

Locations: One in a museum of science and tech-

you look, you see your own space emptied—you see your

nology, the other in the departure lounge of an inter-

context without your identity. This, as it turns out, may be a

national airport.

rather radical theory. Identity is not context bound/specific
When

The two locales are copresent within an official time zone

elements are freed up (so to speak) like this they become

any more than context is identity bound/specific.

difference of 5 hours. The booth as an installation/eruption

more fluid—and thence (it would seem) easier to manipu-

within an archive (i.e. the museum)—granted by gatekeep-

late (both for you and someone/thing else).

ers of this organization, presumably under the popular and
highly coveted auspices of electronic interactive media art).

The object as time-machine is more circumstantial; it is a

Proprietary objects reflective of the past and which harbour

by-product of the booth as surveillance machine. It presents

promise for the future. Time as property. Time, therefore, as

a view to another locale which in the logic of the piece as a

space. Time/space as a relation which begs narrative (and

whole presents an interstitial time frame—between an official

hence coherence, lineage, proprietorship).

and a technical time. Official and Technical are not the same
here. They challenge one another, but perhaps they do so

The booth as an installation/eruption upon a flight platform

while also reinforcing one another. Officially, you look into

(i.e. within the departure lounge of an international airport—

B7

and of a capital city I would add). Sanctioned as is the other
location by a municipal (local) directory serving an international (global) interest. The booths are physically located
within these specific areas but they operate between them.
This is appropriate inasmuch as the operations and functional relations of the institutions are both points of departure. In
this respect their specificity as place is meant to be absent—
it's about where they lead to. This structural obfuscation is
borne by the booths as the burden of the locations.

Presence as appearance rendered as fiction is an operation
which can serve interests motivated by gain using false
premises (pun intended). Presence as so blatantly announced
by the booths creates friction (over fiction). Of course, it is
still made up (insofar as it is informed with any portance)
but it differs in that its shifting operation—its occupation
between spaces and times—highlights its present effects.

as

Michael Boyce is a writer, videographer, musician, and media
artist with a Ph.D. in philosophy, communications
and
political science. His interest lies in the dynamics of the
relationships between the prosaic and poetic.