At 02:35 am, on March the 6th 1973, I began my participation with a loud, tortuous scream. I remember it was during Carnival, a Tuesday. This was ultimately my decision, or at least I thought it was… I was in control and screaming was my statement. I did not realize at the time that they had sucked me in long before I even existed…
A biological apparatus interwoven into unified matter: my pinkish wrinkled flesh was all that could be registered with the naked eye. A little later my progenitors went to the official organization with an official paper from an official offspring-institution and officially registered me: It was then that I started to exist.
I promised all of them a glorious future in exchange for this privilege. They could not know that more then two decades later I would flee the country in fragments, as an ungrateful player of the game. I was also given something called a name – or better still a cumbersome five names – and was expected to react to the annunciation of this assemblage of letters. This was all part of the deal.
Even when so small (weighing only 3 kilos and measuring 50 cm) and not yet awake to the world, this ‘package’ was already active in the game of give and take: my progenitors profited from my existence. They were rewarded financially and invested in fine-tuning me into a fully participative and productive unit. It took time and energy to break from such parasitic dependency – an intricate and traumatic process that lasted some 24 years. I did not always collaborate.
In 1982, halfway through the process of emancipation, I received my first official being-card. It was an event: queuing and filling in numerous forms, aiming to become an individual being, a recognized unit. In exchange for such an honor I happily gave them a printed image of my face and my almost-indelibly inky fingerprints. I also let them record my height, from which they subtracted 3 cm to allow for the heels, even though I was not wearing any. I felt insulted and gracefully complained. I was 1,46m but, for the record, I remain 1,43m.
This was the first glimpse of an understanding that my own will was not the issue. Whilst officially recognizing me as a capable entity it also became clear that they dictated the terms and rules: if they wanted to take 3 cm off my height they were entitled to do so. That and much more… Anyway, I survived.
In 1993 I felt the urge travel to the USA. I requested a mobility-being-card. This in itself was not so difficult, after all, I already had a being-card and I had behaved accordingly, they said. It was just a question of formalizing the mobility issue, to make sure I would return to my country.
Different continent. Different people. Different system. Before being allowed in they asked me lots of questions: Did I ever smuggle drugs? Did I ever commit a crime? Did I have a job? I guess I lied. Everybody commits crimes. In the eyes of the God that watches over my culture even lying to a friend is a crime, which doesn’t leave a lot of options, does it? Anyway, they bought it and I was allowed to visit their country.
In those days it was kind of easy. A lot of words were written down and there were too few people to connect those words to real facts. Certain things came down to trust.
But that was all a long time ago. After the explosion of the towers and a few other events, a growing sense of paranoia led to the implementation of fundamental changes.
Nowadays they don’t need the endorsement of the cards, or any other items that may attest to one’s existence. The codes that the cards carried have long since been integrated into the body itself. We travel light.

Somewhere along the line our bodies became data – a series of genetic, geometric and mathematic codes. It is no longer who we are but what we are – the embodiment of information targeted for analysis.
They scrutinized every layer of information possible from our bodies. In the first stage they took samples of hair, skin, nails, saliva and blood, which were carefully labeled and stored. In the end we became physically exhausted, some of us became weak and anemic. It was an arduous process that required the invention of special places furnished with equipment that performed these tasks. At first people protested. People thought it was intrusive: they could even see into our guts and find what we had for lunch. After a lot of noise, however, people became resigned to the situation, myself included. So I submitted ‘the temple of my soul’ to examination: DNA extraction, eye and iris scans, finger print scans, hand geometry scans, facial recognition, voice recognition, body odor recognition, thermal facial imaging, acoustic head resonance, x-ray body scans… this is called biometrics. For those who lived through these change the new terminology seemed to be taken from a futuristic best seller, but there is nothing futuristic about it, it is the present. They systemized and filed all the information in virtual data-bases which were accessible from anywhere in the world. It became very difficult, if not impossible, to hide or dissimulate. I paid in the supermarket with my hand, accessed my work place using my eye and traveled by exposing my body to x-rays. Sometimes you could choose to trade with your hand, eye or breathe. It sounds primitive but they called it progress.
In earlier times only illiterate people used fingerprints as a form of signature; or they would just take a pen and draw a tremulous “X”. They were labeled the ‘X-people’, a colony of misfits who ended up segregated in remote, isolated, dry places –“out of sight is out of mind” as they say…this was a clever and efficient way of dealing with those uncomfortable, embarrassing and unresolved social problems. In time the concept of the ‘X-people’ was broadened to a variety of undesired social disorders including mental instability or indolence. These anathemas became the ‘EX-people’ and were quickly forgotten – in fact, I don’t know if they still exist.
But to continue with my own story… I became formally responsible for any hair, fragment of skin, or fingerprint I left behind and could be called to account at any time. Once, in the spring of 2015, I carelessly left a hair in a train compartment in which, later that day, somebody got mugged. They came to me for information, and although I had neither witnessed nor participated in the crime I still felt pressured to produce answers – any answer. The absence of an answer implies consent, which is dangerously close to guilt. I developed a strange hyper-sensibility towards issues of personal hygiene and my choice of clothing. I took care to protect my ‘data-body’.
I always thought that being in a certain place at a certain time was merely circumstantial, now I think otherwise: I am responsible beyond my perceptive capacity.
After the incident on the train I became paranoid, scared and suspicious, constantly on the verge of a panic attack. I did not leave my home, did my shopping through the net and used latex gloves even when inside my own flat. I touched nothing and said little. I rapidly reached the bottom. I had to fight back this traumatic event and its existential implications – it was a question of survival. A drastic change was about to take place. Whether driven by instinct or despair, the anxiety I was going through triggered the urge to rebuild and reconnect with myself. It was a tender, delicate and sensitive process.
(In the process) In the course of these events I made some mesmerizing discoveries that made me more alive than ever.
First, there is no such thing as an ‘infallible system’ or ‘powerless beings’. These power/control systems are of human design, perhaps more intelligent than average, but nevertheless corruptible. It is actually an interesting vicious cycle: they implement systems to control us - we subvert them – they improve them and implement further systems, which we undermine again. It goes on forever. It became predictable. And, unless a God-like being intervenes, nothing will change because They are Us. And, after all, we do not believe in God, we believe in Science.
Secondly, the virtualization of existence legitimizes multiplicity and infinity.
We exist in a complex duality. Let me explain: In the process of objectivsation of the body (by scientific, rational appropriation of the body) and subsequent subjectivisation of existence (by detachment of data in relation to the individual-body providing information) a gap is generated.
Within this virtual domain time and space are still, expectant to be played.
It is a swampy, unstable territory that allows for the production and perpetuation of existential landscapes beyond our wildest dreams. It is a place for exchange, reinvention and fabrication. A place where issues like finitude –the contemporary nightmare; the end, death – can be addressed and negotiated. We can live here forever.
Wrongly connecting and manipulating data are just two examples of the strategies of fabrication I have been experimenting with.
Once I understood this dynamic I started to play with it. Everything became clear: from victim I became perpetrator. I made it my occupation to engineer subversive strategies that stated my existence. My goal is not to corrupt the system through major financial fraud (the most common motivation in this area is greed). No, nothing like that, my aim is rather to perform acts of ‘mini-sabotage’ for my own delight, in order to prove that I dictate my own existence.
I was clever enough to refuse surrendering my senses to biological/mathematical rationality; only my corporeal body went through that process, but who cares (biologically speaking) about such a weak, unreliable constituent of our existence when in an insubstantial world one can exist forever? On the contrary, my senses are more sharp and harmonious than ever. I conceal them but do not stifle them. I am an empiricist. I am a contemporary existentialist. To read the world I mainly relay on body language, which is nowadays considered an unworthy language.
They dare to scorn it because body language appeals to immediate cognition and other intuitive mechanisms of perception difficult to systematize. What they cannot control has to be abolished by the use of power. Vanished!
Take gestures for instance, they possess an autonomous intrinsic strength that transcends the individual. Gestures are ephemeral statements of identity. The gesture takes over the individual as a performer immortalizing him/her, not the other way around. But they do not trust them and they are forbidden. So, I learned to manipulate, to simulate, to dissociate and re-associate according to my own agenda. I work swiftly.
I created a ‘toolbox’ of elements that allow identity to be embodied in multiple ways. Depending on my mood, I am sometimes a divorced hairdresser in debt with the bank, sometimes a successful architect building a museum, sometimes an aid worker in an underdeveloped country, sometimes an artist trying to grasp the world. That is all they need to know, what they constantly demand to know. And I give it to them, but now I delineate the terms.
Now, being realistic, I know I wont change the world. I do not want to change it. I actually want to make the best out of it, I consider myself a positivist. I do not victimize myself nor blame them.
My activism is not a protest but a call for harmony between what we are and what we represent. I am not against any system. I couldn’t care less about them. What I do want, and I embrace it as my personal crusade, is to assure my freedom of movement within these control systems, both physically and virtually.
They converted our bodies into information slaves, constantly undermining the world of senses, and they should be conscious of such implications. I demand of them the same responsibility for their actions that they expect from us. If it is a crime it is an honorable one. One that simply claims space for intuition and gaze.
This is the bottom line: for them it does not make a difference. They do not really care about what they control as long as they keep on exercising power. The worse case scenario is that if they cross information they might get confused by my harmless actions. If it comes to that I have succeeded. I would say they deserve it.
So, today I decided to travel. I am actually traveling as we speak. Not the whole of me, though. Since my body is already so fragmented it does not make sense to physically travel anymore. I no longer feel the need, and besides that I consider it slightly dangerous: to much exposure…
I do not go and yet I send myself. It is far more effective when considering my intent of sharing, extending and multiplying the reach of my ‘data-body’. I feel I enrich myself by doing so. It is my way of coping. And I am glad to share my formula with others. Feel free to participate.
Everyday I wake up and make a silent revolution, and in the end of each day I retreat to myself with a smile. Mission accomplished.