1998 - Readme (Own, Be Owned Or Remain Invisible ) - Heath Hunting

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THE TELEGRAPH, WIRED 50: Heath Bunting

Heath Bunting is on a mission. But don't asking him to define what it is. His CV (bored teen and home computer hacker in 80s Stevenage, flyposter, graffiti artist and art radio pirate in Bristol, bulletin board organiser and digital culture activist (or, his phrase, artivist) in London (is replete with the necessary qualifications for a 90s sub-culture citizen but what s interesting about Heath is that if you want to describe to someone what he actually does there s simply no handy category that you can slot him into.

If you had to classify him, you could do worse than call him an organiser of art events. Some of these take place online, some of them in RL, most of them have something to do with technology, though not all. One early event that hit the headlines was his 1994 Kings Cross phone-in, when Heath distributed the numbers of the telephone kiosks around Kings Cross station using the Internet and asked whoever found them to choose one, call it at a specific time and chat with whoever picked up the phone. The incident was a resounding success; at 6 pm one August afternoon, the are was transformed into "a massive techno crowd dancing to the sound of ringing telephones", according to Heath.

More recently, in collaboration with his mother an ex-Greenham activist and bus driver he set up a bogus Glaxo website which mimicked the real one and asked employees to send in their pets for vivisection and experimentation. Glaxo were alarmed enough to issue a public statement, and have the offending site removed.

But why has this one-time graffiti artist and stained glass window apprentice embraced the net? When I was on the street I was always looking for new tools, and I was always looking to do battle with the front-end though I hesitate to say the front end of what, exactly. For me the real excitement of the net was that it exposed many different types of people. Also, the new medium gave someone like Heath who had little or no resources - the chance to engage head on with large-scale organisations. I've always attacked big things. When I was a kid I always used to pick fights with people that were bigger than me. I suppose I've carried on doing it, though now I"m fighting multinationals, or large belief systems. I grew up in Stevenage, too, which although it seems very pleasant jobs, grass, good transport it is in fact an incredibly violent place. It s to do with the top-down plan of the whole place and all the areas are designated, for example. I think that s where I got my hatred of large forms. People think it's a shame that there's no central body in London. I think that's great.

This year is the one in which Heath has really begun to get recognition by the burgeoning European digital arts scene that conference hops its way around the continent from one year's end to the next. This is the year, he says, that net art is going to be absorbed into electronic art in a big way. But although his travel schedule is beginning to look completely insane. Heath has been doing a bit of conference organising of his own. Last year, pissed off with gatherings like Digital Dreams, which cost thousands of pounds to stage and gave no one access to any of the big names he put together the Netmare conference (TK), were there was no distinction between audience and speaker; at the moment, he is organising a series of informal lecture meetings called Anti with E at the Backspace cyberlounge in Winchester Wharf. Already, though, Heath sees the possibilities for staging really challenging events on the net decreasing. All those things which the Net initially exposed are now being covered over. The real form of control is not police confiscating servers but financial dictates. The potential for different possibilities is being diminished by money. For example, a lot of people who used to do challenging work are business people in their own right now and this is effectively a form of self-censorship. Also, and this is only a suspicion, but a strong one, search engines are beginning to deliberately ignore certain kinds of content. The sites of jodi.org, to take one case, were refused by Yahoo because they were meaningless by Yahoos standards.

With this in mind, Heath is dreaming up ways to sabotage other technologies like CCTV and marketing databases. But he is not going to go around smashing cameras that's not his style: by smashing cameras you only reinforced the system. You need to get people to begin to doubt the system. That's what I do - I create disbelief. The idea is to introduce bad data into such systems using techniques of illusion, so that they cease to become trustworthy - optical illusions for cameras, inconsistencies and false identities for the databases. Will it work? Judge for yourself: Heath is demonstating his new techniques in Lancaster in June; for details, see his website http://www.irational.org

James Flint

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Wayback Machine https://web.archive.org/web/19980110070725/http://www.irational.org/_readme.html