Reflections on Personal Identities

So the time has come to round off this project on identities for the time being.

My next planned piece of artwork to represent personal identity has been forming...

I think a great metaphor to represent Personal Identity in a contemporary way would be to use a subtly recognised symbol of identity, that being the finger-print, but formed from the shredded personal information that is held on our behalf, but also with which we are bombarded with throughout our daily lives.  By this I mean the reliance on the use of physical copies of Bank Statements, Utility Bills, Council Rates, Mortgage Statements, printed emails and personally addressed junk surface mail...

The current 'safety' messages constantly played out by our western societies' major authorities, (i.e. the creators and keepers of all these records and references to our personal identity), is to "SHRED IT"...

... The irony of identity theft is that it is because of the very nature of those same authorities' practices, by seemingly endless duplication, that makes it more possible for identity theft to occur.

Equally, those same organisations of power and authority, hold so much electronic data on the individual citizen that it is impossible to know 'who knows you'...

An individual is constantly leaving a trail of electronic presence through their very existence in this world, the level of which is hard to comprehend.  This trail is recorded in the exchanges we make with any type of electronic transaction, from the more intentional or conscious  "swiping" of an identity card, to payment transactions using a banking or credit-card, to the more insidious tracking of an individual's mobile phone, - each having it's own unique identity, which can be located through triangulation of mobile transmitter cells and collaboration between the organisational and authorities' databases.

We are in the Orwellian era, post 1984.
...  "Big Brother" does not need to watch you anymore, 
... he already knows were you are.

(Reference to "Big Brother" taken from George Orwell 1903 -1950. Book, 1984; University College London, Library Services,The George Orwell Archive.  As an interesting irony to this project of personal identity, George Orwell was not a real personal identity, the actual name of the author was Eric Blair, the name George Orwell was used as his 'pen-name').

Our electronic trail is left where we have been.  Likewise, where we physically touch any object through the skin of our fingers, so to we leave a trail of our identity through the finger-print.

The symbolization of a finger-print is often associated with that of crime.  The finger-print is regularly used to make connections between verifying an identity with the physical manifestation of an individual human being.  However, few people realize that this verification is not 100% fail-safe.  The accuracy of recognition and verification depends on many factors, in addition to the obvious transposition and mal-administration of records, to fraudulent manufacturing of identities.

The storage of fingerprint identity relies on mathematical de-construction of a copied image, (and possible encryption) for transmission (and storage) of a coded data set.  The onward transmission from the storage device to an authority is likewise coded (and often encrypted) to either be used to verify an individual by the coded form, or possibly 're-constructed' into a likeness of the original image...   At each point in this chain, there is that slight chance of adaptation. Either by accident or human error (such as incorrect mathematical algorithms within computer software that may miss out vital detail), or as a result of purposeful intervention to exploit authorities data records (hacking).

Concept Piece; - Identity-Print, Graham Hadfield 2013

The adjacent concept piece, made from shredded bank statements, utility bills and other electronically stored identity artifacts, on a granite base, is an allusion to our electronic identity, the throw-away culture, our ephemeral existence, the labyrinth of our journey through life, and finally the granite permanence of our identity left in records after we are dead.

Shortly after I created this concept image of cross-cut shredded bank statements, I simply blew them away into the bin. That event in itself is something to reflect upon.


Footnote;  - The image depicted above is merely an unfinished test piece to evaluate the concept. The final work should provide a more readily identifiable representation of a human finger-print, however, this concept-piece provides a visual assurance that such a final piece can be crafted.