The relativity of boundaries: art, technology, and visual culture in the work of Pat Badani.

A young woman born in Israel to African American parents, and who has lived in Chicago since the age of seven, believes it is important to know her own history, and by taking that history with her, any location can become "home." She stated, "Home is acknowledging your present and past, combining those two and making something comfortable for yourself." A Catholic priest from New Zealand on a residency in Chicago said, "It's not about 'home' later: the big pill in the future. I don't work on the principle of 'no matter how tough it is here it's going to be better over there.' Ultimately, the journey of life is to find happiness by changing from being selfish to being totally otherish."

BETWEEN ETHNOGRAPHIC PRACTICES AND NET.ART

The method Badani has used is similar to collaborative approaches in "community videos" made in the late 1970s and 1980s in the United States, Australia, and Europe such as "Headwaters TV" at Appalshop Media Center in Kentucky. These works emerged from the initiative of a community or a political group. In such collective works the film crew is usually comprised of a fairly large number of people. Today, digital media productions also often comprise a large number of collaborators who come together from different specialities and locations to work on these time-based pieces that give rise to the notion of multiple (or even dissolved or distributed) authorship; a type of practice that has gained new currency. Collaborative works aspire to egalitarian conditions and multiple opportunities for interaction--an extension of geographical spaces for action and reflection. Here, too, as in Badani's experiments, various positions of responsibility and power still remain, such as the continuation of the projects through long periods contingent upon the commitment and persistence of the initiator.

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Another aspect of the project is its affinity to "oral culture" as a means of acquiring knowledge and possibly creating and representing "other" meanings. The artist's aim was to create a democratic context for how knowledge is produced, exchanged, and stored so information may be reused and recombined to create the world in a different light. The heterogenous character of the samples in Badani's digital platform and the presentation of the documentary material in an on-line, non-linear environment prevent us from taking her "talking heads" for granted. New meanings are gleaned as each user/visitor selects different samples in the database.

Lastly, the work is inscribed within net.art projects, an emerging practice in the late 1990s where on-line visitors, or "users," have the possibility to interact and participate by changing or adding material. One part of the project often takes place outside of the internet where interaction is placed at the service of communication experiments aimed at engaging reflection and dialogue, as in the case of Badani's project.

RELATIVITY OF BOUNDARIES?

Badani's project holds up a mirror to technologically mediated modes of communication today and to their impact on issues of identity. "Where are you from?_Stories" is not only a question addressing the relativity of physical national boundaries or of the virtual Web-world (understood since the 1990s as a space with no national boundaries). It is also a question addressing how identity is expressed in recent young user platforms like myspace.com or mypix.ch. In the latter instances, it seems important that users manifest their virtual identity and that they position themselves within a distinct location, building an identity through body and nation--a complete self-branding. (4) What appears here reflects a "double bind" phenomenon, observable also in the movement of people within the European community, because the concept of boundaries has become relative in a geopolitical and ideological sense, thanks to the Schengen contracts allowing free movement of people across Europe. (5) However, on the one hand there is an attempt to make boundaries between countries more open, while on the other hand, border control has elaborated stricter measures through so-called "early controls" or biometrical controls. Further, a "double bind" is also evidenced in a vision of openness and interconnectedness counterbalanced with the fear of identity loss and a wish to reaffirm "local" individuality--a pull in the opposite direction of post-national citizenship visions that hinders its development while circumstances continue to change through and around us.

FLAVIA CAVIEZEL studied (visual) anthropology, film, and constitutional law at the Universities of Berne and Zurich. She is a video artist, researcher, and lecturer, and lives in Switzerland.

NOTES 1. Pat Badani's "Where are you from?_Stories" can be experienced at www.hometransfer.org/where/stories.html. 2. For a discussion on culture see Arjun Appadurai's "Concept of Difference, A Contrastive Rather than a Substantive Property of Certain Things," in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 1996), 11-16. 3. See www.koelnischerkunstverein.de/migration/english/content/projekt.html and the associated exhibition catalog Projekt Migration. 4. For details about the (self-) representation of young people on Internet communities and generally on the notion of body identity, see the research project at www.ith-z.ch/brands/index/home and the magazine gepflegt krass (planned for Spring 2008). 5. For details about Schengen and the Free Movement of People Across Europe see www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?id=333.