Brandon Kayle; Bunting Heath
«The Status Project: by Kayle Brandon/Heath Bunting»

The Status Project.
A collaboration between Kayle Brandon and Heath Bunting.

Kayle Brandon - http://irational.org/kayle/
Heath Bunting - http://irational.org/heath/

Funded by Helix Arts and The New Museum

This project will explore what it is to be a human being in the United Kingdom terms of social economic law.

The core of this project would be a relational database of personal legal status and their dependencies.

For example: To be birth registered.

We would locate this data online, provide users profiles and develop a route planner to guide people along the shortest path (critical path) to their desired status destination.

From this dataset we will be able to provide many customised interfaces.

We initially intend to offer services in the following forms:

A guide to consolidation or dissolution of identities. A 'how-to' cross legal boundaries and attain status with minimal effort and resources (e.g. how to get a passport using combined junk identities such as video club cards or supermarket loyalty cards starting with nothing but money.)

Such a guide could also be used in the reverse as a form of dataflage to dissolve an existing identity.

We are currently considering a game interface that would be based around sticker book collections.

Unlike most games though, this would be played out for real in both the street and the existing institutional datasets.

Identity reproduction (reproduction to create another you). Enabling two identities to merge creating a 'new being' and single identity.

A legal, professional and social identity merger (marriage).

This will obviously raise issues around class and inheritance.

Many of our statuses are defined before we are even the twinkle in our parents eyes.

Visual representations of the 'new being' would be created along-side the economic and social representation.

Personal/ community disaster simulation and recovery.
Back up and action plans in event of disaster.

How do you recover from loss of legal/ economic status as a community or individual ?

This guide would provide a detour map for real or simulated personal and community catastrophes.


The Status Project - Statement.

Profit demands the flexible mechanisation of the consumption force.

I am a child of a crack cocaine smoking mother.

You have not been replaced by a machine, you are the machine.

You are addressable at home by post.

We must be prepared to adjust our machinic identities on command.

We are able to provide proof of true facial likeness.

Change your look, replace components, change you.

He is a Bournemouth & west Hampshire water customer.

The status project attempts to disassemble macro social engineering.

She is cohabiting with a partner who was recently in receipt of income based job seeker's allowance for 26 weeks or more.

You are nothing more than a circuit of interconnecting states.

They are committed to endeavours.

To enable total reconstruction beyond the limits of the permissible.

It is in possession of a television set.

Walk through walls, fly through the air, breath under water.


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