The work of Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon is another dramatic change of pace from that of my previous two New Media Artists; it seems that, after this much investigation, there is little thematic or formal that unites this art form as a whole. Bunting and Brandon, both in collaboration and working separately on different projects, assert themselves as highly confrontational and rebellious. Using the internet as the main means, these “artivists” (to use their self-introduced moniker) make websites to present statements about specific governmental restraints and introduce ways for the visitor to thwart them. The project mentioned most exclusively is "BorderXing" (2002), a site introducing methods one could use to cross European borders covertly, since such unauthorized travel is assumed to be illegal.
The website opens as a simple grid (so simple I could likely identify the HTML used for it: it seems to be nothing more than a table with links). This grid includes abbreviations for a series of European nations along the X and Y axis, and where any two tangential countries converge via X and Y in the body grid, a link indicates if these borders have been crossed or not. When either sort of link is clicked, a new site opens, curtly informing the user that this information is for authorized “clients” only, then proceeds to list the users that would be authorized to see this sort of information. The list of eligible viewers was curious to me, as it did not present them alphabetically, but in a jumble of obscure and familiar nations. I was unable to access any information about crossing any sort of border, although clients from Qatar, Antarctica, or Bahrain (to name the first 3) would have been; thus, I have to take the Mark Tribe wiki-site’s word for it when I say that the presented information on border crossing, like the grid and list of eligible visitors, is simple and unadorned. This simplicity and matter-of-fact attitude, this subtlety in presentation begs the viewer to dig more deeply into the presented site and to actually consider it a work of art with a meaning behind it. It would almost seem that this work attempts to make a statement about the internet on a whole: the information made potentially available to any viewer is a potent means of connecting physical places (a rather obvious interpretation of the title "BorderXing"), but the inaccessibility promised to almost every visitor is crippling, making the web experience almost oxymoronic.
It is clear, however, that Bunting and Brandon intend to convey something more. Bunting’s collaborative project with Rachel Baker, the website “SuperWeed,” introduces information about pesticide-resistant plants that can be cultivated at home and released into the wild to prevent further success of GM-products. This work is much more overt in its political intentions (“By releasing SuperWeed 1.0 into the environment long before biotech companies have a suitable fix, you will contribute to large losses in [GM products'] profitability”). If this serves as a definitive example of the intended attitude behind Bunting (and his collaborator’s) work, then one can assume that BorderXing is a similar attempt to use cyberspace to infiltrate (and comment on) the physical world and the restraints around it. the wiki-site made an interesting comparison of works like these to "hacking," web-introduced methods to disrupt the typical functioning of the interconnected physical world-- perhaps to start a chain-reaction change for the betterment of rebels or for the worse of the administrative parties.
Considering all this, I can’t help but think that BorderXing is somewhat oxymoronic itself in its attempts to belligerently react against border control. The site is stated to be endorsed by famous, one might even say bigwig organizations like the Tate Gallery in London and Fondation Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg; this certainly does not support the anticipated attitude of defying social constructions to make a statement. How can this work be truly combative if it is supported by government-endorsed museums? Are Bunting and Brandon simply trying to assert themselves as artists and not as terrorists?
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