James Bridle

Citizen Ex, 2015

Citizen Ex is an online project which offers a continuous calculation of your evolving Algorithmic Citizenship. What the term implies is simple: every time you connect to the Internet, traces of your passage are recorded and stored. Amongst others, they indicate your physical location, thus allowing people, companies, countries and machines to make decisions about you. In fact, the Internet is not as fleeting, immaterial and ephemeral an entity as is popularly conceived to be. It has a physical reality through computers, cables, routers, and people. In turn, the real places linked to the online spaces we visit entail our affiliation with real territory and politics; it determines our legal rights. In a world marked by migrations, wars, natural disasters, we are all becoming more international, even post-national. In reaction to this ever-fluctuating reality, Citizen Ex proposes to calculate citizenship on behavioural criteria rather than on birth location.

Artwork: http://citizen-ex.com, http://booktwo.org/notebook/citizen-ex/
Artist: http://shorttermmemoryloss.com