Your inbox is a lot like an online home, protected by a password rather than a burglar alarm. The same could be said for your social media pages, your bank accounts, your supermarket loyalty cards. Together they constitute an identity.
But what if your accounts, like a neglected home, fell into disuse, and a squatter moved in and occupied them?
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UK-based artist Simon Farid does exactly this. He’s not looking for credit card details, and he won’t try to catfish your friends. He just wants to give old, disused identities a new lease of life.
Farid’s work explores the “administrative self”: the death certificates, birth certificates, and other records which shadow our lives, seen more often by doctors and civil servants than by the people they pertain to. It raises questions: how connected are we to the trail of records we leave behind? Does human existence depend on having a passport number, and can a new self be forged with a fake one?
“People will talk about love, loss and addiction, but then balk at sharing the biggest of secrets, their PIN numbers.”
So far, Farid’s “identity squatting” has led him to occupy “selves” which were fabricated in the first place, then cast off by their former owners. “I am interested in these constructed ‘shell identities,’ what they mean in relation to one’s sense of self and how they could be used in a politically productive way,” he explained.
A CCTV image of the artist. Image: Simon Farid
One such identity is Mark Stone, an environmental activist based in Nottingham. Along with his long hair and convincing countercultural habits of smoking weed and organising protests, Stone’s passport and ID card confirmed his identity. Except that this “administrative self” was fake: Stone was played for seven years by Mark Kennedy, an undercover policeman eventually exposed in a series of 2011 Guardian articles. Leaving behind several hundred shocked friends and acquaintances after this revelation, the identity known as Mark Stone evaporated. The name continued to exist, but no longer had a body to go with it.
That is, until he was was resurrected. In a paper entitled “Being Mark Stone: an ethnography of identity squatting,” Farid and his co-authors detail the steps they took to “Occupy Mark Stone”: Farid was able to talk around a “Yahoo helper” who granted him access to Stone’s emails, which he then used to reactivate his Twitter account. Stone’s passport number was revealed in a screen grab on the UK TV show Newsnight, as was his signature, which Farid was able to imitate. Telecoms provider O2 even offered to give “Stone” back his old phone number (for a fee).
The markers which had anchored the first Mark Stone into existence—a passport number, membership cards, his email archive—became tools to give his identity to a new owner.
In a current exhibition titled SECRET at Dublin’s Science Gallery, the contents of Mark Stone’s wallet are displayed in a glass case. They narrate Stone’s second coming in a series of cards: one for the library, one for Boots loyalty points, another for Tesco. There’s an organ donor card, despite Stone lacking an actual body. He has also been signed up to the Conservative Party, which apparently does not mind that its new member is a cipher.
Image: ‘Occupy Mark Stone’ by Simon Farid as part of SECRET: NOTHING TO SEE HERE at Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin
But are they enough, these numbers and customer accounts, to constitute a fully-rounded identity? “On one level, not at all,” said Farid. “How connected are you to your passport number, one of the most important numbers that sticks to your body for a period of time? I’d guess that most people don’t even know theirs off by heart. But on another level, I think most of us are surprisingly connected to our administrative identities, at least as shorthand for feeling protective of our status as an individual in a community.”
Another of Farid’s experiments tested the public’s attachment to administrative secrecy: in his “Nothing to See” workshops, participants swapped wallets, phones, and PIN numbers as part of a “documentation exchange.” Access to smartphones was revealed as kind of arcane ritual. “I have encountered people who will talk about love, loss and addiction, but then balk at sharing the biggest of secrets, their PIN numbers,” Farid said.
“How connected are you to your passport number, one of the most important numbers that sticks to your body for a period of time?”
Before “Occupy Mark Stone,” Farid took on another discarded identity: that of MP and Chairman of the Conservative Party Grant Shapps, who was revealed by media to be moonlighting as “millionaire web marketer” Michael Green. His company, HowToCorp, promoted a virtual toolkit promising to make its buyer $20,000 in 20 days for the price of $497.
The HowToCorp site is a joy to behold, replicated by Farid in a project called “Don’t hate the rich, be one of them!” There are fuzzy, low-resolution fonts and bizarre clipart. There’s a litany of downloadable PDFs filled with dubious business advice, while a banner across the top advertises the ominously-named “Traffic Paymaster.” In one corner a stream of nonsensical “motivational” tweets preach “Be Your Own Boss!” and “Emulate Your Nemesis!” A series of video lectures begin as marketing advice but quickly shift to the subject of surveillance. Again and again a clip appears: the hypnotic sight of machines printing money.
Farid working on “Don’t hate the rich…” Image: Simon Farid
“I became hooked on the success signifiers common to internet marketing culture,” said Farid of his time replicating the seedy world of old-web marketing. “Piles of money, yachts, businessmen either climbing ladders or working on a laptop on the beach.”
Farid’s next project involves reconstructing the NSA’s kitschy yet sinister PRISM PowerPoint slides for a group show at Newcastle upon Tyne’s Abject Gallery in January 2016. He plans to use it as material for a performance replicating the circumstances in which it was originally shown, adding animated portions and improvising the redacted slides to impersonate a PRISM operative.
“Really the PRISM PowerPoint reconstruction started out as a joke,” he said. “The source material itself is quite hilarious; how amazing that something so technically advanced would be internally presented in such an amateur way? Perhaps this in itself can tell us something of the culture inside the organisation, like, for example, the start-up-corporate-speak MI5 uses in its tech job adverts.”
Farid sees the performance as helping to disseminate the source material—the PRISM slides—while interrogating them with humour. He describes his approach as “a kind of journalism through re-enactment,” one so convincing that a Daily Mail article accidentally used his reconstructed HowtoCorp webpage to illustrate a story on Shapps.
Farid giving a talk on internet marketing as Michael Green
Maintaining alternate “administrative selves” is often an uncomfortable experience; for “Occupy Mark Stone,” Farid worked in partnership with Loughborough University and their ethics committee. He considered signing up Mark Stone for an official UK citizen card, which would require a friend acting as guarantor and lying on his behalf, but decided that would conflict with the ethics of the experiment.
Farid also took care to keep within the parameter of “administrative” rather than personal identity. He did not attempt to contact the friends Kennedy made during his time as Mark Stone, who Farid describes as Stone’s “victims,” nor to emulate his writing style in emails. “I was mindful of trying not to reanimate him in a way that could potentially affect his victims,” he said. “So while I had access to them, I left them alone.”
One thing I’m keen to know is: if you fill out enough forms and remember enough passwords, does a transformation occur? Did Simon Farid ever feel like he was Mark Stone?
“In practice this became much more about being not-Simon, than about being someone else in particular.”
“No, never, really,” he said. “Moving around in public space as him and registering as him on different systems’ records of my actions was a surprisingly affecting experience for me. But the euphoria of a perceived freedom and an apprehension of the illicit nature of my actions never felt like any kind of social connection to the original identity.”
Instead, the artist found himself in a kind of administrative limbo. “In practice this became much more about being not-Simon, than about being someone else in particular. So, in the end, it acted as an anonymising tool, though this was not what I had anticipated.”
In this sense, “Mark Stone” revealed how little our online selves are made of, how fragile and shallow they are next to IRL personhood. They represent humanity-by-numbers, a bundle of identifiers and behaviours easily replicated or catfished.
Farid has himself exhibited work under different names. He admitted that this didn’t help much with arts council funding applications, but is thematically central to his work and might have its advantages (“I’ll let you wonder that other works I’m actually the author of…”).
I asked him what would happen if a Simon Farid tribute act suddenly appeared, The Double–style, and tried to take credit for his work? Farid likes the idea, even entertaining the possibility of posing as his own imposter. He’s also interested in contacting other Simon Farids around the world, then posing as them, or even posing as them posing as himself.
It’s getting very meta now, though I look forward to future projects where Farid befriends a legion of Farids, or perhaps launches a lawsuit against himself. The administrative self is a fragile thing, but it is fluid and versatile. “How difficult would it be for me to pose as him [another Simon Farid] to have all record of him removed? Or to pose as him posing as me to have all record of me removed? Let’s see…”
