Italian version
.art
18.03.04 Life's a User's Manual: Argos Walk.
Bringing into reality elements of the most visionary science fiction is a characteristic of artists and hackers, with has the encouraging result of destabilize those who observe them. The future is inoculated visually, opening into the present a radical window. Life's a User's Manual: Argos Walk is an ingenuous performance by Michelle Teran which tries to unsettle the collective imaginary of control through warspying technologies. The artist walks around Bruxelles dressed as a bum, with a supermarket cart containing two televisions which apparently show a heap of trash, while she holds an alluminium can of soup to use it as an antenna. The screens show images taken from the surrounding wireless surveillance cameras, showing places, personal stories and hidden spaces, visualizing the control network as a hidden channel. In her path, she's able to pick up many intimate moments and reveal them openly. Commissioned by the Argos Festival, the performance is widely documented on the site, as are the details of the invisible data intercepted by the simple tools of that fake bum.