- MOBILIZING AFFECTIVITY BEYOND THE IMAGE
That the vehicle of Piper's universalization of address is technology appears most clearly in the final space, Unclassified, where two new works divergently take up and radicalize the immanent correlation of ethnicity and technicity.xxx By focusing on the racist deployment of surveillance technologies and the inequalities of access to cyberspace, Tagging the Other and Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace bring a true universality of address to Piper's nuanced blend of the confrontational and the invitational, while at the same time tempering the indifference implicit in all visions of a technically instantiated collective intelligence. They do so by deploying the mechanism of technology as a universal form of address in order better to foreground the fact of its differential application (the burden of Tagging the Other) and, more importantly still, to resituate the potential for community beyond ethnicity (the burden of Caught like a Nigger in Cyberspace).
Tagging the Other adapts a 1992 video installation, resituating the four monitors of the original within the rectangular space of the computer screen. On these four “virtual" monitors, the work presents four black male heads, variously cloaked with a red band over the mouth, over the eyes, or with a target, and corresponding to a set of curious binaries (culture-ethnicity, subject-reject, other-boundaries, visibledifference) superimposed on the image and seemingly meant to expose the differential conditions of life in the "New European State." Clicking on each of the virtual monitors sets off a barrage of news clips reporting on topics like racist killing, the “Fortress Europe impregnable for black people," and the becoming extrageographic of life, as well as a music loop repeatedly intoning the incendiary imperative to “bring it on."
In yet another bid to destroy the certainty of conviction, this work confronts all viewers with the patent racism made invisible (to all but its immediate victims) by the neutrality of technological rhetoric. Yet, beyond simply drawing attention to this new reality, the work manages to place the viewer in the position of the surveilling gaze in a way that compels her to question her potential complicity with this situation. Interestingly enough, the target of this questioning is less one's participation in the technology of surveillance per se than the implicit ratification oflimiting identity categories that such participation would seem to betoken: “Central to the piece," explains Piper, “is the framing and fixing of the Black European under a high tech gaze which seeks to classify and codify the individual within an arena in which the logical constraints of race, ethnicity, nation and culture are fixed and delineated in a discourse of exclusion."xxxi
DIGITIZING THE RACIALIZED BODY
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