different avenue for thinking community, one that welcomes the bankruptcy of performativity as an opportunity to reforge a notion of the human based on the commonality of embodied singularity. The affects generated through the failure of online performative indentification are not the happy, unifying, "easy" feelings Apter describes. Indeed, by undermining identification via such culturally sanctioned individuating categories as race and gender, affects cannot but be lived as confusing, if exhilirating, experiences of bodily excess and singularity. Far from being “the theory lite' version of virtual subjects who have little real stake in national, ethnic, or gender affiliations," affect thus emerges as the central category of a conceptualization of the human as virtual in a very different sense-as always in excess of any particular determination.
"Relocating the Remains" has been documented in an exhibition catalogue and accompanying CD-ROM (Piper, Keith. Relocating the Remains). This catalogue contains an often insightful recapping of Piper's evolution by Kobena Mercer, "Witness at the Crossroads: An Artist's Journey in Post-Colonial Space." A version of the project can be found on Piper's inIVA Website, www.iniva.org/piper. My account of Piper's work addresses the CD-ROM, where what is at stake is the effort to open Piper's work to the domain of the virtual, to extend “the metaphor of the expedition' ... through a labyrinth of user interactive‘virtual' spaces" (http://www.iniva.org/piper/ Cdrompage.html). The Website produces new versions of the three spaces featured on the CD-ROM, in the process expunging all of the works, both old and new, that were incorporated into the CD-ROM. To my mind, the Website can at best suggest some of the effects produced by the virtual extension carried out in the CD-ROM and in particular by the works focusing directly on contemporary technology. However, for an interesting analysis of the work that focuses primarily on the Website, see Ashley Dawson, "Surveillance Sites: Digital Media and Dual Society in Keith Piper's Relocating the Remains."
xx. Mercer furthermore argues that Piper's work —specifically his engagement with the world of sports-can be contrasted (favorably) with the work of other black male artists like Glenn Ligon and Byron Kim and Jean-Michael Basquiat on account of its "ability to bring the analytical and the expressive into dialogue." He continues: "Piper takes account of identification as an emotional tie from which one cannot extricate oneself at will" (58).
xxi. See Mercer, 54, for a subtle analysis of how Piper's work from the early 1990s enacts this complexification.
xxii. As Piper recounts,
NOTES
xix.
276