The author presents “Existential Technology” as a new category of in(ter)ventions and as a new theoretical framework for understanding privacy and identity. His thesis is twofold: (1) The unprotected individual has lost ground to invasive surveillance technologies and complex global organizations that undermine the humanistic property of the individual; (2) A way for the individual to be free and collegially assertive in such a world is to be “bound to freedom” by an articulably external force. To that end, the author explores empowerment via self-demotion.

Discussions of race and identity have often privileged the visual field and its representations as a site of cultural identity. In contrast, this paper examines how sound and its organization have been implicated in the constructions of “whiteness” as a normative category during the colonial epoch. Using a set of case studies, it examines the network formed between sound and vision through what the author calls a harmonic system of representation. After mapping this dominant system, the paper describes tactics that have been used to disrupt it.

The author's interest in film lies in its ability to expand consciousness and perception in ways unique to the medium. His films challenge the language of filmmaking, be it montage, color, sound, lighting, mise-enscène or acting. The author employs a wide palette of film vocabulary to mask reality and filter it through a personal vision. With the introduction of computers, new ways of seeing the world through film, and thus of acting in the world, may be accomplished.

Artificial-agent technology has become commonplace in technical research from com-puter graphics to interface design and in popular culture through the Web and computer games. On the one hand, the population of the Web and our PCs with characters who reflect us can be seen as a humaniza-tion of a previously purely mechanical interface. On the other hand, the mechanization of subjectivity carries the danger of simply reducing the human to the machine.