State to Stateless Machines: A Trajectory
<p>James Bridle (one of <i>Wired</i> magazine’s 100 most influential people in Europe) is an artist and writer working across technologies and disciplines. In 2018, he curated the exhibition and conference <i>Transnationalisms</i>, produced by Aksioma in the framework of the international cooperation project <i>State Machines</i>. Bridle has spent the recent years researching citizenship-by-investment and related technologies: special economic zones and free trade areas, freeports and seasteads, blockchain and other supposedly emancipatory but inhuman and asset-based protocols for identity management. At every level, the mass movement of peoples and the rise of planetary-scale computation is changing the way we think and understand national identity. The state as we know it is coming to an end: in this essay, starting from the increasing exchange of national identities available to the very rich, the author draws the trajectory of State to stateless machine.</p>
Authors: James Bridle
Directors: Marcela Okretič
Proofreader: Rebecca Cachia
Design: Luka Umek, Sonja Grdina
Aksioma Institute for Contemporary Art, State Machines
Part of: PostScriptUM