fromCONCENTRATE

Early in the year I took this photograph of the door handle at one of Newcastle’s Court Houses and it started me thinking about the following question:

If ‘law’ had a handle, what would it look like?

I began a wiki page to try and open this question up, in relation to my Final Project at Culture Lab:

• http://www.fromconcentrate.net/WIKI/doku.php?id=if_law_had_a_handle

How to visualise data/information, in a tangible way, in the public realm?

Back in November I had a look at this work, DEATH COUNTER by Santiago Sierra, which was installed on the front of Hiscox Insurance HQ in central London, for the course of 2009.

The giant LED, reminiscent of the digital clocks and information boards seen throughout most major cities, tallies (in real-time) the total number of human deaths worldwide, starting from zero at 00:00:00 on the 1st of January 2009.

In terms of ‘visualising data,’ there is a simple reciprocal relationship between a binary conception of life OR death and the counter-intuitive representation of these concepts as ‘one’ (death) and ‘zero’ (life), accumulating on the huge display.  Despite the potentially emotive subject matter, and the high value placed on individual human lives, the presentation is unspectacular in the extreme:

business as usual…

One quite remarkable aspect of the Sierra work, is the way in which it was funded – through a legal contract. The work was loaned to Hiscox for the duration of the exhibition, in exchange for a €150,000 life insurance policy, which would be payable in the event of the artists death.

Through a contextual balancing of an art-market value and an insurance value of the artists life, the work highlights and makes explicit the core component of the insurance industry – careful translation of the perceived, constant, risk of catastrophe into bankable capital.*

* As well as providing insurance for major banks such as Lloyds of London, Bermuda based Hiscox, provide cover in the event of kidnapping, hurricane and financial disasters. They posted pre-tax profits of £320.6m for 2009.

London Evening Standard (9/11/2009) / Insurance Daily

The (symbolic) importance of physically petitioning 10 Downing Street should not be underestimated.

If a citizen takes their petition to 10 Downing Street they are literally and symbolically banging on the ‘front door’ of government and demanding that their issue be given due care and consideration by the highest elected authority in the land.

Our friends, MySociety, facilitate their own online brand of this complaint process; the No 10 Petitions Website – How does this online experience compare?

If you have encountered No 10 Petitions Website it might well have been through receiving an invitation to sign a petition via email (something like) -

Protest the Pope, 10 Downing Street Petition

Petition the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown

Please sign:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ProtestthePope/

And, the Number 10 Petitions Website fosters this kind of signature-gathering-via-email approach, which appears to be a very efficient way to:

• gauge support for current issues
• raise the public profile of an issue
• bring an issue to the attention of central government

When I visited to the site today I noticed that there was a new petition there, campaigning for legislation regarding ‘Mosquito youth deterrent devices.’

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/MosquitoUse/

The petition was created by Howard Stapleton and reads:

‘We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Legislate
the use of the Mosquito device.’

I ’signed’ the petition, (since I strongly disagree with the use of these devices*) and it was pleasingly simple to do so.

Perhaps too simple?  Whilst the online petition is certainly an efficient delivery method, the process feels much more like making a mundane consumer complaint (rather than taking part in an engaged political action).  And that is not the only problem.

The No 10 Petitions Website operates, on one level, on a similar model to the previously mentioned FixMyStreet:

• “report-the-problem-to-the-relevant-authority Model”
  

Can reporting a pothole in need of repair (or reporting a broken traffic light in the DIY Democracy example) to a council department REALLY be equated with reporting bigger, less well defined, more complex issues to the Prime Minister?

*These totally unregulated ‘mosquito devices’ send out a high frequency pulsing sound which can only be heard by younger people, indiscriminately targeting them; making their lives unpleasant. The legal use of these devices has not yet been tested in the British Court, but it is widely believed that they are a violation of International Human Rights Law.

Downing Street image file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Brazil license.
Original image here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lula_and_Brown_1_April_2009.jpg