Binary Citizen

Life in a contemporary globalising world is increasingly organised through layers of binary distinctions. Everywhere we go we encounter biophysical and technological systems shaped through invisible binary code. Our lives are increasingly measured, quantified and mediated by digital technologies, so much so that numbers have become mundane features of the contemporary landscape.

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Binary Citizen explores the profound marks left on our lives by these digital structures while also seeking to awaken a sense of global citizenship by drawing attention to the larger patterns that connect us, not least of which is the very medium of our bodies.

Throughout time and across cultures, the body has been marked as a site of cultural creation and meaning. In these works, binary numbers mark the skins of hybrid identities that are at once tribal, technological and contemporary. At the same time, our skins remind us that we are visceral and living organisms, and it is this embodied presence that allows us to intersect with what is seen and unseen, known and unknown.

 

These works ask us to pause amidst the sea of digital information and hypertext in which we are immersed. As our virtual world expands, they invite us not to abandon an embodied recognition of the delicate interrelationships that sustain our biophysical being.

In this way, binary code becomes both a technological language and a cultural pattern through which identities and relationships are continually shaped and reshaped.

 

DIGITAL PLAY

Digital Play is a performance work developed by Barbara Doran in collaboration with the Digital Operators - a small performance group whose practices share a commitment to the role of the body, material and play in contemporary encounters with time and space. The Digital Operators aim to revitalise a sense of play, theatre and tactility, helping to reconnect participants with the tribal and communal impulses that remain embedded within our digital lives.

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Digital Play is an interactive artwork performed by the Digital Operators, who experiment with binary code—the fundamental language of digital systems—in public spaces. Participants are invited to convert their names into binary expressions, translating these codes into material and tactile marks that would otherwise remain hidden within cyberspace.

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The Digital Operators also paint their skins with strings of ‘1s’ and ‘0s’, offering to paint the skins of observers. Participants are then invited to post photographs of their binary signatures or skin markings to a Facebook “virtual gallery.”As the performance unfolds, the location gradually becomes covered in white chalk drawings resembling an enormous blackboard of calculations—a meeting point between the marks of our hands and the invisible logic of the digital world.