Heath Bunting

Heath Bunting
Heath Bunting at Transmediale, Berlin, 4 February 2011
Born	1966 (age 50–51)
Citizenship	United Kingdom
Occupation	Artist
Years active	1980s-present
Style	Conceptual art, net.art, culture jamming, tactical media

Heath Bunting is a contemporary British artist born in 1966. Based in Bristol, he is the founder of the site irational.org (with Daniel García Andújar, Rachel Baker and Minerva Cuevas) and was one of the early practitioners in the 1990s of Net.art. Bunting's work is based on creating open and democratic systems by modifying communications technologies and social systems. His work often explores the porosity of borders, both in physical space and online. In 1997, his online work Visitors Guide to London was included in the 10th documenta exhibition in Kassel. An activist, he created a dummy site for the European Lab for Network Collision (CERN) and works to maintain a list of pirate radio stations in London.

Created in 1998, _readme.html (Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible) is a work of net.art that spoke to the time period in which it was created, and yet still remains relevant to the contemporary moment. The piece is a simple web page with a white background and light grey text taken from an article about Heath Bunting. A vast majority of the words are hypertext, but not all. As coded for by simple HTML attributes, hyperlinked words turn from grey to black once visited.

In Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible Bunting makes use of appropriation. The work utilises an article about Heath Bunting written by James Flint of The Telegraph. Instead of presenting the article in its traditional form, Bunting links nearly every word to [insert word].com and alters the color-scheme of the document as per his white-on-white period.

Own, Be Owned or Remain Invisible addresses the commercialisation of the Internet. By clicking one of the hyperlinked words, the reader is transported to the domain, which may or may not be owned. At the time of this work's creation, 1998, many of the domain names were not owned, but are registered today. In contrast, some domain may have been owned in the past twelve years, but are no longer owned any more, thereby touching on the transience of Internet ownership. Bunting's work also shows the range of banal or absurd domain names that companies have purchased. Not all words in the article are hyperlinked, however. Bunting effectively takes ownership of the following words by leaving them as normal text: