Ma Nu is a young journalist in London of the near future. Like all other inhabitants, Ma Nu does not have a face. No one can even remember that humans ever had faces. And like all other inhabitants, she attends her work, without undertaking much else. Her life changes drastically when she wakes up one morning to discover, in the place where the void should be, a face. In panic, her first reaction is to try to erase it, but this proves to be unsuccessful. She doesn't want to look different from the others! What happened? And why to her?
Produced by only using footage taken from CCTV, for FACELESS, Ma Nu swaps data controllers for a film team; already installed surveillance devices for cameras and cranes; and a lawyer for a script writer. The process of accessing these images activates multiple layers of legal regulations concerning these recordings: Data Protection Act 1998, Article 8 Human Rights Act 1998, Freedom of Information Act 2000, as well as aspects of copyright and image rights. It is this information that mirrors the way society relates to its techno/mediated environment and tries to arrange and control itself. The arrangements expressed in these legal codes are used by Ma Nu to craft a story about a life caught up amidst this reality. The production of FACELESS renders the legal realities attached to these images not only visible, but, by planting a fictional, performed narrative within them, returns the subject to three-dimensional space.
FACELESS ONLINE is an introduction to this 'space' and protagonists, and looks 'behind-the-scenes'. FACELESS, the film, will be released later this year.
Manu Luksch, founder of the London-based arts production company ambientTV.NET, studied Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria, and Bangkok, Thailand, before joining the the Media Lab Munich as Artistic Director (1995-97). AmbientTV.NET conceives and produces interdisciplinary and collaborative projects ranging in form from installation through documentary, dance, and gastronomy, to sound and video composition and live manipulation; ambientTV.NET develops social and technical infrastructure and promotes network architectures that allow explorations of alternatives to current socio-political and economic practice. Techniques and effects of live data broadcasting and transmission provide theme, medium, and performative space for many of the works. Works are shown widely at festivals such as Documenta X Hybrid Work Space (G), Ars Electronica (A), ISEA2004 (Fi), Art+Communication (Lv) and Public Art In(ter)vention (Th).
