One product of the paranoia and insecurity that has accompanied the ‘War on Terror’ has been the conversion of the body from a site of playful flux to a site of security. As Biometric fingerprint technologies are proposed for an increasing number of uses from passports, ID cards, and driving licences to workers clocking on and off at Budgens supermarket stores, questions of ownership of our bodies are raised. We all have a set of unique fingerprints, however as they become used by states and companies for identification purposes, ‘Who Owns these Unique patters?

Id = commodity raise this questions through a playful interventionist performance in which I turn my own fingerprints into a designer commodity and offer them for sale. My finger prints are cast in fine silver and are package in a velvet lined chrome case. Each silver fingerprint cast come with instructions which makes use of the research carried out by the cryptographer Tsutomu Matsumoto to demonstrate how fingerprint scanners can be fooled using gelatine fingerprints created from these casts.