Virtuality, the non-geographic and the political

– Nanostate project description

Summary
The Nanostate project was initiated in 1997 by Brian Chadwick, James Hutchinson, Helena Swatton, Do Murray and Peter Dukes. It is a visualisation and embodiment of the impact of networked technologies on citizenship and the nation state.

Background
The project attempts to engage with a critical aspect of our lives as inflected by technological change. It argues that we are beginning to inhabit an environment where boundaries – political or economic as much as personal - are defined increasingly through networked information technologies.

The traditional nation state has been conceived as determined by the spread of a language and its associated distribution media - particularly printed media (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Verso 1991).

By contrast the Nanostate is imagined as a truly global conception of a state, albeit with minimal (but recurring) duration, and facilitated by the impact upon our political, social and economic lives of information technologies.

It is defined as conforming to the areas determined by international time-zone conventions, but only for the instant of noon or midnight in that time-zone. Hence it successively overlays each time-zone sector of the globe - an imagined spatio-temporal political entity. It can be regarded as both an exaggeration of the conventions of statehood, and a contradiction of those conventions. For example, the Nanostate accepts and incorporates an intermittency of presence which would annul other claims to nationhood.

<<insert image ‘chrono2.jpg’ OR ‘chrono3.jpg’, which should be captioned ‘Chronotope – time-space locator of Nanostate’

Among the many implications of this conceit are the disruption of material ownership of resources, and the problematisation of the concept of citizenship. These issues are discussed in the Nanostate Protocol Volume 1 <<link to http://www.nanostate.org/protvol1.htm>>, written by Brian Chadwick.

A related issue is the dual nature of citizenship, territory, resource or use when an entity such as the Nanostate is considered to be present. This was addressed in the event Nanostate Reading Room <<link to http://www.nanostate.org/mainrr.htm>>. This was a three-day co-habitation of the Nanostate with a private snooker club in Golders Green, London. The game itself became a means to access the contents of the Nanostate Reading Room - a collection of artefacts, texts and appropriations.

<<insert images ‘lib2.jpg’ and ‘shelv2.jpg’ – both should be captioned ‘Nanostate Reading Room. Photographs copyright Do Murray, 1999’>>

The internet itself has been regarded as a social and political space transcending the borders of nation states. It has equally been seen as an essentially colonialist space, which tends to impose an anglophone environment on all its users. The Nanostate project, by contrast, emphasises translation and linguistic uncertainty. This latter aspect was particularly embodied in the Five-Language Reading Event for Live-Stock Ram-FM <<link to http://www.live-stock.org>>, April 2000.

Project aims:
To initiate, promote and develop a discussion on non-geographical political, economic and social entities, as enabled through networked technologies. The project imagines one such entity, the Nanostate, and thereby aims to model the opportunities, perplexities and contradictions that must arise.

It intends to engage in a debate which will contribute to an understanding of the essential issues involved, and so facilitate our individual and collective response to the rapidly evolving technological mediation of our political, social and economic selves.

Outcomes
The project is represented through a web presence at www.nanostate.org <<add link http://www.nanostate.org>>, and has produced its own events, as well as contributing to other projects. It has received support from the Arts Council of England (National Lottery Fund).

Forthcoming events include the launch of the Nanostate Protocol Volume 2, in Autumn 2000, and a number of contributions have been proposed for isea2000, Paris, December 2000.

Discussion is also currently underway towards proposing an international conference on core and related themes. In particular this aims to address cross-disciplinary approaches to the imagination and realisation of new forms of political entities, and their likely implications.

Contributions and participation
If you are interested in contributing to the project, or participating in discussions or events, please contact Peter Dukes at: p.j.dukes@herts.ac.uk