The photograph above demonstrates Joshua Noble‘s sculpture/ankle bracelet, The Bracket, which delivers to its wearer an electric shock every time the wearer strays out of her “home” income bracket. The leather and metal piece is powered by the Census data, GPS technology, and personal information entered by the wearer. It’s on display at Punch Gallery as a work of art. Noble is a programmer-sculptor in Seattle.
Consider the implications of The Bracket: You put it on, you walk through the city, and it announces differences in wealth. In a rapidly changing city like Seattle, you’d have to walk around a lot to keep up.
On an individual level, personal worth (in money terms) can be hard to detect. After months with my college roommate, I found out her father was a millionaire. “Isn’t it cool that you can’t even tell?” a mutual friend said to me. “She’s so down to earth.” Her hiding it was considered a good thing. Recently, a friend of mine told me he thinks of his father when he puts on his white tank top undershirts. My friend finds the undershirts comfortable. My friend’s father, a man determined to leave behind his working-class roots and rise to the rank of upper-middle-class intellectual, would not approve of these shirts, my friend explained. The shirts are always hidden, anyway.
Are neighborhoods less able to hide their conditions than individuals? Do you look like your neighborhood? How often do you not, and where, and why?
Traveling at all while wearing The Bracket would mean anticipating shocks. Many people, rich and poor, wouldn’t be able to go to work every day without being shocked. If the anklets could be programmed to track each other rather than census data, there would be havoc. For instance, everyone would get shocked all the time on an average night at a Capitol Hill restaurant, where diners are wealthier than the servers, who are wealthier than the dishwashers, who are wealthier than the couple sleeping in the doorway just outside.
If The Bracket is a luxury good to be worn by the rich, then it is a subversion of what a disproportionately large number of poor people in this country are forced to wear: ankle monitoring bracelets, for parole or house arrest. Those bracelets are like tracking devices on animals. They’re dehumanizing.
But The Bracket as a product gets in the way of The Bracket as an idea.
According to the artist, The Bracket, which has also been exhibited at a museum at Southern Methodist University, is functional, but it’s not really intended to be worn all the time. It’s meant more as a “conversation piece,” Noble said.
As soon as Noble fine-tunes the device’s ability to recharge by plugging into a wall via a USB cable, The Bracket will be ready for market, and it will be for sale, by custom order, on Aktionsart’s new media gallery on Amazon Art. Is this dodgier than <a href=”http://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/10/20/23005195/the-dodgiest-of-amazon-themed-artworks-just-got-dodgier
“>the already-dodgy sale from that same gallery of a work of art by James Coupe called General Intellect, comprised of video streams made by the artist hiring Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to record their lives?
The Bracket is a made-to-order product sold for $1,000, the artist said. It’s marketed toward someone with play money, then. It could be, I guess, a masochistic toy, like a hair shirt for a limousine liberal.
The mechanism of the shock, rather than some other kind of notification, reminds me of the cartoonish exclamation made by a society lady driving through a poor neighborhood: “Shocking!” she might say, foot on the accelerator.
Noble says this shock is created by “a replica of the mechanism used in a camera’s flash, so it’s short and sharp and surprising, but not necessarily painful.”
A shock is not as benign as your phone vibrating, but a shock is not a lasting injury, either. It comes, it goes. A few more and you might not even notice. Electric shocks function physically the way shock art functions emotionally—first it grabs, but eventually it’s just part of your day.
In that context, The Bracket is more a fascinating symbol than a functioning device. Americans, Noble said, are imprisoned by our silence about money. So in the best-case scenario, The Bracket brings up a conversation that wouldn’t otherwise have happened at a dinner party, about class and its consequences.
