Hello everybody, my name is Diane

Elshout,

I am part of the TRIP module,

My research question has been: “How do you keep

yourself together”

I came to this question through my fascination

with Identity Theft

and more specific with an Identity Theft Protection

Kit

Identity theft concernes the loss of citizinship,

bank and social security numbers

and internet-identities.

It is a crime that has become serious business.

It affects in America alone:

13.3 persons per minute,

799 per hour,

19,178 per day

creating on a years basis:

9.3 million Victims:

$52.6 billion of loss to businesses

$5 billions of loss to individual victims

297 million hours spent by victims resolving their

problems

It is a fast developing crime as we see on this

chart, showing the victims world wide.

Breaking them down in to age groups like shown on

this statistic.

The information of this statistic has been

provided by the company Identity Theft 9 11.

How does a victim of identity theft look like?

And these are some famous identity theft

cases: Franklin Delano Roosevelt Steven Spielberg Barry Bonds Ted Turner Mayor Michael Bloomberg Robert De Niro Will Smith

And this is how the criminals look like.

The 'Bonnie and Clyde' of identity theft:

Jocelyn Kirsch, 22, and

Edward Anderton, 25.

Living the high life on stolen cash ...

I will now give a short overview of the companies

that provide the identity survival kits

The identity theft protection kits that are

offered,

depart form the fact that there is one identity that can be stolen from you.

As a result this one and only identity can be

protected with a fit all protection kit.

As if the identity is that coherent,

as if your identity and the reality you function

in can be controlled

I could conclude that these companies are

dealing with identity theft in a modernist way

Modernism is “an expression of confidence that

humankind can learn to understand, and then

master,

nature and natural forces, that we can grasp the

nature of the universe,

and even shape our individual destinies and the future of the world.”

But this view on life we have left behind us.

As we see in the painting “Suiside by modernism”

Nowadays a person's sense of identity is a

composite …

constructed by the forces of and the interaction with the surrounding culture.

This post modernistic view, in stark contrast to

modernism,

is about the dissolving of the self.

“We should not think of ourselves as

unique, unified, self-conscious, autonomous

persons”.

If we apply this knowledge to an identity survival kit,

we come to a much more confusing point of

departure.

If my identity changes per minute,

contact and circumstance

what can I hold together?

And how can I create an identity theft tool kit with

this notion?

If anybody that knows me, it is me!

I am my own expert about my daily identity!

I am the one that tries to keep myself together,

whatever that may be and however this may look

like!

So, before I go on,

just to get it right,

I want to have a brief look at my post modern self

with

my body

that is made up of 100 trillion cells

my fluids

my intelectual capacities

my spirit

my social interaction

my culture

and my history

this all makes up ME

me, myself and

my identity.

We are not as stable as we thought

In the 21 century, our identity is fluid

Fluid Identity “ a concept that identity is not rigid, but can and

does change”.

As we see in our existence

on this planet

and in our digital worlds.

We worked with the idea of multiple entrances of

our fluid identity with our sub group.

in order to construct an Identity Theft Tool Kit.

And they came up with

CLONING

Cloning themselves

and

cloning others

and