Bureau of Inverse Technology / Kate Rich
The Bureau was formed in Melbourne Australia in 1992 by engineer/theorist Natalie Jeremijenko and radio journalist Kate Rich. It was originally constructed as an anonymous group, a kind of guerilla technical intervention into some of the emergent techniques and technologies of the Information Age. BIT works with Information Technology as its primary material, re-engineering technical systems to address the hidden politics of technology. The anonymity of the Bureau was in part a strategy to reflect on the anonymity of a certain type of production: the diffused accountability and ethnographic anonymity in which technologies and software are generally produced.
After over 10 years of Bureau practice, we no longer see our position as primarily parodic or reactive. In 2004 the Bureau initiated a retreat from anonymity / resort to clarity during a 3-month Research Fellowship at Piet Zwart Institute for Media Design Research, Rotterdam 2004.
BIT media products include economic and ecologic indices; event-triggered webcam networks; human-animal communications interfaces; and various product and vision videos.
Projects at PZI:
bureau of inverse technology: the decade report, the bureau / the evidence / the first 10 years
romancing the goose