The City Hall is a keeper of records-of birth, of death, of marriage, of homes. Neatly packaged details of an individual's life tucked away in compartments specific to gender, race, ethnicity and class. This compartmentalization is what engages and informs my project for the City Hall. The US Government's paranoia after 9/11 and the ramifications thereof have arisen to a similar compartmentalization of non-Americans (read non- whites.) One of the weapons in this arsenal of the perpetually paranoid (read US Government) is the fingerprinting and digital photographing of visitors, immigrants and essentially anyone who they think looks suspicious. Transposing myself to the position of the record keeper and evaluator, the project will try to reverse the immigrant experience by the 'alien' keeping records on the 'normal(?).' Using the concept of fingerprinting as its basis, the project will explore the social construction of the individual and thereby, naturally it seems, the recording of the individual's minutiae in 'official' records, which offer legitimacy to her/his existence. Which leads us to this question that begs to be asked: If you are not on the records, who are you?

Using the board game Snakes and Ladders as an allegory,the project will attempt to familiarize its audience members with the US's immigration juggernaut.The process will explore the definition of Individual. Who is an individual? What makes one individual worthy of entering this country and another not? Acting as an agent of the immigration authorities, I shall make participants play this game of Snakes and Ladders, where I shall arbitrarily decide if I like the participant's answer and choose to advance her to the next stage or not. This process is much like the Visa process that happens to international students. Families of students regularly undertake pilgrimages so that their child's interviewing consulate officer is in a good mood the day of the dreaded interview. If the candidate is successful in advancing to the final stage, they will be allowed to enter a closed off booth, where he or she will be asked to fingerprint themselves. This will be done in the old tradition of thumb impressions, using ink on paper. There will also be a form with required* information that the participant fills out. However, the whole point is that the participant can choose to subvert the system and provide completely false information about her/himself. The participant will also be asked to draw his or her own versions of their thumb impressions. They will then be instructed to leave behind the false information in the 'official' (for official purposes only) box and take their original, un- manipulated fingerprint home. This then will form part of their own Home record. Throughout the process the participant will be faced with the notion that the fingerprint is unique to its owner--that there cannot be two sets of fingerprints alike. That is what makes an individual a separate entity, a person.