Nancy Nisbet, an artist who teaches visual art at the University of British Columbia, is about to embark on a six-month roadtrip to inform people about RFID’s role in three areas: Surveillance and tracking; political and economic agreements like NAFTA; and personal and national identity

She will mark all of her possessions with RFID tags, load them into a truck, drive across Canada, the U.S. and Mexico and trade away her tagged items to people she meets on the journey.

“The trades are more about a sharing experience, sharing the stories of the items; the generation of a community based on the idea of exchange,” explained Nisbet. “I’m taking everything I own – my microwave, my bed, my books, the whole deal.”

The tags are designed to be a conversation piece and the artist will record the stories of the people she meets and upload the audio clips to a database.

To help her with the project, Bartek Muszynski, designed a database solution that could accommodate voice, RFID and pictures of the items. The information is collected via voice- and RFID-enabled handhelds and will be updated regularly on the Exchange Project website.

The project will launch May 1, 2006 at the Richmond Art Gallery.
Via RFID in Japan IT Business. More information in the PDF of the project (via networked_performance.)