Text for shredded paper in Shreddie #3
"Data Protection Act"


(all the useful details are made up of course, no point using phone or passport numbers... I'm not completely stupid)

Application for Artistic Licence (all details will be treated in strictest confidence under the terms of the Artists' Data Protection Act 1983) Fill in all fields and sign the declaration. Note that knowingly omitting or falsifying any details may render you liable to attack from large men armed with blunt instruments. please return completed form to: Department of Artistic Security (formerly Lord Chamberlain's Office) Cato House Bowdler Way Cardiff CF15 6XP Tel: 0870 6666363 Fax: 029 1036 6066 Our ref: 6663XP/LO Your Artistic Security Officer is:     Arnold Spratwarbler

Name: Dai Lowe Address:  24 Wentworth Mansions         Keats Grove         London         NW3 2RL Fax:      none Mobile:  none E-mail:  dai@lucidity.ltd.uk Date of Birth:   20/10/1952 Place of Birth: Boston, Lincs Nationality:  Any Mother's maiden name:      Levy Driving Licence:  None Bank details:   Bank:       I keep all my cash   Sort Code:   in a high-interest   Account No:   sock under my bed! Passport No: 89672226 NI number: XY 45 12 77 V Prior convictions:      completely without convictions

(right side shredded, left disappears without trace)

other side:

Back in nineteen seventy-three when I was at university I lived in a hall of residence called Grosvenor Place just to the north of the main campus and one day while I was there I saw an advertisement in a newspaper or magazine for a piece of office equipment which I seem to remember was called a Brierley Hand Shredder and after making the obligatory jokes about why anyone would want to go shredding hands I noted the promise that using this item would allow me easily to reduce my documents to unintelligible slivers and so I suggested to my friend Andrew Holmes that some of us should pool our meagre student resources and purchase one of these for the shared use of the residents of the corridors on which we lived during term time thus allowing us to reduce our lecture notes to unintelligible slivers but he wasn't at all interested and was even so unkind as to point out that my lecture notes were already to all intents and purposes unintelligible slivers a fact I could hardly deny and which probably accounts in part for my failing to get anything better than a third class degree out of the three years I spent and largely enjoyed in Manchester but the desire to own a hand shredder has stayed with me all this time lurking in some dim recess of my consciousness and occasionally surfacing whenever I have an old credit card bill or receipt that some crime prevention article on television or in a magazine has reminded me could be vulnerable to the sort of antisocial blackguard type who might at this very moment be rummaging through the dustbins outside my home in the hope of finding information or documentation that will facilitate their nefarious and criminal desires to obtain by deception some credit card or other goods or services in my name and thus avoid paying for them themselves but also more recently in a vaguely artistic setting since I realised that the transparent box into which the shredded paper falls has certainly qualities reminiscent of what in modern art circles is called a vitrine and this coupled with the wide variety of texts which could be fed into the shredder and left half shredded protruding from the top such as pages from religious or canonical writings or bank statements instruction books photos of artists or works of art or even art reviews seems to have a certain potential for a series of such works which my first instinct is to call Shreddies after the make of breakfast cereal an empty box of which was previously used to store all my confidential documentation but I am painfully aware that this whole idea carries the risk of a slide into pretentiousness or a rather facile simulation of significance and what some people might call deep meaning but it does have conceptual possibilities and could be made out by the right kind of critic to raise questions about censorship confidentiality destruction oppression and so forth and with certain types of theme such as a shredder where the paper is shredded and falls to the bottom normally in one half but seems somehow to disappear into thin air in the other it could involve us in thoughts not I hope of science fiction and other dimensions but at least of space and the illusory nature of existence which leave me only with a question of what sort of text if any should