This Guy Has a Digital Tattoo Viewable Only by Cellphone

Recently, artist Anthony Antonellis paid a visit to a body modification specialist in Brooklyn, a unique practitioner whose expertise doesn’t lie in tattoos and piercings so much as splitting tongues and reshaping peoples’ ears to look like Legolas. Antonellis, however, had a different sort of request. He wanted to implant a tiny RFID chip in his hand–a tiny electronic cache dedicating to storing digital art.

The intrepid folks at Animal NY were on hand to document the procedure. After a small incision, the minuscule implant was inserted into the fleshy part of the back of Antonellis’ hand, between the thumb and index finger. The chip, which is stored inside a glass capsule not much bigger than a single grain of rice, has 1 KB of storage space. Aside from a small, fading scar, you wouldn’t have any idea it was there. Hold your phone up to Antonellis’s hand, though, and its contents are revealed: a tiny animated GIF. This one, in fact.

Your own interactions with RFID likely haven’t extended much further than swiping into your office building. Antonellis’ application is fundamentally different. “It’s usually used for privacy, and I’m using it for a public purpose, which is to distribute artwork,” he explained to Animal NY. The artist can update the implant’s contents at will, beaming snippets of text, MIDI files, or images by other artist onto the chip with his smartphone. Others can grab those files from him just by swiping their own devices over his hand. It’s not so much an exhibition as a storage space, he says–more floppy disk than gallery. Or, as Antonellis likes to think of it, a sort of dynamic, digital tattoo.
Hold your phone up to his hand, and its contents are revealed.

That admittedly is a lot of trouble to go through to store a 10-frame favicon-size animation inside your body. But in terms of pushing the boundaries of how we store and disseminate art, it’s a little bit exhilarating. Antonellis isn’t the first person to implant an RFID chip in his body–Kevin Warwick, a cybernetics professor at the University of Reading, is probably the best known–but the ends to which he’s doing it make the endeavor unique.

Think of Antonellis as a rogue cyborg moving invisibly through New York City, all in the name of sharing digital beauty. Take the idea a few generations into the future, and things are even wilder: Moguls being kidnapped by shadowy sorts, with arms chopped off solely for the purpose of gaining access to the multimillion dollar artworks inside. That, actually, might leave us with a lesson: No matter what type of art you’re talking about, if you want to keep it secure, you still can’t beat a nice, big vault.  WIRED