This essay was presented as a performance/lecture – Whitecliffe College of Arts and Design, Auckland, New Zealand.

"But what is transmissible is legal ownership and not (or not necessarily) what constitutes the precondition for specific appropriation, namely, the possession of the means of ‘consuming’ a painting or using a machine, which, being nothing other than embodied capital, are subject to the same laws of transmission".

Pierre Bourdieu, The forms of capital. 1986

India's new prime minister Narendra Modi is standing on a stage addressing a crowd of more than 17,000 followers in Dubai, you can watch it on YouTube. Or you can watch some of his holographic lifelike onstage tele-presence experiences of over more than 800 of his ‘live performances’ that he gave during his frenetic 2014 campaign to secure his victory. With over 3 million square kilometres of land to travel and a population of roughly 1.3 billion people to talk to - it is a gruelling and long campaign. India is a big place but the world has just gotten a bit smaller, where the old idiom of ‘you can not be in two place at once’ has just exited stage left. This is not the stuff of science fiction. This is real and the company which developed the technology HologramUSA - states that the experience “will transform your business” – “help you break through the media clutter” and make “you stand out from the crowd”. 1