Karen Eliot is a multiple identity, a shared pen name that anyone is welcome to use for activist and artistic endeavours.
[2] The experimental composers and artists David Chokroun, Aydem Azmikara, André Éric Létourneau, Marc Couroux, Engram Knots, and Vanessa Grey have used "Karen Eliot" to collectively and anonymously write musical compositions during and throughout their lifetimes.
"[3] Many of André Éric Létourneau's radio-art works are also signed by Karen Eliot.
[4] These multiple names were developed and popularized in artistic subcultures of the 1970s to 1990s like Mail Art, Neoism and post-Situationist discourse, with the pseudonym Rrose Sélavy – jointly used by Dada artist Marcel Duchamp and the surrealist poet Robert Desnos – forming a historical precedent, as did the poetry of Taliesin.
In the 1960s underground culture the multiple name Emmett Grogan was adopted by San Francisco Diggers.