Website Provider: Outflux.net
URL: http://jnocook.net/faces/index.htm

faces

These are a collection of whores from the internet, and presented in approximately this format at the exhibition ["NO CARRIER"] a few years ago.

Specifically, the faces are grabbed from images downloaded over two days from alt.binaries.erotic.etc news groups from the UseNet, at a time when this was largely uncommercial yet.

To quote from the catalog...

The images are areas of women's faces from Usenet porn, reduced first to 40 by 50 pixels, then printed to 8x10 inches, so that the pixels are about 1/4 inch square. They are printed in 9-pin ribbon color on acid-free paper. Convergence happens at a distance; at close range the faces break up into almost unreadable blocks, the fingerprints of image files to be found on computers throughout the world.

These images, and thousands like them, float on and off the Usenet. The average daily postings to the alt.binary.erotic groups amounts to 1100 files per day -- probably 300,000 to 350,000 new files per year. The average stay is 2 or 4 days before they disappear from public view, to reappear at unpredictable intervals in the future as in the past.

If this romanticizes the subject, think of it instead as representing only part of the story. These images are a metaphor for the imaginary ideographic life which has already been attributed to the internet in works of fiction by William Gibson and others: virtual, fugitive, and anarchistic. There are no rules. There is no order. Absolute anarchy rules the internet. Without an understanding of the net's anarchistic basis, there is no understanding the net.

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