"fbFaces" is a project by Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay, who study "New Media" at the University of Visual Arts and Design Kassel, Germany. The project deals with the issue of data accessibility on the Internet, a topic that is gaining more and more importance and actuality -especially in our times of privacy protection and social networks.
"On the one hand "Internet giants" like Google, etc. are coming under criticism for unsolicitedly collecting any information accessible, on the other hand it is surprising how many intimacies we reveal voluntarily, especially in social networks like facebook. What is normal, what is exaggerated? How are we dealing with that flood of information and in which ways is it changing us? How important is image cultivation on the Internet and how important becomes my "facebook-me"?
"fbFaces" is a fecabook crawler, built using JavaScript & PHP, that starts at the public profile of any fb-user, saving profile image, facebook-ID and name, and afterwards continuing its way to the public profiles of the user's friends. And so on...
An unimaginable flood of images with self-projection as its only purpose, 100.000 of these profile images were used (via Processing) to print a wallpaper for an entire room. In our living space, a wallpaper is omnipresent, it surrounds us day and night until after a while it is no longer noticed.
fbFaces is an attempt to visualize the incredible amount of data and images that we are daily overwhelmed by, so that we can neither realize our own selectivity nor consider the amount of data perceived.
The wallpaper transforms the room itself into a flood of information. It surrounds us, cannot be estimated from distance; details can only be caught through determined selection. But then they vanish again -in a cloud of information." (Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay).
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