Still from VideoMate montage
Sorry – Another throwaway post before a longer one on Friday…
Anyways, AFC had a link, recently, to Ethereal Others, a web art project that I absolutely absolutely love, by Harm van den Dorpel. Ethereal Others is the counterpart to Ethereal Self, a site that inputs an image from your webcam and outputs it as a weird, faceted kaleidoscope. Little do the users know, but the webcam also captures an image which is then sent on to Ethereal Others and archived there. The result is a huge survey of portraits. More than all that, though, Ethereal Others is the internet version of people-watching – you can scroll while comparing faces, backgrounds, etc., checking out cute girls/boys, trying to figure out what this is an accurate sampling of: Internet users, art school students, AFC readers, those interested in net art?
The second link I’d like to direct you to is a phenomenal video on Ian Alexander Adam’s blog. I won’t spoil it by describing it to you, but please go watch it.
Both Ethereal Others and the sources from which the video is taken are interesting takes on portraiture – One assumes that you can relate something essential about oneself through a screen and the other seems to assume that all that is relatable is one’s appearance, or, at most, socio-economic info gleaned from one’s clothes and background…
P.S. Also, Hippolyte Bayard tracked down one of those Downfall videos, this one on Kodachrome. I think it may be the best way of addressing that subject.