By breaking the constraints and ridiculous social rules put upon Facebook members while cleverly critiquing the invasive data mining that those of us who aren’t members abhor, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico have created Face to Facebook – the third in their Hacking Monopolism Trilogy. What started as an art-site statement based on a social experiment – retrieving a million “personal” profiles, filtering them using face-recogniton software and then posting them as members of a dating website – soon became a performance activity of just a few days in length. The flood of reactions from unwitting (debatable to some extent) accomplices coupled with over a thousand instances of media coverage suddenly thrust the two of them into a legal fight in which they decided to remove the Lovely Faces dating website, but still keep the F to F site. Following some basic photos I took of the installation and at the Forum, you can watch a video of just one media-based reaction followed by a presentation and an excerpt from the Interactive Art panel discussion that they gave on their award-winning project. Also, check out Alessandro’s publication Neural for a great read.
(thanks to Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico and Ars Electronica)