“fbFaces“ is a project by Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay. It explores the issue of data accessibility on the Internet; a topic that is gaining more and more importance and currency in these times of privacy protection and social networks.

“Internet giants”, like Google etc, are coming under criticism for unsolicitedly collecting all information accessible, whereas, on the other hand, we voluntarily reveal intimate facts on social networks and through social media. What is normal, what is exaggerated? How are we dealing with this flood of information and how is it changing us? How important is image cultivation on the Internet and how important becomes my “facebook-me”?

fbFaces is a facebook crawler, built using JavaScript & PHP. It starts on 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. In our virtual 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, to the point that we can can neither realize our own selectivity nor consider the amount of data we perceive.

Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay study “New Media” at the University of Visual Arts and Design Kassel, Germany.

www.joernroeder.de
www.johnnycrab.com