Joern Roeder and Jonathan Pirnay, students at the University of Visual Arts and Design Kassel, Germany, have created an installation that reflects where our modern society has come in this digital age. In the style of Erik Kessel's “Photography in Abundance,” the team put together a piece entitled “fbFaces,” a room covered with a massive collection of Facebook profile pics.
To gather all the photos, Pirnay and Roedar made a “Facebook crawler, built using JavaScript & PHP.” The program starts on a users profile page, saves their profile picture, Facebok ID, and name, then continues on to the other public profiles that the user is friends with. This went on until 100,000 images were collected.
According to Pinary and Roedar, the goal of the installation “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.”
via [Serial Optomist]
