[aha] Art with 1M stolen Facebook profiles and a Dating website - Press Release

[{ brad brace }]

you are numbered
you are product
you are doomed

PROXY Gallery
http://cart.iabrace.com
http://bit.ly/proxygallery

now showing: Profile Portraits (the asia-other collection)
build your own exhibition + catalogue now accepting
commissions for encaustic profile paintings on 12x12"
panels, any subject!

PROXY GALLERY (now showing: the asia-other collection):
Select and assemble your own custom art exhibition with
catalogue! Ultra hi-res art files, suitable for printing,
are delivered in one custom pdf/ebook. Thousands of enlarged
(custom, patented algorithms) and enhanced photographs (now,
likely several hundred thousands, soon over a million,)
mostly low-res cellphone, web-cam, and low-end digital
camera self-portraits (self-packaging), culled from
dating/social websites -- as you might expect, there is some
explicit content (more than is permitted here unfortunately:
you really should see them all, but it probably makes little
difference) -- fascinating and occasionally disturbing. I've
decided to also add a set of painting-filters -- this was
good, as it enabled a 'recovery' of many more worthwhile
images, and also clouded any possible erogenous/irregular
corporate claims, but the project now extends beyond my
life-span. I could easily make small paintings from these
images but who support that activity? Let's see:
commissioned portrait paintings, I'm thinking 12"  square
encaustic on panels, from your choice of subject are
available for $15,000US. It's interesting to find the
balance/inertia point between the look of photo and
painting, and it speaks to the current social/heroic
condition! Often it makes faces look squinty so it's
necessary to 'bring-back' facial aspects. The display images
on this site are but quick approximations of the larger art
files which simply don't scale -- kinda like paint on
canvas. Another advantage of the painting filters is that
they drastically reduce the file sizes and make it well-nigh
impossible for someone to covertly res-up these display
images for printing. It's quite incredible to realize that
many of these pictures were only 3-4K or so when I started
to work on them. You may realize that this is not the first
time I've collected anonymous found-public imagery: notably
dumpster-diving (bicycling with backpack at midnight,) at
photofinishers' in the 70's. And of course, there's the
"Insatiable Abstraction Engine" -- collections from
newsgroups. [http://bbrace.net/insatiable-abstraction.html]
But come to think it, nearly all my work involves repeated
multiples or collections of imagery. My new friends.
Whenever possible I retained any color casts, cropping and
lighting. The portraits are actually very considered,
sometimes selections made/altered merely to obscure the
identity that they wished to presumably portray initially.
Sunglasses are a popular ruse, as are close-ups of cleavage,
butts, tattoos, feet and groins. (Curiously, I've yet to see
a picture of hands... ok, now I have:  some intricate
fingernails and the love/hate finger-tats.) Many
feature-obilerating camera-flash-portraits in the bathroom
mirror. Many of course, occur in and around motorized
vehicles. Only one (so far) in a grocery store. And some,
but surprisingly few, are filched from somewhere online, but
this must be a risky choice in the event of an 'actual
encounter.' How much introductory information/description do
you want to put out there to begin with?  There are some
very creative, even artful, solutions to this dilemma.
Various select groups of portraits are included in each PDF
500-page ebook/catalogue for $250 (sorry about the price but
it was a hellish amount of work and I guarantee you won't be
disappointed or YMB), and can be ordered directly. The
images contain sufficient resolution to print them out on
letter-size/A4 paper (or coffee-mugs, keychains, magnets,
photo-stamps, cards, calendars, tea-towels...), for an
instant exhibition. Use my verified Paypal account to have
the DVD delivered at no charge: [bbrace a eskimo.com;
http://bradbrace.net/buy-into.html] Or, even better,
assemble your own catalogue/exhibition at the Proxy Gallery
storefront [http://cart.iabrace.com/].  Art files are only
$1 each. My new friends. Having been recently kicked-off
Facebook (there was an anonymous report of a depicted
nipple!), and losing 5,000 appreciative friends - it was the
perfect place to host a social-media
profile-portrait-collection, I've decided to also open an
online storefront where individual high-res files will sell
for only $1/each. [http://cart.iabrace.com] How hypocritical
to object to profile pictures that were on FB to begin with;
but it's fun to now position coloured boxes and bars over
n¥pples, c¥nts and c¥cks. How idiotic is that? The prints of
course required different custom algorithms and some
masterful retouching -- they look great! Technically given
the incredibly diverse range of imagery it was difficult to
make them all equally legible; despite a variety of
intricate processing directives, the scripts would
inevitably crash or be unable to render a decent image.
These were handled individually as were the
painting-filters. If I receive a reasonable number of
orders, I'll offer additional states of the union or
countries... but California had to be the place to begin.
Sure to be a collectors' (socio-anthropologists') item! An
amazing and compelling, collective portrait! The
interspersed military/gangster imagery (or maybe something
else), also introduces a new spin on the hopes for this
already tenuous social-media culture. I've had to
organize/sub-divide these in some fashion, so by
state/country seems to be the prevailing approach. And given
how often workers are compelled to move around, there's more
of a local difference in cultural self-perception, body
language, and social-sexual proclivity than you might
expect. It really is a perhaps overlooked (overly-present),
socially significant era when a massive proportion of the
population is able to individually exorcise their
self-imagery instead of being routinely dependent on
existing systematized systems of portraiture and
presentation -- which is not to say that it's entirely free
from stylistic-cultural-corporate constraints and
codification (and why, for now at least, I left the imagery
in a nearly random arrangement), but the individual,
probably for the first time ever, is seen freely negotiating
a shifting porous skein of varied reception... well,
something like that...


PROXY Gallery
http://cart.iabrace.com
http://bit.ly/proxygallery

now showing: Profile Portraits (the asia-other collection)
build your own exhibition + catalogue now accepting
commissions for encaustic profile paintings on 12x12"
panels, any subject!

/:b