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Visit People's Park Plinth

Frequency Love

29/08/2003
Furtherfield

Featured image: abstract animated visual models working from the audio samples of couples engaging in sexual activities.

Frequency Love is a net art piece, not in the networked sense but conceptually filled to the brim with a net consciousness, a net object. This visual deviation playfully captures the dark side of the Internet and its globally collective and obsessive mannerist activities. It reveals a psychological nuance of the everyday Internet sexual experience.

The source material were originally sound files – mp3’s, consisting of couples copulating. Amateurs submitting and declaring their intimately entwined, feral and visceral exertions for other interested parties to hear and enjoy online. Chris Webb abstracted the audio, the data and transformed them into what now are animated gif images of couples having sex.

There is a contradiction at play built by circumstance, that such esoteric interests of sharing intimate, sexual sound files in virtual private clubs do tend to exude. The inevitable occurs. If the multitude of surfers, search hard enough on the net, they collect hidden information by hook or crook somehow; which is part of the nature of using the Internet medium.

When viewing these works it is as though they are breathing, as if they are real souls, real people, even though you know that they are invented visuals, data into sound. Then you remember that they were real people, but mutated into visual form. The ‘Plexus’, culmination of networked, linked individuals expressing proclivity and what seems an uncontrollable hunger to communicate in a way other than by words, via the motion of sexual intercourse in audio format. There has been a global shift of people exploring new territories regarding their own relational selves. The term virtual is essence of the Internet medium and we used to think that this word stood for the unreal, untouchable but now we know that this is no longer applicable. It is now part of our everyday experience, therefore real.