ultranature 6

in the framework of the month of photography 2011 in luxembourg, ultranature has been invited to intervene within the actual artistic and financial re-launching of the web platform flash007. ultranature, responding to the theme proposed for mutations 3 - “personae: personal image, public role” webbased project highlighting photography’s mutations, has chosen to work on the hidden archives of the collaborative platform flash007. flash007, created in 2007, is a photography, video, sound and text archive built on medias realized by artists, institutions and invited participants. an embedded module of the platform, allows a specific public to send, to a given email address, by email or mms, images which are instantly displayed on the web. a slide show is generate and projected in public spaces. flash007, in collaboration with café-crème a.s.b.l. and the museum the family of man, installed the module, from may to december 2008, in the edward steichen’s exhibition “family of man” in clervaux with the aim to create a contemporary family of man with the interaction of the visitors and the public. at the end of the collaboration the link to the project on the web had been hidden.

after two years ultranature found again the link while working on the platform. ultranature 6 reveals that the system has been persistent during the time as an autonomous world. since 2009 spamming has ruled the system module. two kinds of images have been received: illustrations for pills advertising to revitalize men libido (95%) and photos of women looking for relationships (5%). once filtered the spam, ultranature retained the photographic archive, which consists of women portraits with title. the undesired email keeps at activating private desires despite the web system itself diverts unexpectedly the private target of these image-emails. as a matter of fact the public intrusion into the private - to reach private individuals - reverses unforeseeably into a public display. this unpredicted archive continually auto-generates through the web and unwittingly mutate the existing one and questions social relationships as well as photography. the digital reproduction of portraiture and its diffusion on the web multiply blindly senders and addresses into a vortex of images without souvenir left solely to the status of image-écran.

ultranature 6_series of 24 digital prints on diasec