| Out of the fascination for the banal imagery of webcams, a large archive of webcam pictures has been built. These images were removed from the original context and presented as individual images without connection to the internet or to what they depict. Some of this material is presented in the piece Virtual City (1999). Webcam images are printed on photographic paper and framed with a passe-partout. This generates an impression of snapshot photography of various cities. The difference is, that the photographer has not visited the cities herself, she used the web as camera and decontextualized the imagery. Only when seen from very close the pictures reveal their origin due to the visibilty of the pixels. In the banality of the image matter and the blurry digital quality the images develop an aesthetic of their own. An image of international cities that can barely be related to the real locations is generated. |