No Flesh Guaranteed was originally put online in 1997. Since then it has expanded into three different sections as different types of works. All images were originally taken from free web sites that, regularly featured explicit photographs of sexuality.
All the three sites were taken off-line in 2004 due to bandwidth issues. At one point within two days there was over 1.8 million visitors, visiting the site. This crashed the server and left a rather large bill to pay. The mass visits occurred because many links to No Flesh Guaranteed came from various blogs and web sites that showed pron. And even though it feels good to have many passing visitors to the net art work from people who would normally not see such work. The downside is that many visitors were those who wanted to just see raw acts of sexuality, rather than art.
In one sense No Flesh Guaranteed has managed to hijack a large section of the lusty Internet audience to view something different from the usual experience, but whether this matters as a cultural maneuver is another issue that needs to be explored in a wider context and imaginative debate.
In the end, this work is a creative, activist play on the idea of people, not wanting to view sexuality and finding the images of such activities extricated. So that they feel more and secure and comforted in the state of denial, which is of course is a very common and psychological problem that many who cannot deal with the feral nature of humanity put themselves under.
It is also about the absence of something and what we fill that void with instead of what is actually there. Yet the context itself leaves the spectre or ghosts still there in spirit, lurking and leaving outlined traces of what was there once before, which in turn leaves a message that is altogether more sinister. |
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