DRAWING ON ANONYMOUS

Two anonymous BOCA artists have spent the past two months in a BOCA-sponsored residency on 4Chan. At the end of this research period they created portraits of random Facebook users in the MS Paint meme style common to the site’s /b/ section.

By taking the vernacular aesthetic of Anonymous and combining it with the public identity extension of Facebook, these images offer a unique melding of the Internets’ two competing dynamics: onymous vs. anonymous.

These quirky drawings are cleverly sketched to provide anonymity to the user by distorting their face. This is perfect for those people who want to use social networking sites like Facebook, but are not comfortable in having personal photos on their profile. Keen artists can easily go on their computer and use their graphics pad to create a sketch, while they read Creative Review online or just relax and visit Party Poker. This morphing of the human face hides the true identity of the person, yet there is something strangely recognisable about the person.

We believe these drawings (devoid, unlike Troll Face or Foreveralone.jpg, of narrow emotional content) thus offer a unique basis for the generation of a potentially universal meme: a meme representative of all the confusing and complex emotions of the human user.

In keeping with the conventions of classical portraiture, all subjects are presented, whenever possible, with vocational details gleaned from their publicly shared information.

Proceeds will go to the anonymous artists, to reward them for seeing that which can not be unseen.

Interested collectors will have these images made available to them, sans watermark, for their disposal.

(Exhibition text by Jacques Bozeau)