<nettime> No Flesh Guaranteed...

[marc <marc.garrett@furtherfield.org>]

No Flesh Guaranteed...
A strange Net Art Project_by Marc Garrett.

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 featured pron as 
well. 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 net art.

In one sense 'No Flesh Guaranteed' has managed to hijack a large section 
of the lusty Internet audience to view something different from their 
usual, salivating 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 secure and comforted in 
their (self-imposed) state of denial, which is of course is a very 
common and psychological problem for the many who cannot deal with the 
feral nature of humanity and its more pleasurable aspects.

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 of such acts, still there in spirit, lurking and 
leaving outlined traces of what was once there before; which in turn 
leaves a message that is altogether a more sinister conundrum.

http://www.furtherfield.org/mgarrett/noflesh/

p.s. if anyone wishes to write about this project at, please do.
I am also working out new ways of exhibiting this stuff in a more 
realtional context, but more about that another time.


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