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Andrea Zapp «Little Sister» | Interface Screenshot
Andrea Zapp, «Little Sister», 2000
Interface Screenshot | © Andrea Zapp
Web-Link: www.azapp.de/littlesister


 
Andrea Zapp «Little Sister» | Interface ScreenshotAndrea Zapp «Little Sister»Andrea Zapp «Little Sister»Andrea Zapp «Little Sister»Andrea Zapp «Little Sister»
Germany | internet project
 

 Andrea Zapp
«Little Sister»

«Little Sister» describes itself as «The World’s First Online Surveillance Soap» and is made up on an Internet page with live webcams. The interface is a circle of black-and-white photos arranged perspectivally to form a semisphere reminiscent of a surveillance mirror in the supermarket. Every segment, or picture, in the configuration corresponds to a camera. To fetch its images, you click on the camera. The photos show street corners, shops, people at work or in their apartments. The viewer soon realizes that their links with the physical locations are connotational more than anything else. For instance, the view of a darting flame leads to a fire station in Finland. A poster with the inscription «Big Brother gucken macht dumm» («Watching Big Brother makes you stupid») is a reference to a topical discussion about a «reality TV» broadcast on German private television in 2000, and opens a view onto a domestic room with an open fireplace. In this way, the work plays ironically with the users’ voyeuristic expectations, but also refers to the problems of global monitoring by surveillance systems.
(Source: Reinhard W. Wolf in: Update 2.0, Goethe-Institut (ed.), Munich 2000)