When someone mentions Penn State, the first thing that could spring to mind is football, or for those who are less sports-minded, perhaps cows. One rarely thinks of high-end fashion or art with a surprisingly global inspiration.
For the past few months, Adam Harvey (senior-integrative arts) has been hard at work on what has become known as The Internet Portrait Project. The Internet Portrait is a constantly evolving artwork, located, as the name suggests, online. Internet users from anywhere in the world can contribute and participate by uploading a headshot to the project. The image is then added to a database that plays back the headshots in rapid succession.
For Harvey, its importance goes far beyond the visual image it creates.
"All of the images come together to form the idea of a face, even if you can't pick out each person's individual features," Harvey said. "It represents the homogenization of the Internet, but it also personifies it. There's no face to the Internet; when you e-mail or talk online, you're throwing words out to nobody, something faceless. The Internet Portrait creates an image, but the underlying concepts are more psychological than visual."
Harvey began work on The Internet Portrait as a final project for Net Art: Multimedia Web Publishing (Art 416 ).
"Humans have been creating portraits since cave paintings. It's obviously an important form of art, but what is the impact of one portrait out of the millions that exist? I wanted to create one representative portrait," Harvey said.
The project really took off last summer during an internship Harvey did with zoozoom.com, a self-described "fashion/arts Web site."
"Zoozoom.com is really a meeting point for great fashion and fine-art photography," said David McIntyre, the site's creative director. "It's a forum where photographers can be as creative as they want with their art."
Most of the site's work is commissioned and done almost entirely by professionals in the field of fashion, McIntyre said. Harvey is a clear exception to this, but his work upholds the creativity that is the central concept of the site.
"It's so common for young photographers to just copy what's already there," McIntyre said. "When Adam interned with us, we got to work pretty closely with him. I'd never seen anything like his Internet Portrait. It's a real original idea."
Margaret Theranger (freshman-communications), a fan of the Web site, agrees.
"The Internet Portrait is such a fresh idea, especially because it has such a globally diverse focus," she said. "I think it's great that zoozoom.com and Penn State are so supportive of a project like this."
