This is a first part of an eventual installation series in which I wanted to isolate images from their original context and reconsider their meanings.

When I was working on this installation, I was very much interested about the hierarchical power distribution over the world wide web. I wanted to know about who gets the most of the clicks.

I learned from various sources that porn-related sites were dominating the Internet: all roads might lead to Rome, but all the links were leading to porn.

Therefore, I wanted to create an icon as a testimony of gratitude to the industry, celebrating the pornographic conglomerate.

In this case, an icon refers to be generally a flat panel painting depicting a holy being or object.

I started to look in these sites, in order to understand what might attract people to visit them, besides bareness and sex. I tried to understand the structure, how these sites were build, thinking it might be useful to understand how one of the most powerful commercial tools worked.

While visiting these sites, I was attracted by some of the actresses’ gestures myself, not because they were simply erotic or pornographic, but they were something “ecstatic” once taken out of their context.

The term of “ecstatic” refers to “religious ecstasy”, which is defined as a state characterized by greatly reduced external awareness and expanded interior mental and spiritual awareness which is frequently accompanied by visions and emotional/intuitive (and sometimes physical) euphoria.

These pictures were making me think of some of the most well-known Renaissance’s paintings, such as The Spoliation of El Greco or Spasimo by Raphael.

On the other hand, we know that the word “ecstasy” is often used in milder sense, to refer to any heightened state of consciousness or intense positive emotional experience (spontaneous or induced, for example, by meditation, creative activity, aesthetic or sexual experiences or use of psychoactive drugs).

Having this ambiguity and these similarities in mind, I decided to build a computer-designed bitmap-formatted icon using one of these found-images, which is my subjective answer to an eventual contemporary flat panel painting of a certain mythical holy being’s representation, a figure of adoration.