Harvested brings to the foreground five-hundred found artworks from households, studios, movie sets and other heterotopias of the adult films industry. More than two thousand adult movies were bulk harvested from p2p websites directly to a server location where they have been broken into thousands of low-quality JPG snapshots. The pool of images was submitted to crowdsourced services and a selected group of microworkers were assigned to filter them according to a consciously vague instruction: as to whether or not they displayed contemporary art. The anthology underlines the importance for a contextual, industry-specific art history, it posits by the same token, the need to activate peripheral vision in regard to scopophiliac practices. While IKEA paintings are pervasively dominant, one can find works from modern masters such as a rip-off from Fernand Leger, an unknown Joan Miro, Castle and Sun from Paul Klee but also contemporary works such as Quote, 1964, a print from Robert Rauschenberg, a series of paintings from Mark Rothko, School of Fontainebleau from Cy Twombly and even some replicas from Frank Stella and Lucio Fontana.
Harvested is a publishing coproduction from: MMMNNNRRRG (Portugal), Forlaens (Denmark), Hélice Hélas (Switzerland), Lendroit Editions (France), La Cinquieme Couche (Belgium), Topovoros (Greece), Fortepressa (Italy), Ediciones Valientes (Spain), Pachiclon (Mexico) and Bitterkomix (South Africa). 502 pages | hardcover edition CMYK (165mm x 150mm) | 2015 |
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