One of the first images published on the Internet was taken down last week after spending eight years on it. During that time, it was seen by 2,4 million visitors, which is an enviable number even for the most significant works of world art, let alone the object of web adoration, the unsightly coffee pot at the University of Cambridge.
The famous jug found its way onto the internet for extremely practical reasons. One of the researchers, Quentin Stafford Fraser, thought it was an incredible waste of time to climb several floors to the Trojan Room, only to find an empty pot there. Taking advantage of a computer network spread across the university's laboratories, he set up a camera that "refreshed" the image every twenty seconds, showing changes in liquid levels to interested coffee drinkers. As the local network is connected to the Internet, the pot was found there, and it didn't take long for the rest of the world to find out about this cleverness. For many cyber tourists, coffee in Cambridge has become a mandatory break (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html.), and there were those who came to the university to see this "miracle" and live.
Deciding that eight years was long enough, and that there are more exciting things to do on the internet than watching pots fill and empty, the folks at Cambridge decided to retire it, consoling those who hadn't seen it before that it wasn't the original jug anyway , which has long since fallen into half, but who knows which successor in order (something like the Phantom from the comics).
Those more exciting things certainly include living people who are ready to put their daily lives in full view of the public, hanging web cameras all over the house. One of the more recent examples is Tanya Korin (32) and Josh Harris (39), who did it for artistic reasons. Surrounded by 32 cameras that mercilessly revealed everything that happens inside their house and transmitted it to the address weliveinpublic.com, Josh and Tanya lasted 78 days, before they decided not only to abandon the experiment (art project) but also to they parted privately.
"In the beginning, we ran away from the house when we wanted some privacy, and later we covered the cameras," Tanja said after everything, adding that she would agree to a similar experiment again, but under different conditions. "I wouldn't expose my whole life again, maybe just a couple of hours a day," she adds.
Although we are not far behind the rest of the world in many aspects of the Internet, this kind of exhibitionism has not yet caught on here (close-up street cameras do not count), perhaps because so many cameras, even for an artistic/sociological experiment, are still unavailable . Or maybe you should start with something simpler like a coffee pot.
And there would be an audience for both.
