Crystallize Horribles Cernettes, 2020
title: Fig. 001 "Crystallize Horribles Cernettes"
material: JPEG size: a4 year: 2020
"Test Horribles Cernettes" is an REmax Appropriation Art Piece (RAAP) on a work by Constant Dullaart “Jennifer in Paradise”. Jennifer is replaced by the first photo on the internet. On July 18, 1992, Silvano de Gennaro was asked by Tim Berners-Lee to scan and upload a photo of a parody pop group called Les Horribles Cernettes onto the info.cern. Also a REmax on the text found on the fotomuseum website (See website link below): Ax710 recovers the first internet post in history, manipulates and redistributes it, making it widespread again. Created by Silvano de Gennaro on July 18, 1992. That was around the same time that Berners Lee was developing software that would enable the web to handle GIF images. Apparently, Berners Lee was just bumming around the office, working on his web project, when he asked Silvio de Gennaro, who sat nearby, for a few scanned photos that he could upload. You might expect that the first photo on the web would’ve something historical, maybe a picture taken by a famous photographer. But instead, de Gennaro handed off that album cover he’d done for the Cernettes. Tim Berners Lee was a fan of the band, so when it came time to upload the first photo to the web, the Cernettes got the honor of being the first photo on the web. This artistic intervention is not just an archeological effort, though. Behind the placeholder image lie the initial ideals and promises of digital culture, embodied by the manipulation allowed by the filters of Affinity Photo. "Test Horribles Cernettes" reveals the creative utopian vision behind tools that allowed free exchange and cultural expression in a world still unaware of surveillance and control of contemporary imaging systems. The photograph and its endless variations become a nostalgic ode to a historical moment and a reminder of the cultural hegemony hidden behind digital images. Finally the artist inscribes a secret visual message, encoded within the print through a steganographic encryption, exploiting the possibility for the visual placeholder to carry a message within it.
Filters are used from the app Pixelmator in no particular order
On 18 July 1992, Italian computer scientist Silvano de Gennaro snapped a picture of his girlfriend (now wife) Michele Muller with her comedy doo-wop band “Les Horribles Cernettes”. At the time both were working at the scientific research centre CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. Silvano scanned the photo onto his computer and made it into an album cover using Photoshop 1.0. A few weeks later (no one remembers the exact date), Silvano’s colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked for an image to test some new features of his pet project, the World Wide Web, so Silvano sent over the picture of the Cernettes (as a gif). The original image was about 120 x 50 pixels and took more than a minute to load on a typical computer.
Les Horribles Cernettes formed in 1990, with a line-up drawn from CERN’s administrative staff and the partners of CERN scientists. The picture shows (from left to right) Angela Higney (who worked for the Red Cross), Michele Muller (a graphic designer at CERN), Collette Reilly (who worked in CERN’s accounts department), and Lynn Veronneau (a research administrator at CERN). Their songs were about scientific research and the frustrations of dating scientists, with titles such as “Liquid Nitrogen”, “Microwave Love” and “My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize”.
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https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/situations-post/jennifer-in-paradise/