Eyelevel BQE presents Crowdsource, an exhibition of new work by Liubo Borissov.

It is undeniable that the Internet has changed the face of interpersonal relationships, but can it be claimed that it has also created completely new ones? For example, one could argue that Facebook has mutated the meaning of the meaning of the word “friend”, even spawning the common colloquial use of the word “de-friend”. The systems designed to increase connectivity come with un-expected side effects, and across the board, online social applications are changing our understanding of friends, relationships, and intimacy.

Chatroulette is the most recent mutation of online encounters, a cam-to-cam online interface that gives each user the ability to “skip” the other user they are randomly connected to. The resulting psychic landscape is an exercise in a digital-cowboy style mentality of nothing-to-lose lust + disgust. Free from consequence or social repercussion the user base of this less than a year old social forum, provides an endless catalogue of human emotion.

Liubo Borissov created a hack for this world, a digital police interrogation mirror, and turned it on the population of Chatroulette in the same random manner its users meet each other. He has collected hundreds of hours of rogue footage of users being shown their own image upside-down. Part anthropological, part comical, part pornography, this data is deliciously naked and vulnerable.

Through the work Liubo ponders the quality and quantity of these new relationships, and his ability to capture and assess them. The resulting pieces invoke many of the same emotions of the source material: a curious detached voyeurism, mild anxious excitement, and low grade arousal. Amassing the material, trends quickly emerge- and it’s near impossible not to form some kind of judgment towards them.