This portrait was made for a show called Italian Boys held at the Galerie Analix Forever in Geneva in 2002.
I built a WLAN with an open node (its SSID was the name of my main web site: zanni.org). People coming to the gallery with their laptops (or remaining outside in a ray of 50 meters) could join the network typing my web site as password. I set my identity, my Internet identity (zanni.org) as a way to link/connect people to the net. I became a new Caronte, allowing people to overlap between personal digital relationships and human ones. Following a new kind of “alphabet” created for the first time around June 2002 by several London based graphic designers, I chalked the facade of the gallery with a sign representing that type of wireless node and others tech specs. Before doing it I participated to a forum hosted by a web called warchalking.org concerning these new symbols, introducing my up dated version of the classic sign for open nodes. I proposed to insert in the left side of it, the latitude and longitude in decimals of the point where the WLAN was set. The symbol chalked on the Analix facade had those specs.
You can find info about what i did at Analix in a lot of web sites. Just type zanni.org+analix and google will answer you.
