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"Surfing the Internet and the world shrinks to the size of a village. The farthest regions are just one click away. But taking a closer look, the infinite freedom of a virtual space is just an illusion. Why does not even one single website from North Korea exist? Why isn’t there a website about the Tiananmen Massacre from within China, no right wing extremist propaganda from Germany, not one single Pin-Up girl from Iran, no criticism of Islam from Saudi Arabia, no call for a protest rally from Syria?"

The power of pictures

Because of the fact that information is only detectable automatically in specific encodings and because the bandwith of user Internet connections are already fast enough, we developed the pici-server that generates pictures of websites to access web web pages. We installed the first pici-server in Zurich and started for our self-experiment a journey to the end of the Internet.

Berlin was the starting point of our journey. It was for decades a city divided by the wall, now slowly recovering from the separation. From Berlin we flew to Beijing, a mega city almost exploding by the speed of its development. China is experiencing a massive boom and is still strictly controlled and kept under surveillance by its communist regime.

For three weeks we checked the functions of the Golden Shield, the huge Chinese firewall, in Beijing and Shanghai. For most Chinese the numerous Internet Cafés are their only access to the Internet. Entering the Café everybody is asked for identification, and has to be registered. Like most places within Chinese cities even the rooms are observed by cams. As Europeans it was not possible to avoid being noticed – but even under these aggravating circumstances picidae was running very well. Our server delivered us with all the web sites that are usually only reachable on the other site of the firewall.

With our media art project ZONE*INTERDITE we unveiled some blind spots in our own perception. picidae follows up here and explores our perspective and imagination in relation to the digital information transfer. picidae takes the questions for the image of the world literally. The pici-server delivers images of web pages and uses the image as digital encryption. The power of an image is not calculable.

How picidae works

Website blocked by Firewall

The firewall inhibits the invocation of censored web sites within China due to words in the Content, the URL or because of the permanent blocking of the whole web site.

call a pici-server

If you invoke a pici-server a form field appears to fill in a web address. The pici-server then creates an image of that website and sends this back. To make surfing on that image possible, pici-server analyses the web site and puts links via image maps onto the image where they can be seen on the web site. So one can click in the web browser with the mouse onto the links like on the “true” web page.

pici-server delivers a picture of the website

On a further layer form fields are set pixel accurately into the web site. Therewith you can send simple form fields and search as usual within web sites and search engines. That’s important because for example Goolge is reachable in China, but censors search results. Search engines outside China show many more results.

pici-Net

Page content, page title, image name, links etc. chooses picidae arbitrarily. For that the primarily requested URLs can’t be detected by censorship programmes, user’s input is encrypted by javascript before sending.