This superstition survived well past the Middle Ages. “If you do it just right, you summon up the face of the person who is going to be your beloved,” Tucker says. These rituals appear to be the earliest use of reflections in “love magic.” “It’s in the medieval period that we start to have stories of deliberate summonings using reflective surfaces, either mirrors or a bucket of water,” says Tucker. And over time, mirrors’ supposed powers expanded, including fortune-telling. Ancient Romans believed that mirrors had the ability to trap the soul they also believed that it took seven years for the soul to regenerate itself, which is where we get the superstition that breaking a mirror results in seven years’ bad luck. Ancient Romans believed mirrors could trap a soul, which would take seven years to regenerate-resulting in seven years of bad luck for the unfortunate victim who broke a looking glass. The ancient Greek myth tells of a handsome young man who became so enamored of his own face reflected in the water that he wasted away gazing at himself. “Narcissus is about the earliest clear story connected to seeing a reflection,” she says. Legends about the powers of mirrors go way back, according to Binghamton University folklorist Elizabeth Tucker, who focuses on the supernatural. The Lugosi mirror is hardly the first reflective surface to scare up a chilling story. Some even claim to have been attacked, waking from uneasy dreams covered in scratch marks. The mirror’s next owner was murdered and, in the years that followed, subsequent owners have reported seeing a dark entity reflected in it. The story goes that he used it in occult attempts to contact his deceased wife, but instead invited something unwanted and otherworldly. Bagans has said that, of his entire collection, it’s one of the things that unnerves him the most.Īllegedly, the mirror once belonged to Dracula actor Bela Lugosi. There’s also a rather plain-looking mirror, about two feet tall and shaped like a tombstone. There, the spooky memorabilia ranges from Ted Bundy’s glasses to fragments of Charles Manson’s bones, scraped from the incinerator after his body was cremated. And we accomplished our mission: the final piece of the free relationships interface is now running.Beyond the Las Vegas Strip’s dazzling lights, something darker awaits Sin City visitors who venture into celebrity ghost hunter Zak Bagans’s Haunted Museum. Now they are there, in full effect, free to keep in touch with a whole world of men and women and anything in between. Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules. So we established a new website ( ) giving them justice and granting them the possibility of soon being face to face with anybody who is attracted by their facial expression and related data. They wanted more than just their restricted circles of “friends” and they wanted it quickly and easily. But they were trapped by Facebook owning their data and restricting their actions with primitive privacy rules. All that people wanted was to attract new people, have more relationships, to express and receive love through their digital traits. In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook’s exclusive property we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures).Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions. After a few weeks we had to face the evidence. “Stealing 1 million Facebook profiles, filtering them with face-recognition software and then posting them on a custom-made dating website, sorted by their facial expression characteristics. This is how the authors explain this new, provocative net artwork: Face to Facebook is currently on view as an installation at Transmediale Festival in Berlin. They all use custom programmed software in order to exploit (not without fun) three of the biggest online corporations (Google, Amazon and Facebook), exploiting conceptual hacks that generate unexpected holes in their well oiled marketing and economic system. These works share a lot in terms of both methodologies and strategies. Posted In: activism, facebook, net art, social mediaįace to Facebook is the latest project by Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio, the third work in a series that began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir.
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