The Citizens (Special Edition)
Nick Crowe (1999)
The Citizens is both an on-line project and unique publication that marks a particular moment in the development of the internet. It is a tribute to people’s constant desire to participate in the future.
Nick Crowe has worked with the web sites of private individuals, downloading hundreds of home pages, translating some of them from digital code to simple line drawings that have been traced onto typographic detail paper. These drawings were then scanned, digitalised and returned to the web where they could be visited and downloaded.
Looking at the way the early internet has been claimed as a space for the idiosyncratic and the banal, The Citizens presents a fascinating sociological snapshot of its users through the means of their (digital) self-representation.
Co-published by Book Works with Channel/Artec as 1,000 downloadable digital copies and as a unique book produced by Book Works, containing a disc and the original hand-rendered drawings.
