As the trickling flux of beta invites have made their way to a wider user base, FFFFound has gradually exposed itself to the public eye with both praise and criticism. The novice user is breached with a beautifully designed interface that upon first entry visually excites in a way that's rare in this age of proliferated images online. While this mediated effect retains its luster at a surface level upon each revisit and refresh of content, it eventually fades to a twinkle when authorship and credibility of the chosen works disappear in a sudden rush to 'fffind' any instance of an interesting image. In the case of the web this instance could both fortuitously be the artist's personal site, or in most cases a link four times removed from any artistic origin.
I'd like to wait and see what becomes of FFFFound in the next year before I make any particular decisions about it's success as a system; whether new features will be added (maybe a feature that allows users to correct the image's link to the appropriate origins?), and how the expansion of its user base affects its content and quality.
There is no doubt however that the visual collective on FFFFound is loaded with unique patterns that denote a very specific design-savvy, pop-cultured user, who may indulge in the occasional soft porn polaroid of a doey hipster nude. Today's post however will not be about the throes of helvetica tricks, the vintage photos of Japanese humanities, or the impressively rendered moleskine sketchbooks. I would like to bring attention to the copious amounts of Star Wars inspired pop art that instantaneously appears at least once every other page on FFFFound. At least, in my feed.
The following photos are only a slice of what ranges between public Chewbacca sightings, various interpretations of the Dark Lord's headpiece, and clever footnotes on the forbidden love between Princess Leia and every other character in the Star Wars series. Vader's mask becomes a richly limited canvas that evokes both it's cinematic history and its topical interpretation to modern day culture, an accessible kitsch equivalent of the Art world's cube. Meanwhile the galaxy far far away manages to find it's double life in every instance of common existence, from the family portrait to the nudie mag pull-out.