First there were Facebook friends posting on virtual walls. Now there is a Facebook friends poster for actual walls.
If you had a poster of all your Facebook friends, what would you do with it? Use it to remind house guests of how popular you are? Stare at it for hours when the internet went down? Ruminate on the ways in which one’s social media presence is overtaking archaic things like interior design when it comes to building a personal brand?
That’s the promise displayed by Printing Facebook, a new service thats for $20 sells customers a 20″ by 40″ poster of the profile pictures of all of their Facebook friends.
The project is the work of artist Benjamin Lotan, who found inspiration while working on a web application for collaborating on emails and being struck by a collage of the profile photos of his contacts. He soon hit upon the idea for personalized friend posters.
(See pictures of Facebook’s headquarters.)
“It’s totally different from looking at pictures on Facebook,” he explained. “You get drawn into it. It’s a trace of everyone you’ve known or met.”
Lotan, currently pursuing an MFA in visual art, is reluctant to draw comparisons between the posters and his other projects. “I don’t think of it as an art piece — not that art can’t be economically driven.” Still, he is proud of how the idea has taken off, both artistically (“It’s a moment in time. These are the pictures that you have, and next week it’s going to change,”) and commercially. Since launching last week, doing no promotion, he’s sold over 100 posters.