BERLIN, GERMANY.- The Art project picidae started as an exploration of individual perception, led to a new view on the Internet and allows us to circumvent Censorship. picidae withstood the test of the strictly controlled Chinese Internet Cafes.

Whoever is visiting the Olympic Games next year in Beijing, will have to forego the information on Wikipedia or BBC. The Chinese Internet censorship also called Golden Shield or Chinese Firewall suppresses these sites among many other critical ones of the government. picidae is not a hacker software. The concept of picidae is simple and hard to encrypt by censorship.

The artists Christoph Wachter and Mathias Jud live in Berlin and Zurich. With their projects they explore grey zones of individual perception. In the spring of 2007 Wachter and Jud started for an experiment a journey to the end of the Internet. In Chinese Internet Cafes everybody has to be registered and the rooms are observed. Even under these aggravating circumstances Wachter and Jud were able to circumvent Chinese censorship. They were able to call so-called inaccessible sites regarding human rights, democracy, Tibet, and even the Tiananmen massacre.

Picidae beats holes into the Golden Shield. Websites that are reachable on the server's location can be invoked via pici-server. The picture serves as digital encryption. Images cannot be searched by censorship programmes for restricted keywords. China, Iran, Korea, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Uzbekistan and Vietnam are known for active Internet censorship. But also in Germany, France and Switzerland exist disabled web sites. Sometimes a message appears on Google pages that some search results have deleted. What has been deleted remains in the dark. With picidae as a community project a new view on the world wide web can emerge.

The artists: Christoph Wachter & Mathias Jud will present their work for the first time on Tuesday, 6th of September at 19:30 at the Werkleitz Gesellschaft e.V. Zentrum fuer kuenstlerische Bildmedien Sachsen-Anhalt (Center for Art and Visual Media of Saxony-Anhalt) Schleifweg 6 D-06114 Halle/Saale. The Art project is now reachable on www.picidae.net.