THE STRANGE TALE OF MAW

At the end of the 20th century there was a time when you had to buy a book to learn how to use the internet.  Unlike the World Wide Web you are looking at right now, most interaction was carried via Usenet, kind of a text version of the internet.  Modems were so slow that you had to sit and watch a picture slowly load line by line. When that picture was a naked woman the suspense was agonizing. This did not halt the inexorable progress of pornography.  Newsgroups, a type of slow motion chat room, were formed for the sole purpose of accessing and distributing the most obscure fetishes, some of them illegal.  It was also the dawn of the amateur pornographer, before "amateur" became a genre of professional pornography, and in newsgroups with finger-breaking names like alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.nospam.amateur,
photos began to appear of someone known as MAW, or Mary Ann.  Here she is.

Obviously not someone's mom. But the weird thing was her name and initials were the same as my mom, which adds a slightly unsettling subconscious twist to the whole thing for me personally. Small bust, big hair and one eye kind of off, not complying with society's norm for the artform.  Why were there were dozens of photos of this skinny little normal looking gal, indoors and outdoors, and who posted them?  Family pictures, wedding pictures, cheesecake, erotica and the crudest pornography.  I just remembered MAW last night, and within half an hour I knew, thanks to 21st century technology, maybe not the story, but a story. And I had a zip file full of pictures. It is a strange tale indeed but I am not telling it here.  If you care that much you can find it.  What I am trying to figure out is how to make art about something this offbeat and complicated. Someday these things will be important and I am not sure anyone is addressing or trying to understand them in a larger social context so that leaves it up to me.