Our Books

Skin/Strip

Skin/Strip invites specific communities to anonymously express their physical identity using visual images of their naked bodies.

Individuals participate in a collective, live event, confronting social and cultural representations of the body within their community, by revealing and viewing their previously unknown corporeality.

So far we have done Skin/Strip London, Skin/Strip Barcelona and Skin/Strip Online (BBC).

Skin/Strip is an interactive installation created by Completely Naked and commissioned by The Museum Of The Unknown, running from October 2000 until January 2001.
Skin/Strip is a labyrinth of lit round-shaped corridors,
wallpapered with photographic images of skin.
Identities of unknown people.
Blueprints of the audience.
In the middle of the labyrinth is a photo-booth.
In the intimacy of this room, the audience is invited to have part of their body (skin) recorded on a digital camera, this image will become part of the exhibition.

Skin/Strip London

October 2000 - January 2001
Commissioned and presented at The Museum Of The Unknown
The Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street, SouthBank, London SE1 9HP

Skin/Strip Barcelona

Skin/Strip Barcelona was presented at the opening of In Motion Festival (4 to 7 July 2001) and then stayed at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona CCCB until September 2001.

Succesfully aclaimed by the media, the exhibition was attended by 60,000 people and 7,000 images were taken.

Supported by: In Motion Festival, CCCB & The British Council of England

Skin/Strip Online

Skin/Strip Online is an online live artistic project for Shooting Live Artists'03 in a collaboration between Completely Naked and Furtherfield.

A direct development of ‘Skin/Strip’ applied to the internet
An interactive, digital gallery hosted online

‘Skin Strip Online’ invites the global digital community to anonymously express their physical identity by submitting visual images of their bodies. Individual net users participate in a collective, live event, confronting social and cultural representations of the body within the net community, by revealing and viewing their previously unknown corporeality via net-based technology...

'Skin/Strip Online' is a Completely Naked project produced in partnership with Furtherfield.

Commissioned by Shooting Live Artists 2003.
Launched at Site Gallery, Sheffield (physical installation linked online)
Hosted on the BBC website: here (online galleries are now closed)
Independent site launched (www.skinstrip.net now closed)

Shooting Live Artists is produced and funded by The Culture Company, The Arts Council of England, The BBC and The Studio of the North with support from the European Regional Development Fund

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/shootinglive/2003/completelyfurther/

Satellite Venues
The following sites created links to Skin/Strip Online by installing a promotional banner on their homepage:
The Cube Cinema Bristol, UK
Fundacio "la Caixa" Barcelona, Spain
CCCB Barcelona, Spain
Neutral.it Italy
www.devoid.co.uk

Following ‘Skin/Strip London’ and ‘Skin/Strip Barcelona’, we partnered up with internet specialists Furtherfield to develop an ambitious, digital online version of the physical Skin/Strip installation. By devising the technology to accommodate global participation, we broke new ground for interactive arts at the time. Skin/Strip Online was hosted on the BBC website for one year (2003) which challenged social boundaries around issues of nudity and questioned the political margins of copyright, ownership and censorship of such content.

NOTE: we create a new software!

Images

Click here to view image mosiacs fom London and barcelona.

Reviews

Skin/Strip at In Motion / CCCB, Barcelona July-September 2001:

- Primera Linea (11/2001): "So far the best exhibition in Barcelona this summer"

-Escena (Theatre monthly magazine 9/2001): " Often, success is in simple things. Completely Naked has simple ideas, full of suggestion"

- El Pais (23/8/01): " Well framed images and group photos: Tattooed backs, belly rings, tongues and pierced eyebrows, bras, briefs, swimming costumes, sun tanned skins, breasts, pubic areas, testicles, scars, an amazing neck, some very hot images…"

- La Vanguardia (24/8/01): "CCCB presents the last piece of Completely Naked that reclaims the cult of the 'normal body'"

- El Periodico de Catalunya (23/8/01): "At the CCCB, Skin/Strip suggests we reflect on a bombshell of aesthetics"

- El Mundo (24/8/01): "The Photographic Nakedness. An exhibition which fights against the perfect body topic using artistic, intimate images of the visitors"

- La Razón (23/8/01): "Naked images of the audience becomes art"

- Avui (28/8/01): "The Pleasure of self-contemplation… I strongly suggest you go to CCCB, get rid of your prejudices and participate in this creation of a collective model of beauty; more real than the usual conventions that imprison us. As the classics say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

- Diario de Jerez (23/8/01): "An exhibition of Social Nakedness"

- Diario de Navarra (23/8/01): "A New Body Art"

- El Punt (24/8/01): "They succeed in making people feel shameless of their often imperfect bodies"

Skin/Strip Online:

The (in)famous Mail on Sunday review; they were not happy. Download here.

And Case Studies of Current Practice of New Audiences archive at Taking Part ACE.

Here an exctract: "The most controversial was Skin/Strip Online by Pau Ros, Claire Ward-Thornton, Ruth Catlow and Marc Garrett, which invited the public to contribute anonymous photos of their own bodies. Analysis of traffic on the website showed a huge peak in visits shortly after it had received coverage in the popular press. The website hit rate of around 3,000 per week rose dramatically, to over 17,000, after the publication of articles in The Mail on Sunday and The Sun, demonstrating the impact of high profile media in stimulating audience awareness." Read More...

1999-2009 © Completely Naked