Greed
Greed was the first project for which Ellie documented an element of her own daily life. She made her first visit to New York City between 28th February - 3rd March 2000 and before she went decided to challenge herself to eat as much as was humanly possible whilst she was there, and to document everything single last bit. She weighed-in before she left and when she returned, to see what effect this experiment may have on her body.
Whilst away she ate 34 different items including some all-American classics such as a ‘Twinkie’, a ‘Baby Ruth’, ‘Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups’, syrup pancakes, a pretzel, a big apple and, reluctantly, a McDonald’s and a Subway. All these images were compiled into a high-speed looped animation, which can be viewed by clicking on the link to the right under ‘Further Reference’.
The images were also used to form Ellie’s first ever web-based artwork. At the beginning of 2000, Ellie had just begun to learn the basics of web design and work out how to get her work onto the internet by uploading it onto space offered by free web servers. For the Greed project, each of the 34 photographs was exhibited on a separate web page hosted on free web space obtained from different companies around the world under the alias of ‘greed’. As you moved from page to page to view the images you were bombarded by adverts placed on the pages by these companies - with many pop-up windows opening, out of your control.
Due to the transient nature of these web servers, the project no longer exists in its original form. For archive purposes, the original web pages are now all hosted on Ellie’s server and can be viewed by clicking on the link to the right under ‘Further Reference’. On each page, you can roll the mouse over the main image to reveal additional data - figures contrasting the quantity of energy consumed in the food item with the quantity of web space registered to ‘greed’ on that server. The title bar at the top of the page gives the website address of the server where the page was originally hosted.