Behind the mask is an exhibition of peoples' photographs on the Net. The Internet was created against the backdrop of the 1960's Cold War and with the changes from the late 1980s (the so-called "end of the Cold War"), the move to privatize these assetts, and the popularity of this communications medium has accelerated with astonishing speed. Perhaps the first thing that the individual, armed with their new-found connectivity, should consider is not merely a giddy globalism, but rather whether all of this new "communications ecstasy" isn't merely exacerbating the old poles and vectors of the post-cold war power structures -- issues of north and south, of haves and have-nots. "Behind the Mask" is a simple experiment questioning the technical feasibility of having "a home page on every PC," and the limitations to this new potential in the form of a portrait series accompanied by simple questionairre. Specifically, we have been randomly interviewing subjects, photographing them, and exhibiting them on a formatted home page. We've begun in Tokyo interviewing some 300 individuals in an attempt to offer this format and concept all of us on the Internet who share this new public space in the hope that others might begin contributing. Our original hope was to reach 10,000 subjects. If you reconsider, though, a team of 10,000 could just as easily reach 100 million. But then, why not 5 billion? E-mail: nsb@sdw.com