Les Horribles Cernettes, the First Photo on the Internet
How an unknown all-girl band became a part of technological history.
By: Kathryn Bailey
In July of 1992, before Pussy Poptimist, before Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Xanga or G-Chat-- the World Wide Web was all but a void. It was mainly used by scientists at CERN (the European Center for Nuclear Research) to communicate with other physicists. There was really nothing of interest, until the first .GIF file was uploaded: a photo of a four woman doo-wop group edited with the very first version of Photoshop.
The women in the photo are Les Horribles Cernettes, a comedy-pop singing group formed by CERN employees Angela Higney, Michele de Gennaro, Colette Marx-Neilsen, and Lynn Veronneau. The group was started by de Gennaro, a CERN graphic designer who was then dating (and is now married to) physicist Silvano de Gennaro. Frustrated by his long shifts in the lab, she took to songwriting; the single, "Collider," was then performed at the CERN Hardronic Festival on July 18, 1992.
It was there that Silvano de Gennaro took the photo, backstage, for the band to use as album art. After his stellar Photoshop job, fellow physicist and Cernettes superfan Tim Berners-Lee decided to place it on the World Wide Web, on the CERN's music page. Later, Mr, de Gennaro would be quoted as saying, "When history happens, you don't know that you're in it."
The group would go on to perform at CERN events for another 20 years, with the de Gennaros writing most of the group's music--other doo-wop songs such as "Liquid Nitrogen," "Mr. Higgs," and "My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize," all of which can be found in all their glory on YouTube.
The group's songs are meant to poke fun at the idea of a scientist's girlfriend waiting around for him, with the 60's-inspired costumes and melodies paired with lines like "You never spend your nights with me/You don't go out with other girls either/You only love your collider."
Harvard photo historian Robin Kelsey says, “There did seem to be something about that recycling of culture that seems so appropriate for the first image uploaded to [the Web], given the way that the Internet has spawned so much of that kind of recycling and mashing-up and pastiche and parody and so on.”
And so, as we come upon the 23rd anniversary of the Web's first picture, let's sing along to another Cernettes classic, "Suring on the Web"
You can ring, you can ring and I won't show up
You can phone you can phone and I won't pick up
You can write and you can fax, straight in the scrap
You can scream and you can shout and I won't wake up
But you can catch me on the Web
Click me, click on me
Link me on the Web
Baby, I'll hyperlink to you
Surf me on the Web
My page is all for you
Call me on the Web
