The first part of this four part retrospective provided a brief history of the Ogrish shock site which ran from 2000 to 2006, this second instalment looks at the censorship problems the site encountered and its implications for free speech in the new media age. Although Ogrish was never remotely

If anyone remembers the shock site Ogrish at all, they’d be likely to describe it as ‘the Bestgore of its day’, but at its most potent it hovered on the periphery of popular culture, offering up beheadings and atrocities like event TV while being accused of operating in symbiosis with terrorist

The culture of mankind has from its earliest stirrings been dominated by the interplay between sex and death, creating representations ridiculous and sublime, determined by the cultural fancies and technological limits of the time. And the web has intertwined Eros and Thanatos in ways that cater for any proclivity, with

Time gradually strips away the importance of historical events in the public consciousness, relegating all but the most seismic events or those who loomed large in the popular zeitgeist to footnotes. New media accelerates this process, with historical events and agents (and pop culture is included in this) being elevated