watch me! webcams and the public exposure of private lives

Watch Me! Webcams and the Public Exposure of Private LivesAuthor(s): Brooke A. KnightSource: Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Winter, 2000), pp. 21-25Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778117 .

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On your screen, you see an image of a young woman staring intently to the

right of the camera, presumably looking at her monitor. Behind her are a

bookshelf and some computers. A minute later, she shifts her position slightly, and another image is captured and sent to you via her website. Jennicam,

widely recognized as the progenitor of all personal webcams, often offers little more than this scene to the millions of hits her site receives each day.' While

Jennifer Ringley sees her work as a diaristic documentary, I believe that this mode of communication creates a new kind of social space, in which the private is performed for the public, and interaction is initiated by the one who

is being watched. Cams make manifest issues of surveillance, community, the

cyborg, domestic space, intimacy, pornography, and self-image. They are a

form of artistic practice, with an art historical context and correlatives in

documentary production, self-portraiture, and performance.

Twenty-four hours a day, for over three years, Ringley has been living under the scrutiny of the cam's never-blinking eye. She observes, "For some

Brooke A. Knight

Watch Me! Webcams and the Public

Exposure of Private Lives

reason, we think it's OK to watch PBS shows about

bison and whales, but not about ourselves. . . . I

think that's terrible, because we learn a lot by watch-

ing ourselves."• With the Internet, we are able to

watch the daily habits of just about anyone who cares to share them. In many ways, this exposure of the self shifts the surveillance model. Those being seen

control what is to be seen. As Ana Voog, one of the most popular and com-

pelling "camgirls" says, "I can move the camera wherever I want, whenever I want. I'm in control."3 This control goes beyond simply where to point the cam: unlike many other art forms, the artist has access to both the means of

production and, through the Internet, the means of distribution.

Many cam producers choose to point their cameras at themselves while

they are in their most vulnerable state-sleep. Voog started the Universal Sleep Station, a grid of images of sleeping cam people, because of the fan response to images of her in slumber. She writes, "When people are watching me

sleeping and stuff, from all of the nice e-mails I get, I feel that everyone's sort of an angel, watching over me and protecting me."4 Yet when I look at the

Sleep Station, I feel like I'm a cross between the Tooth Fairy and a guard at a

Supermax prison. The nearly panoptic view is disconcerting, perhaps because of the willingness of those on the screen to be seen. Jeremy Bentham's ideas for prison reform through constant surveillance have been applied here, but this time by way of the subjects' free will. Ironically, and fittingly, a wax

figure of Bentham is the object of a proposed webcam as he "permanently

sleeps.'"' While a graduate student at MIT, Steve Mann created a wearable cam that posted images to a website. Here, he has inverted the surveillance para- digm: the individual-rather than an unseen power-produces images of an event. Mann sees his projects as "Humanistic Intelligence," in which tech-

nology is used to safeguard individuals. He feels that if his human rights are abused, his documentation of the event will protect him, much like the

"angels" in Voog's Sleep Station. There is no tape or disc to confiscate, and the dispersal of the image is nearly instantaneous.6

Clearly, those involved in this type of production develop a sense of

I would like to thank Cher Krause Knight for her

helpful suggestions and insightful reading of this

text, and Ken Goldberg for his guidance in my research. I. Webcameras digitally capture images and distribute them via a website. Many sites include more than one camera, some allow the viewer to

remotely control the angle of view, and a few stream full-motion video. There are thousands of active webcams right now, displaying everything from a fishbowl to the construction of a stadium. 2. Su Avasthi, "Cam-Girls Aim to Please," New York Post, May 28, 1998; July 13, 2000

(www.anacam.com/analyze/980528nyp. html). 3. Ben Greenman, "A Room Within a View," Yahoo Internet Life, October 1999, 173. 4. Adam Pasick, "Living on Camera: Narcissism or New Wave?" Fox News Online

(www.foxnews. com), October 28, 1999. 5. Rory Hamilton, Jeremy Bentham On-Line

(doric.bart.ucl.ac.uk/weblN inalBentham. html), July 13, 2000. Bentham proposed the

Panopticon, a prison with a centralized guard tower and a ring of prisoner cells, in which total surveillance was linked to behavior modification. 6. Steve Mann, "Humanistic Intelligence," in Ars Electronica: Facing the Future, ed. Timothy Druckery (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 420-21,425-26.

2 1 art journal



Jennifer Ringley of www.jennicam.org.

community. Voog states, "This is me. This is my life. I'm living on my cam.

I've made friends through it. I've helped people through it."7 Chip, a "veteran of online communities," says that Chipcam was a way of making himself accountable and "authenticated his online persona."' The Web problematizes our relationships: we feel close to those with whom we communicate online, but are physically distanced from them through servers and wires. The critic

Melita Zajc believes that all contem-

porary communication technologies isolate the individual by preventing physical proximity to others.9 The homecam community, however, would say that they have generated friends through their shared experience of living online. "Holly Golightly" from www.iloveholly.com and Stephanie of www.stvlive.com consider themselves to be "twins" after having seen each other on cam.

Golightly traveled to Stephanie's home, and they are now each other's "best friend.'" ' In October

1999, Voog attended Ringley's face-

tiously named "Jennicon," which

produced one of the most unsettling things I have encountered: the two most celebrated camgirls on the

same cam, at the same time. Each had been in her own "remote window" box on my monitor, and seeing them together forced me to regard them as more "real" than I had before.

Thomas Campanella, author of "Eden by Wire: Webcameras and the

Telepresent Landscape," sees a role for the cam as the Internet allows for the creation of a new machine/body: "If the Internet and the World Wide Web

represent [the] augmentation of collective memory, then webcameras are a set of wired eyes, a digital extension of the human faculty of vision."" Voog considers the Internet as a symbol for the collective unconscious, that it is

"intimate in a different way."'2 While some critics envision the extension of the body into the corpus of the Net as a positive development, author Nell Tenhaaf cautions that there are "complications in proposing a language of

technological media as a language of the body, in particular the female body." She feels that the declaration of the body in the technological apparatus is

suspect, as the body becomes either idealized-and therefore a commodity- or fragmented in the form of the automaton and the cyborg, half metal/ half flesh. '3

Interestingly, women comprise the majority of webcam subjects and

producers. These women understand, participate in, and profit from the

specular economy. Many target male desire by highlighting the more prur- ient aspects of their cams, while also maintaining control over the image. The producers are the subjects of the images, and in this way challenge the

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7. Greenman, 174. 8. Simon Firth, "Live! From My Bedroom," Salon (www.salon.com/2 I st/feature/l 1998/0 1/cov_ 08feature.html/index.htm), January 18, 1998. 9. Mann, 297. 10. Holly Golightly, Twins page (www.iloveholly.com), February 10, 2000. I I. Thomas J. Campanella, "Eden by Wire: Webcameras and the Telepresent Landscape," in The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and

Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, ed. Ken

Goldberg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 23. 12. Marlee MacLeod, "TechnoSlice with Ana

Voog," Cake Magazine (tt.net/macleod/other/anavoog.html), December 15, 1999. 13. Nell Tenhaaf, "Of Monitors and Men and Other Unsolved Feminist Mysteries: Video

Technology and the Feminine," in Critical Issues in Electronic Media, ed. Simon Penny (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1995), 230.

22 WINTER 2000



to-be-looked-at-ness described in Laura Mulvey's work on narrative cinema.14

Historically, some women artists have reclaimed their bodies with self-por- traits in which they hold their drawing or painting tools; s in this way, they resemble the self-proclaimed geek girls, who proudly state that they have cre-

ated the code for their webcam sites. The most successful personal webcams

have several things in common: a young, attractive woman as the main focus

who is able to spend most of her

time at home, with significant com-

puter skills and some exhibitionist

tendencies. The fact that the production facility is the home is significant. The camgirls (or camboys) feel com-

fortable there; they can organize their time as they wish; and the

space lends an air of "peeping tom"

authenticity to fulfill the viewer/

voyeur's desire. Marsha Meskimmon

noted that the inclusion of the

domestic in female self-portraiture is a feminist act-that the home has

long been a place for artistic production, as typified by the work of

Mary Cassatt.'6 The journalist Ben

Greenman recounts his visit to

Voog's house: "It is instantly recog- nizable to me in the same way as

Rob and Laura Petrie's home or Seinfeld's apartment."'7 The home is trans-

formed by the cam, from a cove of seclusion to the locus of projected desire.

In a 1998 article, Simon Firth muses that "Perhaps homecam fans are a new

breed of flaneur, enabled by Internet technology to enter more intimate spaces and moments than their i9th Century forebears."'8 I believe this access to

apparent intimacy marks our particular historical moment. As the media move

from paparazzi and the stalking of celebrities to "reality" television, such as

Big Brother and Survivor, the Web allows us the most secret of viewing experi-

ences-ordinary people sleeping, taking baths, making love.

The computer screen-designed to be seen by one person at a time-

creates an atmosphere of secrets among friends. Firth notes: "While people like Jenni and Ana are already celebrities and exist for most of us in a purely mediated, hyperreal space, they are the solitary surfer's own rather wonder-

fully disquieting discoveries."'9 The initial interaction is, at least on the sur-

face, that between lurker/voyeur and object. However, the very structure of

these sites indicates that the person on the cam wants to be known. Often

included are a short biography, diaristic writings, archives, a section for their

art, and a photo album. Most of the sites offer the possibility to chat, or at

least to post to a bulletin board. Golightly alternately shows two distinct sides

of herself on the cam-that as sex kitten or as Hello Kitty. Firth remarks that

"[The fans'] postings betray a knowledge of, and often affection for, the

objects of their gaze that suggest feelings entirely different from the quick,

Stephanie Innanen of www.stvlive.com.

14. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation, ed. Brian Wallis (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 361-73. 15. Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Self-Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth

Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 32. 16. Ibid., 162-63. 17. Greenman, 173. 18. Firth. 19. Ibid.

23 art journal



anonymous transactions of conventional porn. .... The [delay between the

refreshed images] forces the viewer into introspection and connection."20

Perhaps the act of watching cams is as different from other types of

viewing as being the subject of the cam is from other types of exposure and disclosure. Erik Vidal, creator of "Here and Now" a multiroom, multiperson camsite, characterizes camwatching as "passive," as the viewer does not con-

centrate on the images, but rather chooses when she or he looks.2' I would not term it as such; rather, it is up to the viewer to actively cre-

ate the story as she or he watches. The action on the cam is always in medias res, as the narrative is really the

person's life. One snapshot slice of their existence does not tell all that has gone on before. A minute later, another clue is sent to the site, and we are left to fill the interstice. Even in Vidal's own streaming audio

and video world, there is action off camera. Maybe the key is what is

unseen, rather than what is exposed. Detail by banal detail, the cam captures a small snippet from a life. What constitutes "the action" is

usually unbearably boring: washing dishes, working on the computer,

watching television. Content is created by living in front of the camera, without the quick cuts and distillation of events in MTV's The Real World. There are no outside editors, directors, or producers to decide who gets how much airtime. Just like the Internet itself, there is no hierarchical order to the images we see. The sequence of pictures presented to us could either be the best or the worst day of the camgirl's life, and we might never know, as the cam

captures everything in the same way. Without editing and scripted action, cams test the limits of performance.

In Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher's Body, Ronald J. Pelias considers the defining factor in performance simply to be the cognizance of someone

watching." People on webcams are certainly aware that they are under the watch of many, but Ringley says, "Frankly, most of the time I forget that the camera is there. The camera is the least-intrusive thing in the world."23 Vidal concurs: "After 20 minutes on the first day, we all totally forgot about it ... It's a lifestyle constraint, but it's not the psychologically intense experience you'd think it would be."24 In many ways, the camera moves from a record-

ing instrument to an integral aspect of the subjects' lives. Instead of an intruder intended to capture their culture as in the ethnographic films of the past, the cam occupies the same territory as a pair of glasses or a car or an incandescent

light-transparent technology. So, if they forget the camera's eye, are they performing? Perhaps they are "non-matrixed" performers, in Michael Kirby's

AnaVoog of www.anocam.com.

20. Ibid. 21. Erik Vidal, What's New page (www.hereand- now.net), February 9, 2000. 22. Ronald J. Pelias, Writing Performance: Poeticizing the Researcher's Body (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 8. 23. Avasthi. 24. Pasick.

24 WINTER 2000



terms, where they do not pretend to be anyone other than who they are, nor

do they act as if they are in any other space.2" Webcams are creating a new

theater. Firth writes: "What makes them troubling and captivating is that, instead of giving us something we already know, they are pioneering both

a new erotics and a new kind of performance-one that could be called the

art of the publicly lived private life."26 Kirby also discusses John Cage's con-

tention that duration is "the one dimen-

sion which exists in all performance."27 What sets webcams apart from other vari-

eties of performance is exactly the lack

of a specified period of time. Golightly offers "lifetime" memberships, and Voog

says, "The hope is that I'll want it to go on forever. I could be 5o and still doing it. Right now, I can't imagine wanting it

to stop.'"28 Pat Quinn, the subject of "Cripplecam,"

feels that the constant eye of the cam is

liberating and confidence-bolstering. He

writes: "The first month or so I had the

cam up, I'd make sure I coverd [sic] up when I got out of bed, and made sure

my hair was brushed and what not. Any more, I couldn't care less. . . . I feel bet-

ter about myself now that I've invited all

to witness my quirks. . . . I feel that my online persona is an extension of who I

really am, yes, but I don't bother to shave the rough edges .... I don't want

people to think I am someone I am not."29 Through the cam, Quinn has

found a level of comfort with his body. The appellation "Cripplecam" directly addresses the fact that he has Friedrich's Ataxia and is willing to discuss it.30

The Internet, in this case, is a form of empowerment. Tenhaaf also tackles

issues of identity in the face of technology, seeing self-portraiture as a means

to preserve a sense of humanity. She cites as an example Kate Craig's video

piece Delicate Issue, in which an unseen assistant shoots Craig's entire body, lin-

gering in certain intimate areas.3' Craig takes control of the image by allowing this incursion into very private spaces, much as many camgirls do.

The webcam is remarkable because it presents the familiar, and in that

presentation, asks us to question what we find so fascinating. Is it the obsti-

nate consistency of it all; the predictable daily cycle; the endless refreshing of

the image; the domesticity of the setting; or the candid, unmediated body?

Privacy becomes publicity, and the performance is the never-ending nonevent.

Technology allows for an obsessive documentation, which, in these cases,

empowers the one under surveillance. It is a self-portrait of great importance because it is of seemingly nothing important at all.

Jennifer Ringley of www.jennicam.org.

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25. Michael Kirby, The Art of Time: Essays on the Avant-Garde (New York: Dutton Press, 1969), 78. 26. Firth. 27. Kirby, 80. 28. Greenman, 174. 29. Pat Quinn, email to the author, December 3, 1999. 30. Pat Quinn, Policy page (www.pquinn.com/cam/policy.html), December 2, 1999. 31. Tenhaaf, 228.

Brooke A. Knight is Assistant Professor of Art and Associate Director of the New Media Program at the University of Maine. He received his M.F.A. in photography from the California Institute of the Arts in 1995.

25 art journal



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