Cheryl Sourkes on Webcams

See Cheryl Sourkes webcam work here

Currently millions of webcams transmit live on the Internet - some established by individuals, some by business and others by government. These automatic cameras are the focus of my research and production. I’ve worked with them for over a decade. I pursue them with willful misunderstanding.

As long as they’re online, webcams produce viral images automatically and continuously. These images disseminate at great speed and disappear almost as soon as they come into existence. The exposures may persist for half a second or for two seconds or for two minutes, but in every instance they disappear only to be replaced by subsequent exposures. Webcam images participate in economies of the discard. They’re virtual garbage traveling as placeholders. I extract discrete images from these flows; images that foreground particular mini-events, or as some might see it, non-events. My production lends this ephemeral phenomenon an unanticipated afterlife.

Not only are webcam images fleeting, the webcams themselves don’t last. They have a brief stint on the virtual stage and then they disappear without a trace. Most of the cameras I’ve worked with are now gone. Likely the intercepted frame-grabs I’ve made are the only record of their existence that remains. This lends a meta-documentary aspect to the work I’ve done.

My first project with online cameras is Cam Cities; one of which, Virtual Toronto is up in Sorting Daemons. To make Cam Cities I searched the Internet for international cities that had banks of webcams trained on them. I soon realized that cities establish webcams for particular instrumental reasons. Some are designed to attract tourists, others to monitor traffic flow, others again to scan the streets for signs of trouble.

So far I’ve made work from street cams, wedding chapel cams, traffic cams, tourist cams, work-place cams and cams that transmit from Internet cafés. The form I choose for each body of work reflects its subject matter. I’ve used outdoor banner vinyl for cities, a red leather-bound book for sexually explicit material, large-scale photos for interiors and QuickTime movies for sex, weddings and chatrooms. During the past few years I’ve recorded cameras in private homes and have printed them up as large-scale stills or else turned particular sequences into time-based clips such as the ones we see here.

People often suggest that webcams are in the service of Big Brother. However state surveillance plays less of a role in the realm of webcams than one might imagine. Because of the limitations of 72 dpi image capture, online identification is questionable. Webcams record generalized soft-data-type information. People tend to conflate closed-circuit surveillance cameras with webcameras. But CCTV footage can produce very high-resolution images. Footage isn’t readily available to the public, while webcams are available to anyone who searches them out. In point of fact, state surveillance plays less of a role in the world of webcams than does self-surveillance. Snoops and spies don’t post webcam images. Active participants do.

Feminist geographer Hille Koskela writes, “The roles of visual representations have been multiplied. In contrast to being targets of ever-increasing surveillance, people seek to play an active role in the production of images, thus, reclaiming the copyright of their own lives.” She goes on, “Home webcams present daily lives of individuals on the Internet, generating new subjectivities. They change the conventional code of what can or cannot be shown, and thus, expose cultural tensions surrounding epistemological conceptions of vision, gender, identities, and moralities. By revealing their intimate lives, people are liberated from shame and the ‘need’ to hide, which leads to something called ‘empowering exhibitionism’. These deliberately produced images contest many of the conventional ways of thinking how visibility and transparency connote with power and control. To be (more) seen is not always to be less powerful. By rebelling against the shame embedded in the conception of the private, people refuse to be humble. They may gain power, but it does not head for control over others but, rather, blur and mix the lines of control. Sometimes it is more radical to reveal than to hide.”

Koskela suggests especially for women, the lack of hiding and shame normally associated with self-exposure is a libratory impulse. Many people embrace the opportunity to present themselves. Also, counter to expectation, the witnessing aspect of webcam transmission makes many people feel safer on streets and in public places.

I’ve tracked countless webcams over the past decade; nonetheless what I find online keeps on surprising me. What does one see in the mirror webcams hold up to the world? Many things both anticipated and not, but whatever one sees, one is seeing it in a unique dimension, a sphere that combines physical and virtual space, neither exclusively the real world nor exclusively the virtual one, but rather a place of mixed reality that participates in both. While webcams record in the material world, they transmit in the virtual one. At the same time, their presence in the virtual realm may have real world consequences. This bounce relationship is in a new and ever-expanding dimension, and lies at the crux of my interest. The divide between public and private domains has tilted.

When Internet communication was new, cultural theorist Sherry Turkle wrote “Online experiences challenge what many have traditionally called ‘identity’: on the Internet many people recast identity in terms of multiple windows and parallel lives. In this way, today’s life on the screen dramatizes and concretizes larger cultural trends that encourage thinking about identity in terms of multiplicity and flexibility.” “In Multi-User Domains, the projections of self are engaged in a resolutely postmodern context. Authorship is not only displaced from a solitary voice, it is exploded. The self is not only decentered, but also multiplied without limit. There is an unparalleled opportunity to play with one’s identity and to ‘try out’ new ones. MUDS are a new environment for the construction and reconstruction of self.”

Cultural theorists speculated online role-playing would enable utopian opportunities to modify identity. But now that we are post post-modern we can see that these predictions aren’t the only thing that has transpired. Predictions of multiple constructed identities have taken place within fantasy sites like Second Life and in online gaming. However, social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace have concerned themselves more with magnifying established identities than with inventing new ones. Webcammers remain firmly grounded in their unique bodies and their particular environments. Rather than inventing identities, homecammers prefer to present their resolutely specific, if rather banal realities as they live them out.

On another level, it turns out no one is actually anonymous on the Internet. Each time a user goes online his or her IP number is clocked. In fact it’s possible for hackers to turn on any user’s webcam. Everyone is located, locatable and possibly photographable. Homecammers may often be reached by chat or by email. Many encourage contact. Homecammers don’t want to be private. They use webcams as a way to connect with the world in a kind of democratic transmission prefigured by Warhol’s prediction of universal but short-lived fame.

There has to be an imaginary before there is an address. Different modes of address produce new arenas of desire. Desire creates audience and manufactures reception. Homecammers live many aspects of their lives in full view of other Internet users. Their cameras operate in places formerly inaccessible to any public. But while homecammers are happy to share their day-to-day experience, they’re just as happy to have their webcams transmit images of empty rooms, sleeping pets, screensavers, driveways, cluttered basements and the like. Anybody with the technology and a bit of know-how is potentially a slacker, a set designer, an actor, a director, a producer, an exhibitionist, a pornographer, a documenter, a cinematographer, an extra, whatever.

Here’s a brief history of webcams. In 1991 a HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Cambridge"Cambridge University scientist established the world’s first webcam to see if there was coffee in the common room urn without making the trek downstairs to find out. CoffeeCam transmitted images of the HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_room_coffee_pot"Trojan Room coffee pot for ten years before the urn broke down and the cam was retired. During that time millions of webcams joined it online creating a virtual mirror of ordinary life. If one sees the entertainment industry as constellating a vision of reality at its most overheated, webcams on the other hand represent life at its most quotidian.

Very soon after webcams arrived online, the pornography industry began to exploit them financially, as it still does with great success. But porn cams were also responsible for spurring technological advances. As the industry required 'live' images, they requested a Dutch developer write a piece of software that could update without requiring any HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser"web browser HYPERLINK "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plugin"plug-ins. This led to the development of live-streaming webcams.

In 1996, just five years after CoffeeCam came online, Jenni Ringley began JenniCam to webcast her day-to-day life. Her widely reported-on site allowed Internet users to observe Ringley, or else to view her empty apartment while she was away doing other things. At the same time, Ringley gave television talk show interviews that brought her webcam to popular attention and turned Ringley herself into a bit of a media celeb.

Now a decade and a half later there are huge numbers of homecammers on the Internet webcasting their daily lives. Apparently the type of address inspired by these homecams influenced the creation of Reality Television. However although Reality Television uses supposedly unscripted events and usually features non-professional actors, the reality of Reality Television is highly suspect. On the other hand the low production values and apparent aimlessness of homecam transmissions appear to guarantee the authenticity of the homecam experience.

Because webcams record continuously over a long period of time, people tend not to produce the kinds of mannered behaviour cameras normally induce in their subjects. People rarely appear to perform actively for webcams. Instead they act as if a camera were a normal part of life, as if someone else were present in the room, perhaps God herself? I sometimes wonder if God hasn’t been reinvented as an imagined webcam spectator in order to bear witness.

But one wonders if homecammers are behaving or if they are acting in front of their cameras. Does the camera‘s presence shift a homecammer’s intensions? Have webcams perhaps generated a new form of delivery where reality comes mixed with virtuality, and day-to-day behavior is subtly infused with performance behavior? Does a homecammer’s actions spring from some semi self-aware place between spontaneous activity and premeditated performance? By recasting quotidian activities like sitting around, watching TV, eating and showering without a fourth wall, have homecams created a new kind of living theatre?

Performance theories are often concerned with the manner in which individuals enact aspects of daily life. Some theorists, for example Judith Butler, use the term performativity to describe the material presence of abstract discourses. For Butler, "a subject is never performing his or herself, but rather enacting certain discourses.”

On another level, webcam images participate in the realm of evidence. I see webcams in continuity with certain aspects of the documentary tradition. While documentary tends to foreground our own beliefs, the experienced viewer tends to view documents with a certain measure of distrust. Who has funded this production? To what ends am I being lead?
The new technologies involved have added a further complication - the low-res image. How does the low-res image inflect the reception of webcast data?

In Documentary Uncertainty, Hito Steyerl writes, “I vividly remember a strange broadcast a few years ago. On one of the first days of the US invasion of Iraq, a senior CNN correspondent was riding in an armoured vehicle. He was jubilant as he stuck a direct broadcast cell phone camera out of the window. He exclaimed that never before had this type of live broadcast been seen. And that was indeed true. Because there was hardly anything to see on these pictures. Due to the low resolution, the only things to be seen were green and brown blotches, slowly moving over the screen. Actually, the picture looked like the camouflage of combat fatigues; a military version of abstract expressionism. What does this type of abstract documentary tell us about documentary as such? It points at a deeper characteristic of many contemporary documentary pictures: the more immediate they become, the less there is to see. The closer to reality we get, the less intelligible it becomes. Let us call this the uncertainty principle of modern documentaries.“

In her article In Defense of the Poor Image, Hito Steyerl writes: “The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.” “The poor image tends towards abstraction: it is a visual idea in its very becoming.”

In other words, the more real the image gets, the less there is to see. What we can see is the condition of an image’s production. In judging an image’s value, such qualities as immediacy, proliferation, image-mobility, number of hits, etc. have replaced the traditional standards of quality of resolution, contrast, composition, etcetera. Internet images transgress previous frames of evaluation. They supersede traditional standards. We are now working within the aesthetics of collapse. While 72 dpi images pretend to reality, they actually tend towards abstraction. Form has become automatized.

Webcam images normally appear on computer screens. However I transform webcam source into real-world photographs and time-based works. I’m interested in what happens when images cross over between realms. When low-res webcam-generated imagery is presented off the Internet it attains an unanticipated presence. Viewers may receive these images in more nuanced ways than they do on their personal computer-screens. As meaning is tied up with intention, the meaning of these images change in this new context. The transient webcast image becomes an indeterminate hybrid, more substantial and at the same time more ambivalent than when it was online. During the 20th Century, various art movements impacted art production. Some focused on disciplinary purity, while others explored cross-influence. In the 21st Century however, the primary image-making impulse seems to come from pictures referencing other pictures, across all sorts of divides.

--Cheryl Sourkes