Marc Lafia on Chatroulette

the project
to investigate chatroulette as a social medium, as a formal medium, to performatively come to it and reflect upon it

the rules
to 'meet' 1000 people
never to blink anyone, that is i never click the 'partner' off or channel switch them first
to engage in dialogue, to meet the other no matter
to record my honest reactions photographically while recording them.
in posting the work, never to tag it chatroulette to keep the anonymity of the persons photographed anonymous, as much as I can (this is a difficult one)
to write about the experience and create conversation about it to understand its current social reading and its possible reading

http://marclafia.wordpress.com/

you can double click on any image to look at them larger.

certain thoughts come to mine both about cinema and photographic practice in the realm of our networked condition.

film makers and photographers have given us access, insight and images from places and peoples we had not seen (scene). they brought to us worlds only they could access, often very intimate worlds, they narrativized both these worlds and at times self-critically their own intervention of recording.

the suburbs, subcultures, all kinds of groups, peoples and places from all over the world and with them stories and situations where brought to us through photography and film.

in the one to one, to anyone, video recording of chatroulette, one is put into any number of stories or encounters with people we may have seen in a todd soldanz film, a nan goldin or alex sloth photograph, the harold and kumar films, the sacha baron cohen films, these being road trip, documentary and performative films. these works are pre-recorded events, linear events whose narratives may be open, but whose events are 'closed'.

the always on camera, both as an event to present oneself and to encounter any possible image or representation of others in the chatroulette open network - takes us to this place of always already recorded, always to be recorded - and so what is it to make an image, still or moving, when one always is or has a camera. if we live within cinema and cinema does not stand outside us, what is it to always be recorded. of course cinema and photography is not simply recording, but intent and arrangement of recordings and the recording event.

but if cinema once gave us narrative closure and photography remove and intimacy of and from a distant, an event, the always on, both to see and be seen, networked video gives us this realm in which we are always on in cinema and photography. these are prosthetic ways of seeing and performing ourselves. but not just seeing but encountering, discovering and always, while seeing being seen.

the photographs document this encounter, this condition of being image, being seen while seeing, of in a sense, living inside cinema and photography, inside recording.

something compelled me to do this piece. one could ask what makes it art? or, 'where is the piece, i have seen so much converge on this, so many images of this and what you show is no more than snapshots of what I have been seeing?'

I can understand that and it may be absolutely right so perhaps if this is to work, it needs reconsideration on just how to present and make it work or think through or abandon. I know you have a lot going on, but when you can please take a moment and allow me to tell you what I think is going on. and please, if you want to write me and tell me, i just don't see it, i will take it openly and with appreciation, sincerely, so for the pleasure of thinking and dialogue, give it 5 minutes and know that, it was experiential, a deep dive, and work and in a sense i am past it (in the sense of joan jonas talking about a work of performance having an urgency that makes the performance a 1 time event). i do feel very much that i have experienced something and wanted to report that something that i am either reading much too generously or for the most part is being read much too narrowly.

so i wrote daniel coffeen, and asked him, if the project was 'silly'. and he wrote back, 'i think your project is beautiful. the fact that it is easy to make something that looks like it, is a variation on it, is beautiful. you made ready mades. and as you point out, your mode of navigating is quite different, free of cruelty and fear and loathing. fear and loathing: hunter thompson understood: fear. and loathing. that is america.

on that note the few things I have read about this, seem to be about people being punked and not at all about crossing borders, making connections, being moved beyond your comfort zone, taking risk, reaching out, about the desire to 'see' beyond one's confines, the desire to communicate, i read nothing in any real way about predation as absolutely human, instrumentation, the erotics of seeing and wanting to be seen, the fear, abjection, euphoria, longing in anonymity, the unknown, pleasure, nothing about bringing face to face people who would in no other circumstance be in the same room - all of this and more seems so interesting. is it the sexual, the sexual maneuvering, here that can be spoken with out the kind of consequence one might find in the physical realm, with its own consequence, is this that makes it so uneasy and loaded to speak to. in CR what is permitted, where are the limits, one does not know and is free to push a certain limit or discover a limit - that alone is worthy of so many dissertations, what are the protocols in an unvetted network?

take debord's argument of the circuit of seer/seen mediated by the Spectacle, by the desires of capital, CR doesn't just bypass this mediation, it goes through it - in some sense - to become a place of pure spectacle. that is something too. where the network has become increasingly mediated, what is pure spectacle.

one other brief note. yesterday's ny sunday times article on performance art. went and saw the gugg's tino sehgal show, it is the frame of art that is read, the institution that gives the piece legibility in sehgal's case. - in thinking about 'net art' - this piece and my documentation of it, which is entirely performative of this circuit of seeing, this channel, of being seen - in what context and how might it be read as a 'work', presented as a work - where is the context in the network or the institution of art, or in fact the ongoing context of net art in the art institution today so something like i am doing here can be brought there for dialogue.

--Marc Lafia