Can U C me?

WEBAFFAIRS

BY SHOW-N-TELL

BOSTON: EIGHTEEN PUBLICATIONS, 2005

144 pp./$40.00 (HB)

Surveillance has long been a subject for artistic exploration. Many artists have investigated the relationship between viewer and subject in both static and moving images. With the proliferation of the Internet, the ability to continuously watch and be watched simultaneously has increased to epic proportions. Webcams have changed the nature of surveillance; the level of complicity in webcam interactions makes them significantly different from their predecessors in video, film, and photography.

Issues of voyeurism, truth, privacy, and power are paramount to artists who engage in surveillance-related work. A significant difference between surveillance photography or video projects (and those that employ webcams) is that with a webcam, the subject is often aware of the camera's presence and often performs for it. There is a new equality between the subject and the viewer; as a consequence, the way one responds to being watched, and to watching others, is changing. With the use of webcams, control may even tilt toward the performer, who now has a reciprocal and consensual relationship with the audience. The lack of public and private space is revealing, providing intimate details of daily lives that can be monitored, searched, recorded, and stored. It is this dislocated space that is of interest to many contemporary artists.

The Boston-based artist, designer, and educator Show-n-tell explores online telecommunication between anonymous individuals using point-to-point personal video teleconferencing (specifically, a software called iVisit) that connects people in adult chat rooms. When using any kind of CUSeeMe software, one must allow one's image to be broadcast in order to view pictures of others. Taking screen-shots of her chat room friends, Show-n-tell visually documents, appropriates, and recontextualizes the sexual escapades, comings and goings, and the connections and disconnections of these video chat room participants.

WebAffairs is a coffee-table book designed and published by Show-n-tell to chronicle her online activities. Show-n-tell originally set up her webcam to communicate with a friend who had moved away, but her agenda changed as she became fascinated by online sex communities. At first she was determined to be an anonymous onlooker, but soon found herself attracted to the fantasy life the adult video Web community had to offer, and eventually became an active participant. Her book webAffairs documents four years of her activity in these chat rooms.

Using a myriad of fonts and a collaging of screenshots, the beautifully crafted book chronicles her online interactions with numerous individuals, including two running narratives and excerpts of her own online exchanges. Rather than create a book that celebrates or criticizes the goings-on in these chat rooms, she presents a personal account of her exchanges juxtaposed with a conversation with her husband--who she presents as both supportive and suspicious of her activities. She continuously informs him of her activities, while not wanting to share the whole truth of her involvement. He is suspicious and eventually threatened by the potential of her sexual activities to affect their interactions, but remains supportive of her project.

The book becomes an honest and revealing analysis of her journey into this virtual, yet potent, world of the different roles sex plays in one's life. For the author, her general self-esteem increased as she became more comfortable performing for and conversing with members of this new community. Show-n-tell explains that engaging with people in Internet chat rooms allows for a certain amount of anonymity and fantasy. It is a world of projection and self-exploration, in addition to being a place of voyeurism.

While many of the images in the book are explicit, they are presented to support Show-n-tell's journey. In addition to saving bits and pieces of conversations, she took screenshots and kept folders with images, documenting many of the people with whom she communicated. These fragments are represented in the book--it is not the story of an affair with a certain individual but a chronicle of numerous sexual encounters. Pixilated images bleed off the oversized pages, interrupted by snippets of conversations between the artist and members of the chat rooms. The conversations meander from desire to the banal. They highlight the kind of spaces her online companions occupy and create a context for their lives. Using each double-page spread as a frame for her compositions, Show-n-tell gracefully positions images of her desktop, cluttered with windows containing images and texts to emphasize that all of this has been recorded through the computer.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Show-n-tell engages with those who either desire her or whom she is interested in, and enjoys the position of power this community offers female participants. Aware of how the female's role in satisfying male desire comes into play online, she acknowledges that this is a world where everyone who chooses to participate is in control. This is not a book about sex online that pictures those who participate, but rather Show-n-tell uses specific interactions that took place within that world as a way to strengthen her relationships: her relationship with herself, her husband, and with those strangers she meets online.

JODY ZELLEN is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles, California.