In the Flesh exhibition
"Global Citizenship" is a series of low-resolution movies located in international Internet cafés. In each movie a layer of text crawls relentlessly across the screen. This text is actually run-of-the-mill spam - stuff people normally delete. One day I began to think about it. I pictured people in third world countries fantasizing about first world wealth, people in first world countries perpetrating low-order scams, people everywhere with time on their hands playing around with text-generators, etc. Email travels cheaply & easily. It extends our reach. Suddenly I became intrigued. I began to collect and sort spam into categories - money, opportunities, drugs, winner, language, etc. Each "Global Citizenship" movie presents one of these categories. Each is set in a different cybercafé somewhere in the real world.
I've worked with webcams for seven years, made bodies of work from street cams, chapel cams, traffic cams, tourist cams, workplace cams and home cams. The most recent work, "Global Citizenship" draws its visual material from web cameras in cybercafés. By translating digital files into photographs and by sequencing still images into movies, I introduce the element of time into a transient medium, exposing the viewer to fleeting virtual images in a more reflective context.
In 1993 a Cambridge University scientist established the world's first webcam to see if there was any coffee in the common room urn. Three years later Jennifer Ringley began webcasting her daily life live on the Internet under the historically renowned title of "JenniCam". By giving interviews that brought her webcam to popular attention, she became a media darling. Now, barely a decade and a half later there are millions of webcams on the Internet - some established by ordinary folk, others by business, still other by various levels of government. A vast number of these are available to anyone who takes the trouble to look. Initially people worried that webcams were a pernicious form of surveillance. They worried cameras in the public domain invaded privacy. However because of the limitations of 72 dpi image quality, it now appears webcams are more about a new sphere of communication than about hard data. And counter to expectation, it seems many people enjoy the opportunity to present themselves in the virtual world. Also counter to expectation, the witnessing aspect of webcam transmissions actually makes many people feel safer on the streets and in public places.
I see images produced by webcams in continuity with certain aspects of the documentary tradition of film and photography. One of the things I appreciate most about the images produced by webcameras is the candor of their subjects. Because webcams are ubiquitous and continuously transmit visual data, people don't think to perform for them. But what's really new about this image-making trajectory is the bounce relationship with the Internet. While webcams record in the real world, they transmit in the virtual one. However at the same time, their presence in the virtual realm has real world consequences.
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Cheryl Sourkes
