Webcams: The Aesthetics of Liveness

Daniel Palmer

[Originally published in LIKE, Art Magazine, 12 (Winter 2000), 16-22]

Andy Warhol must be jealous that he didn't live to experience webcams. He would have had a webcam on every corner of The Factory just looking at the watercooler.

David Ross, Director of the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1999[1]

The idea is simple: a video camera takes pictures at set intervals, the images are digitally compressed and instantly uploaded to an Internet server, where they become immediately available to anyone surfing the World Wide Web.[2] Set up by a minority of dedicated netizens, the still images are usually transmitted around the clock, delayed only by the time it takes them to unveil on the screen. A Webcam by video artist Wolfgang Staehle lends support to David Ross's claim above. In Empire 24/7 (1999), a homage to Warhol's eight hour film Empire (1964), Staehle has trained a camera on the Empire State Building and plugged it into the Web.[3] Go to the Website and you get a continually refreshing video 'grab' of the building as it currently looks (if you believe the accompanying clock). But, as usual, television was there first. Similarly gritty images of the New York skyline were relayed live to London viewers in 1962 by Telstar, the first commercial satellite. Then, as now, the medium not the message is on show; where 'liveness' was a generalised myth of television, 'real time' has become that of the Internet.[4]

Net cameras predate Web browsers, going back to 1991 when the network was nothing like the 'mass medium' it has now become. The story goes that a group of Cambridge all-night academics, working on ATM networks, concocted a simple plan: to point an idle video camera at a filter coffeepot, and link the camera to a networked computer set-up. The black and white images that updated on the screen every twenty seconds would tell a computer user in another part of the building when the coffee was ready. The coffee contraption was a practical, surveillance device. 'The street,' in William Gibson's terms, had found 'its own use for things': instead of just using Webcams to monitor and convey traffic or weather information, people started installing the devices in cafes and semi-private spaces like homes and offices. The consumer market soon followed. The names WebCam and QuickCam were trademarked, and plastic 'eyes' appeared on top of computer monitors. Today, thousands of Webcams dispatch live images of streets, bedrooms and offices, blurring documentation and performance, establishing a new way of 'being alone together', and creating a voyeur's paradise.

Jennifer Ringley, aka Jennicam, has lived under the gaze of cameras in her Washington apartment since 1996, and she is still the most famous of Webcam celebrities. Tens of thousands of fans check in on her every day, she has tribute sites, scores of imitators, and is frequently written about in traditional mass media.[5] Jennicam is diaristic. Web users can watch Jenni wake, wash, dress, write, and work (from home) 24 hours a day. Gradually, more and more cameras have been added to the site, which has now incorporated pay features and is becoming more and more like a live soap (Jennishow features streaming video). Unlike The Truman Show, Jenni's media imprisonment is voluntary (though this apparently didn't stop its director, Peter Weir, from emailing her during the making of that film). Her antics are posed to appear natural, with the right measure of eccentricity and the odd glimpse of live flesh. There is no guarantee that anything we see or are shown is authentic, but the site accumulates enough supporting detail to give it the weight of a 'real life'. There's the opportunity to look through Jenni's CD collection, a 'photo-gallery' of highlights, and to read accounts of her dreams, her poetry and journals.[6]

In trying to make sense of this outrageous self-surveillance and display, issues of public and private, and psychological accounts of narcissism and exhibitionism usually top journalists' lists.[7] The abundant narcissism on the Web, with its 'all-about-me' homepages, is only matched by the hype surrounding Webcams as an extension of video's potential for everyone to become their own mini-broadcaster. It's even been claimed that Jennicam symbolises women reclaiming the camera from men, taking control of her life. Rationales given by 'homecammers' themselves are varied: from the desire to cultivate an 'interactive' relationship with anonymous viewers to promoting the idea that everyone's life is some kind of work of art. The truth is probably the purer aim of making a living.

The appeal of homecams is the nawing question. Like the 'intellectual' fascination of pornography, it's the brutal otherness of anonymous bodies in generic suburban settings. Who are these people and why are they doing this? Voyeuristic fantasies seem perfectly realised in the homecam experience. Gendered, of course. As we know, straight-down-the-line pornography is a force behind the popular penetration of the Internet, like the video recorder before it. The leap from amateur 'readers pics' to Webcams has been both predictable and dramatic, but amateurs are easily professionalised: forget phone-sex, there are now thousands of pay-per-view sites offering the opportunity to 'chat' with wannabe porn stars, the Heidicams and Shannacams, gyrating alone in cozy domestic settings. At large Webcam portal sites such as 'Earthcam', we find various sub-genres of homecams (dorm cams, voyeur cams, girl cams, guy cams, spy cams, peeping-tom cams, amateur cams, housewife cams, and so on), most credit card hungry.[8]

Watching 'real' people live out their lives in public is increasingly sparking our televisual imaginations, with a whole genre - Reality TV - established in the name of a kind of voyeurism. Perhaps the notion of voyeurism needs revaluing? While homecams suggest little in the way of John Grierson's 'creative treatment of actuality', perhaps they are a contemporary mode of 'documentary' engagement appropriate to our disconnected times? In any case, homecams are just one genre of Webcam. The World too spreads itself out in an exhibitionist pose, and 'Viewcams' describe another large category of Webcams whose gaze resembles an imperial or tourist desire to cover the globe. What a beautiful world we live in and know you can see it without leaving your computer screen, says one ad, summing up the rosy regime of hyper-visibility. Think of a scenic site, from the icy slopes of Mount Everest to the dusty Australian outback, and chances are that you can now view it in real time. Views of natural sites compete with the built environment for our attention. Streetcams are particularly popular, including views from moving cabs and competing views at Metropolitan hubs such as Times and Trafalgar Square. So-called 'resort cams' or 'beach cams' give Microsoft's slogan 'Where do you want to go today?' a tourist reality. In Melbourne, the forty-odd Webcam views of the central and surrounding city confuse our tourist, surveillance, and meteorological desires (if you've walked in inner Melbourne recently, you've been digitally uploaded to Citysearch's servers and probably splayed out on someone's screen).

Site-specific Webcams have been interpreted by one commentator as breaking the otherwise temporally undifferentiated surface of the Internet, and disrupting the placelessness of cyberspace by knitting it to physical places.[9] But the more immediate challenge seems to be to find the most 'exotic' view, with Websites claiming dominion over touristic epiphanies such as the Book Depository in Dallas, Texas, or the Lenin Mausoleum at Red Square. The enormous popularity of panoramic scenes of foreign cities and historical 'attractions' resembles the late nineteenth century fad for stereoscopes, postcards, and early cinema - all once promoted as being able to put the world within your grasp. Technical limitations help determine the subject matter. While there's little that we would now recognise as cinematic about Webcams - usually stationary cameras, and no edits, special effects, or Dolby sound, not to mention the absence of imaginary characters and narrative - the display of unique views betrays some similarities with early, silent cinema of the single shot.[10] Yet Webcams have almost nothing in common with the highly mobile camera consciousness of modern cinema, and only a passing similarity to the long takes of a Tarkovsky. The Webcam is more directly a bastard child of TV, with its obsession with liveness, and its realist fragments as opposed to the narrative representations of mainstream cinema. Hardly surprising, then, that many Webcams gravitate to television and radio studios, and we even find Webcams watching TV itself.[11]

 

Like TV, Webcams are especially interested in everyday rhythmic routines at the heart of workplaces, homes, streets or offices. But unlike TV, at most live Internet camera sites precisely nothing happens most of the time. Pointing your browser to a Webcam will more often than not result in the peeling back of an image of an empty (and often dark) bedroom, street, or cityscape. Aside from reminding us of our longitudinal anchoring, there's often only the very faint sense that something might happen. Except in the case of pay-per-view 'spectacle' sites (such as live sex, or live tattoo parlours), the everydayness of most Webcams is quite distinct from the event-based nature of live TV.[12] Webcams present what TV producers fear of live telecasts: images with a weak sense of expectation. We wait for evidence that isn't forthcoming, we watch the light gradually shift on a mountain or street, we watch the hands on Big Ben slowly tick over. Webcams can do this, for time is not the scarce commodity on the Web that it is on TV, which must draw consumer attention to advertisers. Into the endless mosh of the Internet, the scenography of Webcams is usually empty of action but endlessly open to signification.

Admittedly, there are Webcams that record 'action'. You might discover action at Wedding Cams, Sports Cams, Oscar Cams, Zoo Cams, Share Market Cams, or Warcams (at least one was trained on central Belgrade during the Kosovo crisis). There are also what might be called 'zany', or 'only in America', cams: the Electrolux Fridge Cam (from inside the fridge), 'I See Lucy' (pointed at the apartment of Lucianne Goldberg, Monica Lewinsky's infamous friend), and one monitoring the rush to file tax returns on time at the world's largest Post Office in New York. Today, an event is not complete without an accompanying streaming Webcast, and it doesn't matter if no one has the connection speed or software to view it. The more humble Webcams just monitor, sending images now and then, but incessantly. In the vast, wordy wasteland of the Web, the visible world is periodically disclosed without a narrative imposed from outside. What fascinates is the aura of the excessive detail, the possible unveiling of a moment of truth, and the sense that we are participating in a potentially collective ritual. Webcams aren't a medium but a hybrid, a remediation of video by the metamedium of the networked computer - so we can't talk, in modernist tones, of the distinctive features of the medium - but perhaps, even without trying, we are beginning to get to the specific aesthetics of Webcams.[13]

So what about 'artcams'? While artists were early colonisers of the Web, few Webcams identify themselves as art (though several artists have installed Webcams in their studios). Jennicam may be equally at home in Art Forum as Cosmopolitan, but most Webcams are more pop than high. One could easily recuperate Webcams for art, as indeed I'm doing here: they carry the familiar aesthetic hallmarks of a sense of wonder and an almost surreal pointlessness, and like much avant garde artistic practice most are rooted in an amateur aesthetic. Yet it surprises me that more artists haven't capitalised on Webcams (Leslie Eastman's The Contracted Field, shown in '@' at 200 Gertrude Street during Next Wave in 1998, is the only local experiment I know of). Perhaps the relative lack of interest in Webcams is not surprising: for analogue artists, they're technically tricky; for digital and on-line artists, they're not digital enough (they're messy, real world, and often primitively analogue, unlike the snappy grids of the latest digital modelling and animation software). An assemblage of video and the Web, the interventionist 'artcam' site is more likely to be created by a video artist than a straight pixel-pusher.[14]

While Webcams offer the ultimate switch-on-the-recorder and leave-the-tape-running fantasy, many artists choose to appropriate already existing views. For instance, the French artist Valéry Grancher poetically frames existing Webcams with fluid text and data elements. Webscape (1998) is made of one hundred random number generators organized like a mosaic, where every digit is linked to a Webcam. The piece deals with the juxtaposition of numerical flux and geographical space. In Be Safe, Be Free (1998), Grancher critiques the supposed transparency of Webcams by incorporating a network of locations linked on the premise of 'paranoia'. Self (1999) - exhibited in the exhibition '1 Mondo Réel' (A Real World) at The Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris - asks visitors to provide a single word response to a still image from a Webcam in Antarctica. New images are provided every hour, and words submitted during that time are accumulated and bound with the image.

The very look of Webcams supports their claims to liveness and authenticity. But as documentary film makers have always known, markers of authenticity can be highly deceptive. As Ian Haig has pointed out, it's no accident that 'software like Adobe Premiere has as one of its filters a fake camcorder viewfinder, complete with flashing dates, for that authentic 'Amateur Video' and 'Real TV' look'.[15] Several notorious forgeries on the Web have been exposed, including a Webcam hidden in the ceiling of a public toilet, whose 'live' effect was generated by indexing a library of pre-stored photographic stills. The American architectural duo Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio play on the authenticity of existing Webcams, in Refresh (1998), created for the Dia Center in New York. Around a dozen office cams, all with similar fluorescent-lit cubicles, they have created a fictional narrative using invented text, hired actors, and Photoshopped imagery. The effect is to question the authority of liveness, and to produce chance resonances between the continually refreshing live image, and those that are made up.[16]

Ken Goldberg is so interested in the evidential uncertainty of remote vision and movement - the question 'is it real?' - that he's even coined a term, 'telepistemology' to describe the new epistemological terrain. Goldberg's canonised Net piece is The Telegarden (1995), which originated in a science laboratory in California, and then resided for a few years at Ars Electronica in Austria.[17] The Telegarden is an elaborate 'tele-robotic installation', involving a remote controlled arm, camera, and a garden. Extending the capability of some Webcams, which allow the viewer to pan and tilt the camera, The Telegarden allows users to view and interact with a remote garden filled with living plants. Members can plant, water and monitor the progress of seedlings via the movements of an industrial robot arm. Goldberg's stated aim is to explore Web community behaviour, through the literalised metaphor of the shared garden, but the tending project also offers benign proof of our ability to effect action at a distance. Tele-action is rarely so unsleazy.

I like these art projects. They work from the assumption that the browsing experience is a private and habitual practice, like the most engaging Net art.[18] Nevertheless, to me, even these more successful art sites are less compelling than some Webcams with no artistic pretensions. I don't think it's just the appeal of the window of immediacy. The distinctive aesthetics of Webcams are a product of the temporary limitations of the Web as we know it: specifically the limited ability to stream audiovisual content ('rich media') over telephone networks. As a transitional form, the crude aesthetics of Webcams can therefore already be experienced elegiacally. While television is always obliged to make sense of things, to provide a commentary, the Webcam is blissfully outside of this demand. Webcams are a 'dumb' fold within the Web medium before the imminent rigidification of the talking and moving image as an interactive entertainment commodity.

Unlike the generally extended present of the Internet clicking experience, Webcams exist in an intensive present characteristic of the ennui of early video art.[19] As Douglas Davis once wrote of video:

when we are watching 'live' phenomena on the screen we participate in a subtle existentialism. Often it is so subtle that it nears boredom. Yet we stay, participating. [...] waiting, aware that something unpredictably 'live' might occur next...[20]

I could get all metaphysical trying to explain the uncanny allure of 'liveness'. The simultaneous presence of things in their 'appearing' seems to highlight the contingency of reality. With Webcams, delay and anticipation are central: delay, because Webcam images are a permanently missed rendezvous with the intractable real; anticipation, because it's in the nature of curiosity, the lust of the eye, never to be satisfied completely. Glued to the almost unbearable tension between the static and the immediate is the anticipatory pleasure of 'anything can happen at any moment'. At the same time, Webcam images are, like those of TV, virtually shared worlds, unfolding in some virtual relation to our own.[21] But, unlike TV, Webcams have the luxury of time, the luxury to revel in the real's excess - spectral bodies for drying eyes.

Notes

1 David Ross, 'Net.art in the Age of Digital Reproduction', Switch 5.1, http://switch.sjsu.edu/web/v5n1/ross (Accessed 30 August 1999). This is the transcript of a lecture given by the Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in March 1999. [back]
2 The interval between new images can range from a few seconds to several hours, or can be triggered by movement or other activity. Here, I am making a distinction between the static images of Webcams and the jerky moving images of 'streaming' video or Webcasts. [back]
3 Empire 24/7 was included in 'net_condition', the largest physical exhibition of Net art yet mounted, at ZKM, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (The Centre for Art and Media Technology), in Karlrsuhe, Germany in 1999. [back]
4 Jane Feuer, 'The Concept of Live Television: Ontology as Ideology' in Regarding Television: Critical Approaches-An Anthology, edited by E. Ann Kaplan (Frederick MD: University Publications of America, 1983), 12-22. [back]
5 References to Jennicam in mainstream Australian news press include Robert Wilson, 'What the Butler Saw: A Woman Who Lives for the Camera', The Australian, 22 January 1998, and Philippa Hawker 'The Web We Weave', The Age, 3 April 1999. [back]
6 In 2000, Jenni has taken to adding 'smart' comments to her image galleries, removing any vestigial illusions of unstaged charm. Reading her diary, it tells me she will be moving from Washington D.C., redesigning her site and selling her bed on the Internet auction site, ebay. A la The Truman Show, she was apparently offered, and declined, a sum of money from a soft drink company to use their products. [back]
7 The best account of the psychological aspects of homecams I know is Margaret Talbot, 'Washington Diarist: Candid Camera', The New Republic, 26 October 1998, 44. [back]
8 See, for example, Earthcam (http://www.earthcam.com), Webcam World (http://webcamworld.com), Webcam Theatre (http://wct.images.com), and Lifecams (http://www.lifecams.com). [back]
9 Thomas J. Campanella, 'Be There Now', Salon, 21, August 1997 (http://www.salon.com/aug97/21st/cam970807.html, Accessed 10 March 2000). [back]
10 See Tom Gunning, 'An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator' Art & Text 34, Spring (1989): 31-45. Most often, Webcams are immobile cameras. Steve Mann, however, has been working on a 'WearCam' for years, which feeds images to a remote server from a wearable computer and imaging system. Thus, on his site, we can see him wherever he is, at any time of the day, on public transport, walking down a street. Mann even has a philosophy attached to his project, which reads like a combination of Dziga Vertov ('I am a camera'), Marshall McLuhan ('the Internet as an extension of the nervous system'), Donna Haraway ('I am a 'photoborg entity'') and a play on the peculiarly American paranoia of surveillance. His view is that the more cameras there are in the world, the more democratically images are dispersed, the less chance there is of harmful corporate or state surveillance. See http://wearcam.org, Accessed 10 March 2000. [back]
11 For a Webcam site that rechannels Melbourne television, see http://www.babcom.com.au/webcam/, Accessed 24 April 2000. [back]
12 Not all live tattoo parlours charge a fee, but the best (such as bodypiercingcam.com) scream 'Want to see more?'. The logic is precisely the commodified voyeurism of pornography. [back]
13 The term 'remediation' is borrowed from Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1999). [back]
14 The development of Net art in the late 1990s parallels that of video art in the late 1960s. Both art forms arrive in the context of an established quasi-public yet commercial infrastructure; both are critical of the gallery system, with its focus on genius and precious images, yet ultimately depend on it for legitimation; both are on the margins of dominant art history, despite strong formalist tendencies; both are grounded in myths of transgression of the institutions of both television and the gallery; and both exhibit an unstable mixture of cultural pessimism and technological optimism. [back]
15 Ian Haig, 'Born to Be Alive' Presentation in the Videor Lecture Series at the Centre for Contemporary Photography in 1998, published in Globe E-Journal 9 (1999): http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/visarts/globe/issue9/ihtxt.html, Accessed 10 March 1999. [back]
16 Sara Tucker, 'Introduction to Diller + Scofidio's Refresh', 1998 (http://www.diacenter.org/dillerscofidio/intro.html, Accessed 19 March 2000). See, also, Matthew Mirapaul, 'Office Webcams Provide Raw Material for Art Project', Cybertimes, New York Times, October 1, 1998 http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/98/10/cyber/artsatlarge/01artsatlarge.html, Accessed 11 April 2000. [back]
17 Among other places, it has been written about in Flash Art. See David Pescovitz, 'Be There Now: Telepresence Art Online', Flash Art, 32 (205), March-April (1999): 51-2. [back]
18 Another Webcam piece is Tina LaPorta's Distance (1999), which moves away from the technical to a concern with the social effects of Net mediated communication. This work explores our desire for connection, via fluctuations in transmission and reception between geographically separated participants mediated by the surface of the computer screen. The work is a kind of poetic documentation of 'CU see me' computer mediated relationships, with fuzzy, black and white images symbolising themes of intimacy and loneliness. [back]
19 See Bruce Kurtz, 'The Present Tense' in Video Art: An Anthology, edited by Ira Schneider and Beryl Korot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 234-243. [back]
20 Douglas Davis, 'Filmgoing/Videogoing: Making Distinctions' in Video Culture: A Critical Investigation, edited by John G. Hanhardt (Layton, Utah: Peregrine Smith Books in Association with Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1986), 270-273; 272. [back]
21 Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 20. [back]