I took a few liberties with this project, so I feel the need to write more than usual. The process and the gamut of feelings I experienced doing this paired with the way I saw myself and other people act through these websites is the core of why it’s interesting. The images I got feel more like travel photos than art photos because of this.
At the end of class two Mondays ago Sarah talked about how street photography should capture people unexpectedly, that we should pick a spot and stay there, that we should try to get people to ignore the camera. Tips were to have the camera away from our eyes and shoot from the hip, or to set the camera’s timer so it goes off without needing to touch it. In terms of being ignored and not needing much or any touching after initial assembly one camera came to mind: the security camera.
Security cameras are pretty much put anywhere there are people and/or things of value, and especially with the proliferation of digital video, it’s cheaper than ever to monitor and record. Many companies opt to use webcams and streaming video instead of more expensive or complex set ups. This is where the website opentopia.com comes in. Opentopia started as a sort of online encyclopedia but now extends itself to access of all sorts of information easily accessed on the internet. They have a search engine which scours the internet for the specific signature of streaming webcams and list that on their site. Because I wanted to at least address part of the “street photography” theme I focused on human subjects and tried to capture them with as much detail as all of these cameras I didn’t own allowed.
Before I dive into the descriptions and justification for my pictures I want to describe this as a process. I’ve often felt unsettled in the presence of surveillance camera’s but quickly comforted myself by realizing that, first, I wasn’t very interesting in general and shouldn’t flatter myself by believing someone would watch me, and second, that cameras are as much there for the deterrence and paranoia as they were for surveilling anything. While I can confirm that the vast majority of people are very boring I seem to have proved part of my first point wrong. Here I was sitting in my room watching complete strangers in different windows on my desktop for hours. I also saw that there was a forum below all of these video windows that proved that many others were doing the same.
Many people in class talked about feeling creepy taking pictures of people in public without consent. I did try this out and know how it feels, but I’m here to say what I was doing with the webcams felt much different. I there as still that moral dinginess about watching these strangers, more so in the beginning, but it was easily overpowered with a sort of giddiness when things did start to happen. The first time I felt this is also when I screen-captured my first picture, “Sip ‘n’ Snog”. I was watching a feed from a German café and watched a man and woman walk into frame and sit down. They ordered drinks and talked for a time and I almost forgot about them. Then the woman stood and the man met her; they began to kiss. It was an odd moment for me, sitting in my boxers and frantically hitting the “print screen” button and alt-tabbing to a word document to paste the photos, sharing the intimacy of two people kissing, perhaps for the first time, them being only feet from the camera and myself miles away.
The second photo I screen-captured from Opentopia, “Nose Job,” was at a brewery with a cycling camera feed. It panned and showed flashes of beer bottles being turned and stacked by hand off a conveyor belt, people on their break, and, for a split second, a woman in a store-room picking her nose. And I captured it. It seems childish, but in some way I feel it captures how disarmed and oblivious she is. Maybe she picks her nose in front of people or rarely. Maybe she was just covering her mouth from coughing. We’ll never know, just as we almost never know what the context of any photo is. Just light, huh.
My third Opentopia photo I’ve titled “Cubicle Voyeur.” This man sat, switching between computers and drinking coffee for minutes, just working. Then I saw him dart around his shoulder and cozy closer to the desk. He opened a browser, typed something in, clicked a few times, and then I saw things on the screen begin to move. It’s difficult to tell from the image alone, but the way the pinkish pixilated blobs moved on the screen, I was sure it was porn. I screen-captured, and sat for a moment considering the loop I’d fallen into: Myself on the internet watching a man on the internet watching porn. There’s a joke in there somewhere.
For all of Opentopia’s links, it was hard to get many good shots where people were close enough to pull anything out of what they were doing. The vast majority of the feeds are from cameras placed high above streets which sacrifice detail for depth of field. I decided to move to a website also in the live feed game. It’s called ChatRoulette.com, and it is essentially a video chat service that randomizes connections between people, giving each user the option of moving onto another connection at their will. There is no login or anything to track you, but your IP address may get banned from the site if one disturbs enough people. One can go on without a webcam, but it notifies the other user that you won’t have one usually resulting in you getting skipped before the other user’s image even loads.
The largest demographic of Chat Roulette are clothed men looking to interact with ladies, after this are unclothed men looking to chat with women, then kids smoking and comparing amounts of weed, then groups of people who are drunk, and the smallest proportion are the women themselves. Because of both users having control of the “next” button and the majority of users only interested in women, there’s a quick turn around, especially being another guy. Many users have signs or props to try to capture the short attention spans of other users. I took a hint from them and donned an octopus costume I had laying around.
The experience didn’t have the big-brother giddiness of the security cameras but the brevity of the interactions and frantic clicking of the “skip” button, rejecting and being rejected, gave me a sort of gambler’s itch. Something interesting was always one click away. Even with my face obscured by the octopus mask I felt almost seedy. I had been on here before and seen some weird stuff, and that’s all I was interested. When normal people tried to strike up a conversation or compliment the costume I only gave them a wave and clicked onto the next user, feeling bad in a way for rejecting these strangers because of their friendliness and normalcy.
I decided to crop the rest of the screen out of my pictures from Opentopia and contemplated cropping everything else but my “subjects” from Chat Roulette, but I decided to leave myself in these, as it was an interaction, and my response to this situation was a product of the situation too.
My first screen-capture came about half an hour and probably six exposed penises into my octopus gag. An Asian man appeared over my screen wearing a bra and looking wasted. He cocked his head at me as I took screenshots then ended the “chat” ten seconds in. I’ve titled it “Making Friends.”
The second capture was another short and bizarre experience. I decided to blur this image so I don’t get my Tumblr account revoked, but I think you get the gist of what’s happening (I’ve “titled it “Chat Fellatio” if you’re still having trouble.) This wasn’t much of an attempt at a two-way interaction but more on the line of the thrill of being watched with all the comforts of seclusion. The fact that there are people thousands of miles away watching pixels generated by a camera pointed at you making the close and intimate act of sex more stimulating on some mental level is pretty trippy. It made me think of those butterflies of excitement in my stomach when I watch the couple kiss in the café, how their blocky forms of color glomming together made me feel something too.
This last one, “Gun Play,” fell in what I think was the drunken hangout category, but certainly stood out by the choice of “props.” The guy appeared on my screen and seemed to laugh at my costume to which I nodded moronically in response. The girl to his right seemed to be texting, the one to his left laughing and talking. He then took a pistol that was sitting in his lap, opened his mouth, put it in. I stopped nodding, and just watched him transfixed while he rocked back and forth and gestured with his shoulders looking into the camera. I didn’t think he was going to blow his brains out sitting next to his friends or that it was even a real gun, but I continued watching with the glimmer of a possible suicide holding me in place. I don’t know if that says more about him or me, but he certainly got bored quicker than I did.
This is already sort of long and pretentious, but I feel like I should tease out a relationship between these two sets of three. In my Opentopia set I captured people doing things that they thought were private, things that may embarrass them if they somehow found out I witnessed or posted them. They were things that defied the social norms which I found interesting enough to capture on that simple level, things I don’t think necessarily make for good pictures in formal terms but still attracted me because of the I was surveilling them. However, if someone showed me a photo of anything I captured, even though I was still faraway and still anonymous, it wouldn’t quite make me feel the same.
On the other side of the coin on Web Roulette the people on each side know it’s an interaction but also know it’s anonymous. All of the things I chose for these also violated social norms which made them stand out for me, but also made them stand out for them. They got the thrill of defying norms without fear of social fallout. At both websites I witnessed things that people felt they were free to do given the circumstances, but the former were secret, intimate, or self-attentive actions while the latter were brash and crude with full awareness and anticipation of being viewed. What did I get out of it? The thrill of exposure I suppose, the kind of dramatic irony of “Candid Camera,” of essentially viewing people from afar and enjoying it while separating myself by saying “it’s just an art project, this isn’t me.”
Anyways, if you’ve read this entire whopping thing, I’m impressed. I urge you to visit these sites and try this out for yourself. See if you enjoy it, see if you get that thrill of wondering if you’re missing something, of spending hours clicking for the promise of a big payoff at the end. You will feel creepy doing this stuff, and it’s very easy to admit that to others, but see if you’re like me and you actually experience and admit to feeling something else.
