When voyeur_web was featured on artport during the month of July 2001, the ‘rooms’ were all links to live webcams on the internet. The archive mix is the replacement of the original piece. It functions as an indication of the live material that unfolded during its month-long feature on artport’s gate page.

Below is a statement I wrote when the work was originally launched:

voyeur_web explores 'liveness' through the medium of the internet. I use the image of the floorplan as both a navigational interface structure, and--perhaps more importantly--as a way to call attention to the interplay between the public and private spheres, which appear to become less and less demarcated on-line.

The home represents a private space and the web a public site; webcams then become a window, or an invitation to look, to gaze upon the everydayness of the inhabitants of these sites. The distance between the watcher and the watched is quite clear, and those who are being watched set the stage for their own exhibitionism--to be seen is to exist.

The floorplan maps the gaze of the voyeur, regardless of whether the cam exists for the gaze of the web surfer or the husband away at work. Click on a room and a new window opens a stop-frame image hyperlinked from a live cam. Over time, the frame refreshes and glimpses of a body occupying it's own personal space appear on your desktop. Repeat views over time reveal new characters, the absence of the main character, a pause of the cam, or a change of its location.

The work itself has a biological aspect, it's embodied. It changes and is alive at this very moment, but will for sure die out when all the cams eventually shut down.

 

Tina LaPorta, NYC March 2002

 

distance.portal
| distance | real-time | eye2ear | dystopia | re:mote |