November 17, 2005 - January 16, 2006
The Erotic Museum with the support of the Hollywood Walk of Fame Webcam present a new interpretive exhibition and accompanying art exhibition exploring adult video chat communities and the personalities and peculiarities surrounding them. The images and words that make up this exhibition were compiled by artist Show-n-Tell (her screenname).

Presented on the first floor in the Museum's Natural History Gallery, interpretive panels and monitors show screencaptured images and animations from online interactions varying from pixelated scenes of everyday domestic interiors to the shorthand-typed dialogues that serve to communicate desire in this voiceless world.

The exhibition addresses the contradictions that often dominate this illusory world of invented personas and indulged fantasies. Participants enjoy anonymity in this world leading to a vastly different system of interaction than most of us are used to. The conversations transcribed as part of the exhibition give the visitor a peek into this world and begin to build a picture of the personalities who live there.

Kate Ledogar of Boston’s Weekly Dig describes scenes from the exhibition commenting on how “snippets of internet chat text communicate the casual intimacy people can share when they think they will never meet. Some people are clothed; many are touching their naked genitals; some are in pairs - in one, a little boy looks over his (apparent) mother’s shoulder. There are also many pictures of interiors. Desks and books and sofas and afghans and ugly clocks. Other people’s houses. We today, seek to cement time in reproducible images, attempting to be made real by becoming fictionalized. And now we’re sitting at home with our fingers up our twats, facing a digicam and typing words into IM with our free hand. Cementing our personal fiction with every stroke. (the artist’s) stolen images capture these handcrafted attempts at notoriety, filmed against the backdrop of the mundane terrors of everyday life.”

Accompanying the interpretive exhibit on the first floor, a selection of large-format photographic prints from the project presented on the second floor art gallery. In collecting images for the project, Show-n-tell produced a handful of images that cross the line from simple documentation to art. The low-resolution screen captures present a multi-faceted view of the human sexual condition including various compression, distortion and error attributes common to low-bandwidth video transmissions. Some are portraits, some become abstractions while still others, transformed by scale, become mosaics of pixels with meaning that moves from background to foreground and back again changing with the viewers perspective.

David Hockney captured a unique sense of space and form with his revolutionary photographic technique that flattened three dimensional spaces into a flat plane. Similarly, Show-n-tell’s low-resolution images capture spurts of data flattening time and space into mosaics of color often combining multiple frames into one image. The characteristic distortion and compression of video data add a unique texture to the large-format prints which become abstractions when viewed at close range.

A friend of mine who now lives in Kuala Lumpur wanted to show me some live video on the internet of what her son looks like. I did the research and found a software used for interactive chat rooms. You hook up a webcam to your computer and you can broadcast images of yourself, as well as see everyone else in the room. My friend in Malaysia and I met only once in virtual space, but since then I have become a regular of this internet community.

At any time of the day or night there are thousands of people connecting to each other. In the early afternoon the rooms are full of Europeans. In late afternoon and early evening it’s Americans from the east coast; later in the night it’s the west coast. If I log on early in the morning I would meet someone in Japan or perhaps a U.S. soldier stationed in southeast Asia. Most of the community centers around the adult rooms. In these rooms there is a mixture of chat, live video and sex, which attracts me the most. I’ve been compelled by the energy of the people in here, the variety of images that are broadcast and the way people communicate both in words and picture. This was a big party, with a lot of nudity, and I wanted to watch.

With the availability of cheap computers, fast web access and small webcams, virtual communities have come to include people of all ages, economic and educational backgrounds, from everywhere in the world. In adult chat rooms singles, couples, straights, gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transvestites, cross-dressers, fetishists… everyone comes to play out their fantasies, blurring the lines between public space and the bedroom. As one of my online friends said, “it’s safe sex,” a safe way to flirt and have an erotic encounter.

This exhibition is the documentation of my time spent as a member of an online community where I captured pictures, recorded dialogues and even personal confessions. I’ve learned small bits and pieces about the lives of people I would otherwise never meet. But I’ve learned more about myself, that I can connect to people in the same spontaneous way that I did when I was younger. I became part of a more open and liberated community where our fantasies empowered us. And I returned to “real life” enriched, the distinction between real and virtual, no longer so clear.

Show-n-tell

“Web Affairs” opens November 17, 2005. Please join us for our special artists reception on Thursday November 17, 2005 from 7:00 - 11:00. The evening will include a book signing by Show-n-Tell, DJ’s, a hosted bar and the complete Museum exhibition. Contact the Museum for details at 323 463 7684.

General admission: $10
Museum members: FREE!