webAffairs
by Show-n-tell
Eighteen Publications LLC, Massachusetts,
USA, 2006
144 pp., illus. $40.00
ISBN: 0-918290-02-3.
Reviewed by Andrea Dahlberg
andrea.dahlberg@bakernet.com
"Show-n-tell" is the pseudonym used by
an artist based in Boston when she participated
in an online adult video community. Her
involvement came about by accident when
she purchased software and a camera to
communicate with a friend abroad. But
soon the friend was forgotten and Show-n-tell
was using the internet in ways she had
not foreseen. Show-n-tell documented her
online adventures, and in this book she
traces her increasing fascination with
and engagement in a community she encountered
by chance. In many respects the themes
of her work are familiar to us through
the work of well-established artists such
as Lynne Hershman. Through the distancing
medium of the internet Show-n-tell encounters
new sexual worlds and individuals she
would be unlikely to meet in her ordinary
life as a married Turkish American artist
and teacher. The new technology draws
her into unforeseen encounters. She begins
to construct new identities, and she comes
to understand herself differently. Although
many of the ideas raised by this work
are familiar - the construction of identity
through technology, the role of the internet
and its visual culture in shaping sexual
desire, voyeurism, defining and re-defining
moral problems created by a new technology
which can so powerfully transcend traditional
parameters of time and space - this work
is an engaging, honest and human study
of one person's evolving encounter with
all these issues.
Show-n-tell uses screen shots taken in
chat rooms, sometime enlarging them so
much that they no longer convey specific
people or objects. These pixellated images
disguise individual identities but also
suggest that the themes about sexuality
and identity are larger and more universal
than just the particular individuals in
a chat room at one time. She also reproduces
short dialogues and excerpts from her
own diary of her experience. Some of the
most interesting aspects of the work are
those which describe what is unique to
the internet - the way a body can be visually
segmented by a webcam and the resulting
collage reframed as an imaginary whole
by viewers, how a webcam is experienced
as a pair of eyes and the keyboard a voice,
the way the computer itself is eroticised,
how online identities differ from other
identities a person has and how this mediated
form of interaction effects a person's
face to face relationships.
This book will be relevant to anyone interested
in gender, sexuality and especially the
construction of gender and identities
through internet technology. But it stands
as an art work in its own right. "Show-n-tell"
is actually a metaphor for this form of
artistic practice.