This is the second of a three-part series adapted from my talk at Arse Elektronika: "Sex and Computation in a Material World" Check out part 1.

This could also be titled: How I learned to stop worrying and love (via) my webcam.

What is this prepossession of the visible, this art of interrogating it according to its own wishes, this inspired exegesis? We would perhaps find the answer in the tactile palpation where the questioner and the questioned are closer, and of which, after all, the palpation of the eye is a remarkable variant. - Maurice Merleau-Ponty

"Cultural context", sticky though it may be, is also always being configured and reconfigured by people acting and reacting within it. Arguably, Mulvey's assessment of cinematic gaze holds less true for other media; television, for example, is more interactive and fragmented than cinema, and the viewing environment much more variable, making it much harder to construct the spectator as voyeur . Video on the internet is an even greater departure . I suspected that, if this script of the typically masculine, objectifying gaze is being reconfigured anywhere, it's happening amongst internet users. The thing that cemented this suspicion for me was my webcam.

The Webcamatic Gaze

There is some consensus amongst researchers that webcams do not provide optimal support for the kind of objectifying, possessive gaze that Mulvey talks about in cinema and that Benjamin, Buck-Morss, and Young take note of in public urban spaces. In her doctoral thesis, Teresa Senft argues:

...from a feminist perspective, the camgirl is interesting not because she can be successfully grabbed by Web consumers as a self-branded "super cyborg," capable of resolving all contradictions about women in network society. Rather, she is interesting because sooner or later her gender-as-brand inevitably fails to deliver what I call the "ideology of commodity" -- the belief that what matters, is what is owned .

The use of webcams foreground issues, not just of sight and visibility, but of control over one's visibility and how one is portrayed, a control that, in traditional cinema, doesn't typically belong to the woman on screen. But that control often does belong to the woman portrayed by the web cam, because she typically owns the camera and the space in which she is being filmed:

Although cam sites market the idea that the man can tell a cam girl what to do - the customer, after all, is always right - the reality is that a performer can cut her client off and block him from contacting her again at any time during their session if he gets too pushy or demanding. The exchange of bang for buck is certainly more explicit on cam sites than it is on the paid-membership portions to lifecam sites, but women who do cam shows and women who have lifecams have something in common: Both have invited viewers into their realm, and they can rescind this invitation if they want to .

Michele White notes that "assertions by women that they control the apparatus are an essential part of the webcam genre ." From the webcam operator's point of view, invisibility is disempowering, while the surveillant effects of the webcam can be dealt with. Dealing with surveillance in some ways involves rendering the medium opaque and imperfect, disrupting the illusion of transparency. Thus, images are not always available, sometimes they flicker, sometimes the equipment is uncooperative; the webcam image suggests its own mediated nature and incompleteness, that it offers a positioned view rather than a "unified perspective". Often the woman sits too close to the camera, at her computer, to offer a complete view; this fragmented view is "too close" to be an empowered possessive gaze, though it is potentially an intimate and negotiable way of looking. Conventions of the webcam genre affects not just who can see the webcam operator and her conditions of visibility, but also the kinds of images and portrayals of women's bodies that are produced and circulated by this particular medium. The dialogue between performer and audience shifts. "Resistance and a kind of violence to the spectator's vision are an important part of women webcam operators' practices. "

Even with a fairly anonymous audience, then, the relationship between viewed and viewer becomes more intimate, more negotiable. With this context, what I'm interested in, personally, is the even more intimate: not so much cam sites with large audiences, but some of the more personal uses of web cams, seeing and being seen within close relationships. Cam sites are more publicly available, but for every person operating a cam site, how many people are using them for more private sexual purposes?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Webcam

Just as I was several years ago, I am now living some distance away from someone I want to be having sex with. Some 10,000 miles and 14 times zones away, in fact. Happily, my MacBook Pro has a built-in iSight, and Skype lets me video-chat for free, provided that we can find a time when we're both awake. After an increasingly sexually charged series of IM conversations, we decided to turn on the video chat and see what would happen. In fact, a medium that - though I should have known better - I thought would be transparent, proved to be a sort of awkward third party.

If you have ever used video chat, you are probably aware that you can see yourself in a small window onscreen, as well as seeing your chat partner in a larger one. It was difficult for me, that reciprocity, seeing and knowing my audience and knowing how I look to them. Feminist theory around "male gaze" discusses the ways that we internalize other people's gaze and view ourselves as other may view us; arguably it is awfully oppressive. But seeing-oneself-from-outside is typically thought of as an implicit background activity to everyday life, something one might be confronted with when passing by a mirror, or encountering a stranger's glance. Seeing myself literally, exactly, as my partner was seeing me right that moment (actually, a perceptible half second later - yet another surreal element) was a loop of distracting strangeness for me; that onscreen window was like a teeny, pixellated, cheesy mirror on the ceiling. I spent more time looking at myself to make sure I looked sexy than I spent looking at him.

Adding to the awkwardness of the mediation was the impossibility of eye contact - we couldn't look at both camera and each other's image at the same time. Eye contact can be faked well enough for a business meeting by placing the video window near the top of the screen as close as possible to the camera , but that technique was simply insufficient for more intimate interactions. My wireless mouse had been lost in the shuffle of my recent move, so I was constantly switching between posing, adjusting the camera, typing something into IM, or moving windows around so I could see the boy. If I wanted him to see my whole body, or even enough of it to be (to my thinking) interesting, then I was too far away to operate the device.

So my webcam, it should come as little surprise, was not a transparent medium, and in expecting it to be transparent I was setting myself up to feel awkward about its presence. On the other hand, I could use that opacity, eroticizing the technology itself and incorporate it playfully. So we stopped doing live video for a while and started doing still shots, interspersed with words in IM. I took webcam photos that I could pose for consciously and delete if I thought my thighs looked too lumpy, my chest too flat, or my ass not sufficiently big. Using that opacity, I could feel in control of my image. I could take blurry mutant shots of myself with two asses and a full body tattoo of jpeg artifacts. I could take pictures of myself making out with pictures of myself, like a pornographic house of mirrors. Perhaps such photographic play was more about being clever and making myself comfortable with the device than it was about being sexy, but being comfortable and feeling in control helps free a person up to actually let herself be sexy. Even on video.

What was sexy, I was learning, was that the gaze of the camera, here, was not a stand-in for all men, or all of society, or all people who might or might not think I'm hot, but rather for one particular person. Controlling my own visual representation, I could borrow from conventional visual culture if I wanted to. Or I could not. And representing for an audience I knew, an intimate audience, meant cooperatively developing an intimately shared visual language. T&A is widely available, but maybe your partner knows that you want him to feature his hands and collarbone a lot. Maybe lip-biting is a big turn-on. Maybe leaving an empty space in a photo means "wish you were here". The challenging "too close too see" point of view theorized by Michele White becomes just the kind of fragmented view one might have from actually sharing a bed someone. That incompleteness becomes erotic. We could develop photographic configurations that were peculiar and meaningful only to ourselves. And in this shared visual language, we could find that much of intimacy is about the implicit, that which is understandable because of shared experience, memory and fantasy, and incomprehensible to wider audiences.

Erotic images, to us, became also about evoking shared memory and imaginings, and thinking of it in this way opens up the design space well beyond the visual. Rather than the distance required to visually possess or take in a whole, my way of seeing through my webcam is close in a way more often associated with touch - at least, seeing from that point of view, my partner and I would be close enough to touch. This reconfigures the gaze, or reinvents a sort of gaze that is not necessarily about power, possession, control, or distance; it becomes a kind of gaze that I can be perfectly comfortable with, a more holistic way of seeing that seems more closely tied to position, to the body, to other senses.

Coming soon in Part 3, "Beyond Visual ": let's talk about design for the body as a multi-sensory, communicative subject.