10 August 2000 (originally uploaded to 12taboos.com)
hardware: 3Com HomeConnect / Graphite iMac software: EvoCam
In some version of the year 2000, I dropped out of my Comparative Literature program that I was always pushing to the limit anyway, and just moved into Kristie’s Chicago apartment.
She’s the one in the mask. I kept the silver glitter in my hair (as short as its ever been, and shock white already) all night.
Autumn 2002 (originally uploaded to beautifultoxin.net)
hardware: 3Com HomeConnect / PowerBook G3 software: Oculus
An attempt to recreate the iconic accidental shakticam splash image in higher resolution, three years after the fact. What I shot once in thirty seconds with a desk lamp, was, of course, everything this thing I did under “real” lights could not be.
But I go back. I always go back. I can’t keep from looking.
2 Feb, 4 Jan 2003 (originally uploaded to beautifultoxin.net)
hardware: 3Com HomeConnect / PowerBook G3 software: Oculus
I still sleep with my elbow up over my head. This might be how I learned that I did. There is a boy out of frame in the first image. The bed is exactly the same.
09 April 2001 (originally uploaded to beautifultoxin.net)
hardware: 3Com HomeConnect / boyfriend’s pc software: Webcam32
We all learned from each other, and the woman I learned the most from was ana voog, who figured out how to push the limits of Webcam32 before anybody else. (There was an explicit camgirl site, IsabellaCam, that was also quite good at expanding what could be done to the image live.) These are, as all of these, what went out directly from the camera to the computer to the server. I onion-skinned myself, pulling in the webcam frame 90 seconds before the realtime capture, layering on and on. This is that whole time: a hand slid between my legs, a hand reaching for the keys, a hand adjusting the monitor to see what I’d become, which was nothing that different from any other girl in any other bed.
03 March 2002 (originally uploaded to anaiscam.com)
hardware: iBot / PowerMac G3 (the turquoise one) software: Oculus
Three things. 1. I killed ‘shakti,’ the name I performed/lived under on beautifultoxin.net, at the end of November 2001, during an academic conference. I gave a paper on camgirls, and in the finest postmodern parody, webcast the whole thing, and pulled the plug when I got to the end of my presentation. Then I started anaiscam.com. 2. By this time, I had a lover who was almost okay with being on the camera, sometimes. Even people who have sex are boring when you put them in front of a computer. 3. I also ran with multiple live views whenever I was online. One here is from a FireWire webcam called the iBot (when everything was an iSomething) and the other shows what my desktop was at that moment. The desktop camera was inevitably more naked-feeling than anything I did. Mostly you just got to watch me write papers (and admire how narcissistic my desktop wallpaper of the moment was).
27 March 2001 (originally uploaded to beautifultoxin.net)
hardware: hacked QuickCam / boyfriend’s PC software: Webcam32
My boyfriend and I shared a one bedroom apartment in Amherst, Massachusetts with two smaller rooms we each used as an office. Sometimes I used his computer to run a second webcam, a cheap QuickCam a fan had sent me, modified to be extra-sensitive to infrared light. I could use it when asleep, so long as the laptop was aimed at me for a bit of a glow. The QuickCam was the dirtiest of all the webcams, the most ubiquitous. The ‘artists’ among us preferred the 3Com, which came with a lens pack for wide-angles and macro shots, but also, the 3Com was more sensitive to color and contrast. The QuickCam had the tendency to make everyone look like a cyborg. So the only thing to do was to play it up.
July 2000 (originally uploaded to echocam/artvamp.com)
hardware: 3Com HomeConnect / PowerBook G3 (Wallstreet) software: Oculus
I met Artvamp in May 2000 over LiveJournal. She was casting a digital feature about a woman named Echo who confronts 12 taboos and is followed by a videographer in the process: sex with a stranger, incest, a gangbang, etc. Artvamp sent me a webcam and I lived my audition for her on it during June, July, and August. This is my first webcam show. I used a gooseneck lamp from my desk to light it and monitored the live image on my laptop screen. The archive was posted to beautifultoxin.net, my webcam site, as well as to Artvamp’s site for the film. By the end of the summer, her website had 5000 members watching and remixing our images. Several people in the forums claimed that Artvamp and I were the same person. Erik Vidal, a new media entrepreneur (and the nephew of Gore Vidal), offered to foot the bill to stream video and audio (to his webcam house site Here and Now) live from our Chicago cast apartment, where I was due to move that August to begin filming. I visited Artvamp there in July 2000 and held casting sessions at the School of the Art Institute. Artvamp also posted mock advertisements for the film on several newsgroups, teasing people to break into the apartment and steal our cameras. After I began to fear (ultimately, unreasonably) for my safety under such conditions, I backed out of Other People’s Mirrors and Artvamp stepped in to play the role of Echo herself.
23 January 2007 (originally uploaded to sheisacamera.com)
hardware: Canon Elura 100 (DV) / PowerBook G4 software: Oculus
A Canadian documentary crew came to my apartment in San Francisco to record a segment about me for show on camgirls. I gave an interview on my bed, and made tea and drew a bath and put on makeup to give them b-roll. I also walked from my apartment door down the street and asked them to obscure my address. After they left, I kept the camera on for the rest of the day, making basil noodles, answering email, and re-arranging the apartment, which I had just moved into.
