Glitch, Noise, and Techno-Grrrls

Webcamming as Art

Ana Voog is one of the early camgirls recognized for her contributions to the medium, cultivating a distinctive style and performance practice in relation to the camera. Anacam was one of the longest running webcam sites, at thirteen years, starting in 1997 and ending in 2009. On an archived version of Voog’s website, it is possible to watch a stream of images. These can be played back at a refresh rate of 600 seconds, or a faster rate of thirty seconds.1 They can also be viewed in the order they were shot or at random. There is an option to jump to specific frames, though some of the archived images do not load properly. Watching this stream of images in 2020, after becoming acclimated to the immediacy of livestreaming video and radically decreased online response times, even the thirty-second refresh rate involves a test of patience.

Voog’s presence ranges from the documentation of mundane activities to playful interventions. In one series of shots, Voog appears to be playing with a graphic of a colored circle on the screen. Even though these images are taken minutes apart, when played in quick succession they take on an animated effect, with Voog behaving as if the digital circle is an orb or ball that she can manipulate with her hands. A simple gestural performance, this sequence highlights how Voog is aware of the camera, her body, and resulting digital image as an artistic medium and performance site through the screen. Images are taken from various angles: some close-up while others are shot from a high corner of the room, like a CCTV security camera. It was not uncommon for Voog to appear naked. In some images, Voog posed directly for the camera provocatively and engaged in sexual activities, while in other instances she treats her state of undress with the same comfort of wearing clothes. Cameras were on 24/7, capturing a feed of her life as it unfolded not on camera, but with the cameras as a durational performance where Voog cultivated a milieu through her growing following on the Internet, with her site receiving millions of visits per day during the late 1990s (Knight 2000).

In addition to showing herself and her daily activities, Voog pointed the camera at objects around her apartment that she found interesting, sometimes adding text and colored effects to the images. At the top of all broadcast images is a phrase created through a random word generator, a digital Dada poem. The images are low resolution, though their noisy quality contribute to a style that Voog cultivates. In certain respects, the work is evocative of that of Cindy Sherman, as she is performing for and with the camera, turning the image into an exploratory space of femme identity that plays with and challenges presentations of gender and sexuality through a “performance art persona” (Senft 2008, 26). Voog is conscientious about her playfulness with the medium and performance-based approach: “I was the seventh camgirl, and the first to call webcamming art!” (as quoted in Senft 2008, 39). Voog is not just posing for the camera, but treats it as part of the performance itself. Emma Maguire observes how Voog uses her body as “media—as a malleable, formable, shapeable material with which to make her art. The webcam, too, is media, and her work is an exploration of the effects of bringing these two mediums—one flesh, the other a digital machine—together” (Maguire 2018, 41). Treating the body as medium is a standard feature of performance art. Voog’s images have a staged quality to them that border on theatrical, enhanced by her strained positioning of the head, twisting up of the body, or awareness of her gaze and that of her viewer. In many of the images, Voog is looking to the side and toward the computer monitor, pointing to her awareness of how an image is composed. She also regularly uses mirrors as a prop, drawing attention to the presence of the camera as she performs with it, reflecting it back into the image frame of the screen.

Techno-Grrrls

The term “camgirl” warrants further discussion. Ringley and others, including Teresa Senft (2008) who both studied camgirls and hosted her own webcam site, use this term to refer to their broadcasting activities. Michelle White argues against using it, instead referring to them as women webcam operators, since she argues the term camgirl is infantilizing and eroticizing, downplaying the “women webcam operators’ complex skills” (White 2003, 15). As Maguire notes, instead of treating Jennifer Ringley as “innovative” or a “tech pioneer” in her novel approach to engaging with the webcam, she is dismissed as a “novelty” and “exhibitionist” (Maguire 2018, 35). However, Maguire continues to use the term “camgirl” as a provocation. The term “girl” does not need to be treated as infantilizing, but is part of a broader trend of the late twentieth century where women claimed the term as a source of empowerment, most notably in punk rock through the Riot Grrrl feminist network (Leonard 2017). Maguire describes how the term girl “broadly denotes a gendered identity that signifies both youth and femininity (although not necessarily femaleness) as distinct from mature womanhood” (Maguire 2018, 6). That is, girlhood is not restricted to a particular age bracket, but used to identify a process of subjective becoming. In the context of this book, the term girl is consistent with the spirit of Riot Grrrl, where youth subcultures embraced feminine contributions as a means of feminist gender rebellion. Senft (2008) highlights how the personal-as-political, feminist response of Riot Grrrl to the marginalization of women in punk and indie rock cultures can be found in the confessional quality of 1990s cam girls. However, I extend this observation to consider how these women engaged with technologies. Just as Riot Grrrl critiqued the masculinist culture of punk and indie rock music through DIY practice, camgirls challenged the masculinist hacker culture of the tech industry as Techno-grrrls. I want to reiterate that even though many early camgirls were cisgender women, I do not consider the term girl as innately connected to biological femaleness. Rather, it evokes a certain performance of youthful femininity that is not determined by biological sex or assigned gender.

From Empowerment to Encounters

Current aesthetic analyses of camgirls emphasize empowerment with a focus on women’s control over the production and distribution of the image, which contrasted from mainstream media (Knight 2000; Maguire 2018; Senft 2008; White 2003; 2006). In particular, there is a desire to invert the subject/object binary. That is, while men have typically been treated as the subject (the looker) and women as the object (to-be-looked-at in the language of film theorist Laura Mulvey), this binary can be inverted where the art object as female looks back, making the male subject/viewer uncomfortable. Michelle White uses this approach in her analysis of women webcam operators, arguing that the spectator’s gaze is “too close to see” (White 2003, 20). She maintains that the computer screen, unlike the film screen, is one where the viewer and subject are positioned closely to the monitor, with images uploaded and displayed minutes apart with regular technical glitches. The result is a display of images that is fractured where the spectator is too proprioceptively close compared to the “classic viewing position” of cinema.

Focusing solely on empowerment, however, is restrictive as it limits the subversive capacity through the ability to frame the image and to look back, even as an aesthetics of inversion. In addition to placing focus on the masculine consumer as the beholder of the gaze, this approach generalizes gender based on the experiences of white women, excluding and at the expense of Black women and women of color. Aria Dean problematizes this obsession with the male gaze that persists through twenty-first century selfie artists. These qualities are also found as a prominent theme in the work of feminist artists who work with social media platforms, such as Ann Hirsch and Amalia Ulmann, who attempt to reveal the constructs of this gaze through performed avatars of white cisgender femininity. Dean describes how white, cisgender, nondisabled, female identifying artists praise the challenge to the gaze capacity of the selfie as “the primary feminist tool for resistance [. . .] follow[ing] a logic in which the circulation of personal narratives through Instagram and other social media platforms is supposed to provide points of identification for all women” (A. Dean 2016). Anticipating the rise of social media, camgirls popularized the Internet as a platform for producing and sharing autobiographical narratives through images. Camgirl culture of the 1990s and 2000s included predominately young, white, cisgender women. Through webcams, these women opened up their domestic spaces and lives to the public space of the Internet. While these women have challenged gender norms through their digital performances, such performances relate to a particular kind of femme-ness that is marked as white. As Legacy Russell points out in relation to cyberfeminism, “hypervisibility of white faces and voices across feminist cyberculture demonstrated ongoing exclusion, even within this new, ‘utopic’ setting” (Russell 2020, 33). These qualities exist in Victor Burgin’s critical reading of Jennifer Ringley’s performances, where he infantilizes her and “rescues” her from criticisms of exhibitionism. Burgin argues that Ringley is merely a girl finding her way in the world: “Parading around her websited dorm room in spike heels, Jenni is tottering around in her mother’s shoes. Under the gaze of her mother she is investigating what it is to be a woman, like her mother” (Burgin 2000, 85). Despite the fact Ringley was twenty-one at that time and legally recognized as an adult, Burgin insists on her “fledgling sexuality.” His persistent claims of her innocence, however, are possible due to her unacknowledged whiteness, where white, youthful, cis, female heterosexuality is assumed to be inherently virtuous as “white women’s whiteness can always help them find their way back to respectability” (Hamad 2020, 75). Any displays otherwise are dismissed as a “child . . . recklessly launch[ing] itself into the void” under the protective gaze of her mother (Burgin 2000, 84).

Thus, I take a different approach to analyzing the practice of camgirls, without making universal claims of empowerment. Rather, I frame it as aesthetic and ethical encounters with a focus on technical objects and, like Voog, a work of performance art. Lifecasting functions as what Brooke Knight describes camming as: a “never-ending nonevent” (Knight 2000, 25). While Voog indicates how she began camming as a way to explain or present herself and create “at all times” (Krotoski 2016), what actually was presented on the screen was fractured documentation of various gestures and activities. For instance, when Voog pointed the camera at different scenes or objects in her apartment that seemed interesting, with these shots uploaded every few minutes, they didn’t always make sense. It is these moments of obfuscation and confusion that intrigue me, where attention is not placed on visibility, but on abstracting the image in a playful way. The performed actions in these early days of Internet broadcasting are provocative, before they became codified, tracked, and nudged through the infiltrative infrastructures of what is referred to as surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2019), the attention economy (Citton 2017; Wu 2016), or as McKenzie Wark (2019) speculates, perhaps capitalism is dead and this is something worse. My interest here is not so much in the content of the performances, but the unique encounters that emerge through the relational mediation of the web camera, Internet, and computer monitor.

The aesthetics of camgirls’ broadcasted images were influenced by the material qualities of the technologies, including slow modem speeds and low camera resolution. Here, the webcam is not just a capture device, the Internet is not just a telecommunications network, and the computer monitor is not just a machine for display; but these constitute what Simondon refers to as technical objects. As noted in the introduction, he does not consider technology merely a vehicle for human activity or tools at our disposal. Simondon argues that technical objects function as part of a milieu that they modify, thereby making technology, humans, and their surrounding environment co-constitutive. The range of technologies that camgirls of this period used, including the webcam, self-maintained websites, FTP servers, archives with limited storage space, dial-up modems, and chat rooms, helped inform how these technologies are relational, as the camgirls adopted and modified them. Technical objects, for Simondon (2016), are not restricted to particular uses, but also have a degree of indeterminacy that invite other, even unanticipated actions. This indeterminacy means that even though technical objects have material properties that invite specific gestures, they may also be repurposed and used in ways that are not intended. Such engagement of technology anticipates the Maker movement that Silicon Valley promotes as a phenomenon of innovation, but it also connects to longer histories of technological modification through necessity, or what Nettrice Gaskins (2019; 2021) refers to as techno-vernacular creativity (TVC): the informal engagement of science and technology by underrepresented ethnic groups, including African diaspora, Latinx, and Indigenous groups in the United States, through communities of practice in local contexts. Gaskin states: “Do-it-yourself or maker culture—creating technology without expert input—is a newer contribution to this age-old, global practice and, in some cases, make use of TVC modes/methods” (Gaskins 2019, 255), which include re-appropriation, improvisation, and conceptual remixing. The hacking and modification practices of camgirls involve TVC methods, though their technological innovations are commonly dismissed as frivolous in a gesture of techno-sexism.

In short, many camgirls were required to create their own websites and provide their own broadcasting capacities, as streaming platforms such as Justin.tv were not yet available. Internet capacities at the time also influenced production, as the cost of bandwidth was variable and unpredictable, depending on the amount of information that was transmitted to end users. That is, as more people visited the site, the amount of data that was transferred increased. Rising popularity of a camgirl’s website made it more expensive for the camgirl to produce (Senft 2008). Internet connectivity was also limited in terms of data transfer, as most connections at the time involved telephone modems, with access to DSL and Broadband only arriving in the 2000s. As a result of these technological factors, broadcast images were full of gaps, noise, glitch, and breakdown.

The Aesthetics of Glitch and Maintenance as Care

Art historian Carolyn Kane defines glitch as “a problematic, annoying, or unintended error that, like the definition of error, tends to be negligible, quickly absorbed by the larger, still-functioning system” (Kane 2019, 15). She observes how the glitch has given rise to its own genre of art at the end of the twentieth century—simultaneously the time of first-generation camgirls. However, for camgirls, the glitch was not the “fodder for a new style of art-making” (Kane 2019, 15). Instead, glitch was an inevitable quality of livestreaming that typically emerged from a breakdown of these DIY broadcasts. Kane provides a considered aesthetic analysis of the glitch, tying it to a longer history of visual noise and chromatic aberrations found in abstract expressionism and other modernist art, as well as notions of failure and breakdown in Western philosophy. Kane argues that the glitch, along with error, failure, noise, and trash, are not anomalies against an ongoing progressive stride toward perfection, but instead, the often unacknowledged norm of certain breakdown. Glitches, as aesthetic manifestations of failure, are everywhere despite ongoing attempts at denial in Western philosophy, art, and media.

While Simondon does not specifically reference the “glitch,” he does acknowledge noise in his discussion of aesthetics. In On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, Simondon describes a telephone center as an aesthetic experience, arguing that the white noise that accompanies communication throughout these channels is not to be ignored for the “meaningful signal,” but integral to the technological system that makes such communication possible (Simondon 2016, 198). Simondon states that the aesthetic experience emerges from the intention to communicate. The noise that accompanies communication does not need to be treated as an unwelcome disruption, but is integral to our engagement with technical objects, and therefore part of its techno-aesthetics. Like the audible noise that accompanies early long-distance telephone calls, the glitches and other visual manifestations of breakdown that comprise the imagery of first-generation camgirls are indicators of a desire to communicate, part of the broader systems that make such communications possible. In Voog’s broadcast images, sometimes these glitches are manifest as silvery, cubic swatches, consuming chunks of images that do not transmit properly. Noise is also present in the colorful visual artifacts of image compression, unavoidable during the 1990s and early 2000s when limited technological capacities meant low camera resolutions and inhibited the sharing of large files.

The aesthetic qualities that result from technological limitations should not be dismissed merely as errors, despite the frustrations that arise from breakdown, ranging from glitched images and broken links to more significant website malfunctions that disrupt service. Voog comments upon such disruptions in her streamed images, describing her efforts to maintain her site’s functionality. Here she draws attention to the breakdowns—the glitches and noise—which are not edited out but comprise part of the broader stream. These qualities make the desire to communicate evident through the work, as the influence of the webcam and Internet on Voog’s actions as technical objects are apparent. Her labor is made visible, with these acts of technological maintenance functioning as gestures of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). Voog is engaging in what Lucy Suchman refers to as situated actions, “actions taken in context of particular, concrete circumstances” (Suchman 2007, 26). The glitch functions as an aesthetic manifestation of such care ethics, which influence not only the technological systems, but the collective that Voog has formed around her webcasting. This collective involves the individuation of individuals, including living humans and nonliving technical objects, but also comprises processes of transindividuation, or shared experiences of individuation that exceed individuals. Individuation and transindividuation are not distinct processes, but interconnected. Transindividuation, for Simondon (2020), is not simply harmonious. As he reiterates throughout his philosophy, it involves transduction and becoming that include potentials of the pre-individual and states of metastability, as well as expectations and tensions from various involved individuals. The technical glitch and its resolution are one such tension of agencies between human and machine in this realized ethics of care as maintenance.

Therefore, the technology of camming influenced the quality of the imagery produced, cultivating distinctive stylistics connected to its limitations. In addition to the visual qualities discussed above, there were also gaps between images. These gaps have been commented upon by various writers and scholars, including Voog herself. She notes how her viewers would project stories onto the image sequences that did not accurately convey what was happening in the images as a kind of digital Rorschach Test (Krotoski 2016). As such, the aesthetic qualities of Voog’s camming practice are informed through her engagement with technology, or its techno-aesthetics. As noted in the introduction, Simondon emphasizes how techno-aesthetics is not focused on contemplation, but “it’s in usage, in action, that it becomes something orgasmic, a tactile means and motor of stimulation” (Simondon 2012, 3). Simondon’s use of sexual language is notable here, especially when considered in relation to camgirls where the pornographic has been used as a means of dismissing their activities. In techno-aesthetics, Simondon focuses on how engagement with tools and machines, particularly in nonart contexts that tend not to be treated as aesthetic, evokes aesthetic sensations: “When a nut that is stuck becomes unstuck, one experiences a motoric pleasure, a certain instrumentalized joy, a communication—mediated by the tool—with the thing on which the tool is working” (Simondon 2012, 3). In particular, Simondon focuses on how human bodies and technical objects work in tandem, where “the body of the operator gives and receives” (Simondon 2012, 3). Unlike other philosophers of aesthetics, Simondon is not only interested in the impact of an art object once it is produced, but treats the process of creation as a type of aesthetic experience:

Art is not only the object of contemplation; for those who practice it, it’s a form of action [. . .] Aesthetics is not only, nor first and foremost, the sensation of the “consumer” of the work of art. It is also, and more originally so, the set of sensations, more or less rich, of the artists themselves: it’s about a certain contact with matter that is being transformed through work (Simondon 2012, 3).

The aesthetic, for Simondon, is not specific to the art object, but “it is the encounter—which takes place about the object—between a real aspect of the world and a human gesture” (Simondon 2016, 202). Even though Voog’s camming practice through Anacam has ended, the project as a whole encompassed thirteen years of working with various technical objects to produce and maintain the cam feeds and site—thirteen years of process that were co-constituted as performance, aesthetic, and ethical encounters while being produced. Voog was not just producing Anacam; Anacam was also constituting Voog. Both were cultivating an online network that contributed to the growth of an online community, which at its height involved millions of visits to the site.

Since first-generation camgirls were working prior to social media platforms that have normalized many of these lifecasting activities, there was not a template for such production at that time. As women designed and programmed their sites, they also established methods for connecting along with developing the techno-aesthetics of the resulting encounters with the site through maintenance as an ethics of care. In addition to sharing images uploaded from webcams and coding websites, camgirls set up chat rooms, online shops, archives of images, and blogs in order to engage with a growing following of fans from around the world. This milieu consists of the camgirls and the technical objects used to produce the sites, but also the geographic space of their homes as the setting of their camming work and the millions of individuals connected as part of the network that arose around their sites. Observing images archived on Voog’s site that have been shot over the years, evidence of change can be found throughout. Her engagement with the camera alters over time, as her actions indicate a process of artistic experimentation. Improved capacities of cameras enabled increased resolution of images, but also the website was modified as Internet affordances improved, such as the introduction of DSL. These processes of change encompass what Simondon refers to as individuation and transindividuation. With Anacam, individuation does not just occur through Voog’s processes of subjective becoming in conjunction with her technical objects. The technical objects also individuate as these are modified or replaced with newer versions. Change occurs through the iterative progression of transduction. Simondon emphasizes the significance of relations involved in these processes, where change is biological, physical, but also social through the growth of a networked collective. Individuation of physical and vital beings occurs through the techno-aesthetics of these first generation camgirls, where such processes are co-constitutive and transindividuating through a relational ethics of care as becoming.