Abstract
On your screen, you see an image of a young woman staring intently to the right of the camera, presumably looking at her monitor. Behind her are a bookshelf and some computers. A minute later, she shifts her position slightly, and another image is captured and sent to you via her website. Jennicam, widely recognized as the progenitor of all personal webcams, often offers little more than this scene to the millions of hits her site receives each day.1 While Jennifer Ringley sees her work as a diaristic documentary, I believe that this mode of communication creates a new kind of social space, in which the private is performed for the public, and interaction is initiated by the one who is being watched. Cams make manifest issues of surveillance, community, the cyborg, domestic space, intimacy, pornography, and self-image. They are a form of artistic practice, with an art historical context and correlatives in documentary production, self-portraiture, and performance.
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