A small and incomplete taxonomy of artists that use webcams for their artistic practice
Just a random sample. This is the result of a few evenings of wild googling and searching. There is much more out there. I'm open for suggestions.
Using webcams as inspiration for classic painting and drawing - Focus on spaces - direct translation
Patrik Entian
The paintings depict images from a webcam in Antarctica. The camera usually shows an icy landscape, the horizon and sky. At least during daytime. Through out the summer of 2010 the webcam image froze, and instead of up-dating every ten minutes, it rendered the same picture over and over again. This was precisely during the period I collected material to paint for the museum exhibition. I had promised the curator to cover one wall with 70 diverse landscape paintings of nights, days, changing weather and distortions. As a painting diary of the summer of 2010 from Atka Bay, painted as it occurs from the webcam images that updates every ten minute.
Frances Cockburn
Cuba Mall Painting. Painted from a webcam image on the other size of the world from me. Cuba Mall in Wellington, NZ.
Enda O'Donoghue
Gone 410 Painting. A painting from a series of anonymous images found online. In this case using a randomly found webcam image of an empty room showing a desk with a computer and keyboard.
The imagery comes almost exclusively from found photographs sourced from the Internet, where he plays with random throw-away moments of everyday life, merging them together in various interconnected themes.
David Meyers
Andy Warhol's grave site. Inspired by the live webcam feed of his grave. In this painting, an homage to Warhol, His grave sits bespeckled with ornaments yet vaguely specific. Behind his headstone lies his family's "Warhola" The specificity and simultaneous vagueness of this scene really appeals to me and the sign "Party 5pm 8/6" livens up the whole affair and is the birthday of Andy.
Using webcams as inspiration for classic painting and drawing - Focus on spaces - Reinterpretation
Debbie Locke
I'm currently working in collaboration with a farm in the Blackdown Hills, to explore and attempt to capture the relationship between the farmer, the sheep and the sheep dogs. We are using webcams and GPS to record the movement of the sheep and then experimenting with the resulting footage and data - simultaneously creating drawings by alternating layers of marks by hand and by the use of drawing machines.Using webcams as inspiration for classic painting and drawing - Focus on erotic webcamming - Direct translation
Stephen Schirle
NSFW paintings of camgirls. And cam glitches.
Berkay Tuncay
Webcam Girls While Touching Their Keyboards, 2012-2015 - The moments when these women touched their keyboards are frozen in the images. Tuncay manages to capture and turn on its head the means of distribution that is specific to the industry of sex online, subverting its very “touch.” Tuncay reminds viewers that the women that we see through their webcams are technology users and you access their images through the keyboards that you touch. In other words, although these touches and their appearences are titillating, the situation itself is machine-like and it is far removed from skin contact. In: Life Is What Happens To You While You Are Busy Watching Cute Cat Videos
Using webcams as inspiration for classic painting and drawing - Focus on erotic webcamming - Reinterpretation
Pietro Spirito
In recent works, the artist combines his interest in drawings of the human body, animals and in ceramic sculpture with the visual worlds of the social-media platform Instagram, dating app. Spirito takes motifs he finds that focus on staging and revealing the subject’s own body and address the publication of private images in a playful or provocative way. The fleeting gaze as you navigate the platforms is interrupted from the moment the artist paints.
His goal is not to create a new image, but it is an act of redesigning and feeling one’s point of view through images, exploring desire, voyeurism and the dramatic flood of images.
Using webcams for digital painting and drawing - Focus on space
Antya Umstaetter
She is painting the same Norwegian traffic cams that I love so much! Her paintings are totally wonderful!
The Webcam Series. Webcams around Stokmarknes, Dark and snowy roads in February, but. Dark. It. Is. Not. ( all are 100 x 75 cm), digital prints, edition of 3.
Isabelle Jenniches
RAINFOREST IN WINTER LIGHT takes us inside the Climatron, a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller. The camera is placed within a simulated rainforest environment and allows for minutely detailed observation of plants, as well as animals that have taken up residence there.
WHEN YOU LIE DOWN uses one of over 30 robotic webcams placed in a furniture superstore to encourage e-commerce. A glowing row of aquariums in the bedroom department illuminates customers trying out mattresses, unaware of the virtual eye zooming in.
Geert Mul
I HAVE BEEN WATCHING YOU - 6000 surveillance camera images from the city of Tilburg.
Surveillance camera imagery is secret or confidential. In the artwork “I’ve been watching you” the city is mirrored to its citizens but from an alternative point of view.
Using webcams for digital painting and drawing - Focus on objects
Sara Ludy
I couldn't find out know what Sara Ludy does here, but the artwork looks great. I assume it's a webcam movie of a glass artwork in a landscape.
Using webcams to observe the invisible
Geert Mul
‘Glow in the Dark’ is based on a thermographic camera that searches for warm objects and persons in his environment. The camera is capable to keep track of persons and objects when they are detected.
Tomas van Houtryve
In 2014 a low-resolution thermal-imaging camera was introduced for sale as a clip-on accessory for mobile phones. I photographed New York City to see how a technology designed for surveillance rendered the human form.
Dislocation of Intimacy is a sealed black box who's interior is accessible only via the Internet. ``the user selects from among five lights, clicks the button, and receives a surrealist and mysterious shadow, which arrives at the user's screen in gray-scale and without content.'' There are 32 possible combinations of shadows using this apparatus, but is one selecting from a previously recorded database of images or actually operating the instruments that make these specters?
And an interesting theoretical text on tele-epistemology.
Ken Goldberg
Dislocation of Intimacy is a sealed black box who's interior is accessible only via the Internet. ``the user selects from among five lights, clicks the button, and receives a surrealist and mysterious shadow, which arrives at the user's screen in gray-scale and without content.'' There are 32 possible combinations of shadows using this apparatus, but is one selecting from a previously recorded database of images or actually operating the instruments that make these specters?
And an interesting theoretical text on tele-epistemology.
People observation - without consent
Andrew Hammerand
For "The New Town" Andrew Hammerand gained access to a networked camera in a planned community in the American Midwest. For about 18 months he operated the camera and made tens of thousands of pictures. Through the grainy, long-distance lens of a security camera, however, the views take on subtly nefarious undertones. A man Mr. Hammerand spotted working with a hammer looks, in one photo, like he’s about to commit some terrible crime.
For the past 15 years, Kurt Caviezel has been monitoring 15,000 publicly accessible webcams located all over the world. By taking screenshots of any situation he found interesting, he compiled an archive of more than 3 million images, categorizing them from A to Z by recurring patterns and subjects. The result is an Encyclopedia composed of images, drawn from the public landscape to the book, taken from the book to the museum, from images to words and from words to images. Disseminating, in a nut shell, the lines between public and private spheres, between the ordinary and the heroic.
He has good theoretical texts on this art practice also.
Willem Popelier was looking for showroom computers which visitors use to take pictures of themselves by using the computer’s webcam.
On one particular computer Popelier found almost a hundred pictures made by two girls. One of the girls wore a necklace stating her name. Popelier started to look for her on the internet and found both girls on various websites such as Hyves, Facebook and Twitter.
Ian Wooldridge works with Pornography and Boredom; Comedy and Depression; the Terror in Polite Aesthetics. He appropriates and re-works found material.
Home for 2 minutes is an extensive collection of two minutes videos containing dead webcam space that IAN WOOLDRIDGE extracted from male chat rooms.
Over time it became clear that the mountain would not erupt. I remained seated in front of the screen and took pleasure in each cloud that passed by. For weeks. Sometimes the only attraction lay in the color shifts of monochromatic fog-images from a dim lilac to a warm morning gray. At first that wasn’t planned as a work but was simply a sort of innocent interest with an addictive aspect. In the context of the American presidential election, which was occurring at the same time, the waiting for the volcano acquired a dreadfully significant dimension.
In 1996, Wolfgang Staehle started a series of live online video streams. His first series was called Empire 24/7 where he documented the Empire State Building in New York City. He documented it by setting up a digital still camera at The Thing's office located in New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood. Every four seconds, the camera took a picture of the building and the images were sent and projected in a gallery at the ZKM. Staehle has continued working on his series of live online video streams of other buildings, landscapes and cityscapes such as the Fernsehturm in Berlin, the Comburg Monastery in Germany, and a Yanomami village in the Brazilian rainforest.
In 2002, Mike Parr's performance, "For Water from the Mouth" was held at the gallery Artspace. For ten days Mike Parr was isolated in a room with nothing but water to keep him alive. His actions were followed by surveillance cameras and broadcast live on the internet. For "A stitch in time" Mike Parr used a live web cam showing Mike Parr having his lips and face extensively stitched with thread into a caricature of shame. In 2003, "Malevich (A Political Arm)" was as live web broadcast where Mike Parr sat for 30 hours in the gallery Artspace with his arm nailed to the wall in opposition to the Australia government's treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.
Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM (2007) is a YouTube video in which the artist stares intently into a webcam as cartoonish clip art figures float around her face. Unlike a typical camgirl, Cortright also engaged in all-out flame wars with her commenters.
In a way, the works weren’t about me at all, but about maintaining a sort of neutrality, letting the customization effects overpower any sense of self. Over time, I made fewer and fewer videos because I wasn’t alone as much anymore. I wasn’t as lonely.
Her self-portrait videos have always been mesmerizing, too likable to be a guilty pleasure, too DIY to be unattainable.
For 19 years now I have been following the traces of public webcams: cameras installed in public or private spheres that automatically record images and spread them via internet. I research where they are located, travel there, and get myself photographed. New York and Moscow, London, Las Vegas and Singapore – I went to more than 800 webcams in 22 countries. So far. On location, I place myself in front of the camera. As »The Traveller«, I stare back. Same clothes, same pose, every time. You can recognize me in every image. You can watch me.
With cameras in every phone and webcams and security cameras all over the world, everything and everybody is constantly being photographed. In 2010 Willem Popelier made a journey through Florida, while keeping his camera at home. He wanted to get as much visual proof as possible of him being there, with the use of cameras that are already there and that are already recording.
Doorway to the Soul consists of a small screen with someone staring at you. The artist is paying people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to stare into a webcam for 1 minute each, a task for which they are paid 25 cents. The videos are scaled to life-size and played directly on a display mounted at average hum an height.
100 Hours per Minute is an interactive artwork that displays averages of multiple YouTube videos overlaid and played together. To watch every frame flow by, you’d need 18,000 screens. If you were to average all the videos together instead, and watch the resulting video collage, you’d see Gaussian noise: gray static.
Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia direct adult performers to pose in copies of paintings by Egon Schiele, Modigliani, Botticelli and others.
For BEFNOED – an acronym for By Everyone, For No One, Every Day – we give instructions to anonymous workers to realize webcam performances. The performers are hired through crowdsourcing services, so we do not know who they are, where they are, or even their motivations. The resulting videos are then dispersed on obscure, peripheral or forgotten social networks around the world, in Cambodia, Russia, China, South Africa.
For his series "Every CCTV Camera", James Bridle, who had been researching surveillance as part of an art residency, set out to walk the perimeter of the city’s congestion charge zone, to document as many closed-circuit security cameras as he could find.
Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria, whose work explores the tension between intimacy and technology. She seeks to blend conceptual work with traditional forms of hacking and sculpture.
Asymmetric Love was intended to mimic an iconic baroque chandelier. It attempts to be perceived as something familiar in memory by the audience so that the details of the CCTV cameras recording them is overlooked.
Kurt Caviezel
For the past 15 years, Kurt Caviezel has been monitoring 15,000 publicly accessible webcams located all over the world. By taking screenshots of any situation he found interesting, he compiled an archive of more than 3 million images, categorizing them from A to Z by recurring patterns and subjects. The result is an Encyclopedia composed of images, drawn from the public landscape to the book, taken from the book to the museum, from images to words and from words to images. Disseminating, in a nut shell, the lines between public and private spheres, between the ordinary and the heroic.
He has good theoretical texts on this art practice also.
Found photography and video
Willem Popelier
Willem Popelier was looking for showroom computers which visitors use to take pictures of themselves by using the computer’s webcam.
On one particular computer Popelier found almost a hundred pictures made by two girls. One of the girls wore a necklace stating her name. Popelier started to look for her on the internet and found both girls on various websites such as Hyves, Facebook and Twitter.
Ian Wooldridge
Ian Wooldridge works with Pornography and Boredom; Comedy and Depression; the Terror in Polite Aesthetics. He appropriates and re-works found material.
Home for 2 minutes is an extensive collection of two minutes videos containing dead webcam space that IAN WOOLDRIDGE extracted from male chat rooms.
Observing scenes and landscapes
Astrid Nippoldt
Over time it became clear that the mountain would not erupt. I remained seated in front of the screen and took pleasure in each cloud that passed by. For weeks. Sometimes the only attraction lay in the color shifts of monochromatic fog-images from a dim lilac to a warm morning gray. At first that wasn’t planned as a work but was simply a sort of innocent interest with an addictive aspect. In the context of the American presidential election, which was occurring at the same time, the waiting for the volcano acquired a dreadfully significant dimension.
Wolfgang Staehle
In 1996, Wolfgang Staehle started a series of live online video streams. His first series was called Empire 24/7 where he documented the Empire State Building in New York City. He documented it by setting up a digital still camera at The Thing's office located in New York’s West Chelsea neighborhood. Every four seconds, the camera took a picture of the building and the images were sent and projected in a gallery at the ZKM. Staehle has continued working on his series of live online video streams of other buildings, landscapes and cityscapes such as the Fernsehturm in Berlin, the Comburg Monastery in Germany, and a Yanomami village in the Brazilian rainforest.
Performance - By the artist
Mike Parr
In 2002, Mike Parr's performance, "For Water from the Mouth" was held at the gallery Artspace. For ten days Mike Parr was isolated in a room with nothing but water to keep him alive. His actions were followed by surveillance cameras and broadcast live on the internet. For "A stitch in time" Mike Parr used a live web cam showing Mike Parr having his lips and face extensively stitched with thread into a caricature of shame. In 2003, "Malevich (A Political Arm)" was as live web broadcast where Mike Parr sat for 30 hours in the gallery Artspace with his arm nailed to the wall in opposition to the Australia government's treatment of refugees and asylum seekers.
Petra Cortright
Petra Cortright’s VVEBCAM (2007) is a YouTube video in which the artist stares intently into a webcam as cartoonish clip art figures float around her face. Unlike a typical camgirl, Cortright also engaged in all-out flame wars with her commenters.
In a way, the works weren’t about me at all, but about maintaining a sort of neutrality, letting the customization effects overpower any sense of self. Over time, I made fewer and fewer videos because I wasn’t alone as much anymore. I wasn’t as lonely.
Her self-portrait videos have always been mesmerizing, too likable to be a guilty pleasure, too DIY to be unattainable.
Corpos Informáticos
Since their founding in 1992 at the University of Brasília, the collective Corpos Informáticos has conducted artistic research into the relationship between the body and communication networks. In the late 1990s, Corpos began to stage staunchly lo-fi telepresence experiments using existing webcam networks like CU-SeeMe and iVisit. Without prior announcement or any kind of script, they would convene day-long discussions and online banquets that linked online participants with gatherings in Brasília and other cities.Performance - By the artist - Positioning yourself in public webcams
Jens Sundheim
For 19 years now I have been following the traces of public webcams: cameras installed in public or private spheres that automatically record images and spread them via internet. I research where they are located, travel there, and get myself photographed. New York and Moscow, London, Las Vegas and Singapore – I went to more than 800 webcams in 22 countries. So far. On location, I place myself in front of the camera. As »The Traveller«, I stare back. Same clothes, same pose, every time. You can recognize me in every image. You can watch me.
Willem Popelier
With cameras in every phone and webcams and security cameras all over the world, everything and everybody is constantly being photographed. In 2010 Willem Popelier made a journey through Florida, while keeping his camera at home. He wanted to get as much visual proof as possible of him being there, with the use of cameras that are already there and that are already recording.
Performance - By (hired) others
Jamie Zigelbaum
Doorway to the Soul consists of a small screen with someone staring at you. The artist is paying people on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to stare into a webcam for 1 minute each, a task for which they are paid 25 cents. The videos are scaled to life-size and played directly on a display mounted at average hum an height.
100 Hours per Minute is an interactive artwork that displays averages of multiple YouTube videos overlaid and played together. To watch every frame flow by, you’d need 18,000 screens. If you were to average all the videos together instead, and watch the resulting video collage, you’d see Gaussian noise: gray static.
Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia
Addie Wagenknecht and Pablo Garcia direct adult performers to pose in copies of paintings by Egon Schiele, Modigliani, Botticelli and others.
Eva and Franco Mattes
For BEFNOED – an acronym for By Everyone, For No One, Every Day – we give instructions to anonymous workers to realize webcam performances. The performers are hired through crowdsourcing services, so we do not know who they are, where they are, or even their motivations. The resulting videos are then dispersed on obscure, peripheral or forgotten social networks around the world, in Cambodia, Russia, China, South Africa.
Exposing surveillance
James Bridle
For his series "Every CCTV Camera", James Bridle, who had been researching surveillance as part of an art residency, set out to walk the perimeter of the city’s congestion charge zone, to document as many closed-circuit security cameras as he could find.
Addie Wagenknecht
Addie Wagenknecht is an American artist based in Austria, whose work explores the tension between intimacy and technology. She seeks to blend conceptual work with traditional forms of hacking and sculpture.
Asymmetric Love was intended to mimic an iconic baroque chandelier. It attempts to be perceived as something familiar in memory by the audience so that the details of the CCTV cameras recording them is overlooked.
