Saturday, January 30, 2021

From a strange planet - 27

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.

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.

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.

Sunday, January 17, 2021

From a strange planet - 28

A long trip along Norwegian traffic webcams - "eine Bildbeschreibung". 

We are in the county of Agder. The name Agder is older than the Norwegian language. Its meaning is not known. Neither is the meaning of the webcams.

We start from Kristiansand and go North-East along the E39. Very soon it becomes the E18 but still points North-East. We are now in Vestvold or Telemark. We drive along the Oslo fjord. We take the side roads too. Then we return along the E134 end finish at Hovden. We have been there before.

At night there are monsters and ghosts.
During the day there's a painting by Turner.

A row of trees. A row of lights.

There's a closed building with darkness inside.
A sign points to the building.
At night everything disappears,
and there's just a lonely light in whiteness and darkness.
No sign, no direction.
Dark trees on the right. They look impenetrable.
But then the snow lightens the dark background. And there are rocks.
There is no behind, behind the trees.
There is a round object on the left. A UFO.
It is always there. It hides something.
But the cubic object is, and stays  in view.
A road goes into the trees at right. There is house.
At night a small light shines down there.
There are two boxes on the left. Day and night are the same here.
The road goes somewhere.
The trees are the masters here. The road is barely tolerated.
Not many cars drive here. No one is interested to go from here to there.
This road will be covered by weeds soon. Seedlings will sprout.
The trees are closing in. Darkness will fall. 
First snow. Box on the left, night lights on the right.
Cable crossing the road.
Lampposts fighting with the trees. Barely holding their ground.
Boring highway. Beautiful sign.
Yellow arrows pointing into the rocks.
Tree bark looks like poplar.
Total darkness at night.
The cable and the white fields.
At first the snow is transparent.
Later it thickens and grows solid and graphic.
Lights behind the birch trees.
Reflection of the sky.
Two empty paths crossing at right angles.
No cars.
This is a Mobius strip going from nowhere to nowhere.
Underneath the bridge you're on the bridge.
That explains it.
Snow flattens the landscape.
Japanese woodcut.
Night lights in the upper left corner.
Isolated buildings thinking building thoughts.
You will be ignored.
Snow lies in the circle on the left.
The snow is illuminated.
There's a lamppost for the snow.
People drive here to see this.
It's a place of pilgrimage.
The snow has broken the trees.
Branches lie in the snow.
The road to the bridge.
The arc. The white.
The height of the snow.
The weight of the snow.
White creaking.
Everything disappears in the snow.
But the landscape grows larger.
A landscape for megaliths.
Megaliths under the snow.
The snow has overturned the landscape.
There is a sky road now.
It disappears into the grey snowy sky.
White creaking.
Snow until april.


Silence has fallen on the landscape.
The houses are asleep.
The tree curtains are drawn.
A blanket covers the road.
Traveler, look straight ahead.
Don't wake anyone.
Spring comes. Snow fades. New buildings rise.
Links for scripting later:
E18 Inntjoreheia
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=114397

E18 Haslestad
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=567756

Rv. 41 Hynnekleiv
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=566702

Rv. 41 Åmli
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=1363193

E18 Stokkebakken
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=118079

Fv. 353 Brumyrdal
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=110597

Fv. 32 Kikut
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=110983

Fv. 40 Rienlia
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=604420

E18 Rødbøl
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=289361

Fv. 307 Gravdal
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=289642

Fv. 310 Kotterud
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=289648

Fv. 313 Bogen
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=576514

E18 Hanekleiva
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=209309

Fv. 35 Hemsdalen
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=281664

E134 Darbu
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=1107725

E134 Meheia
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=111165

E134 Gvammen
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=2961524

E134 Ambjørndalen
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=127268

Rv. 36 Seljord
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=566690

E134 Brunkeberg
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=127262

E134 Grønnliheia
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=1069329

E134 Vinje
https://www.vegvesen.no/public/webkamera/kamera?id=757803