The Peep Diaries

I came across the work of Cheryl Sourkes on the weekend. She’s a Toronto artist who grabs images from live streams of webcams and, as she writes, “reformats” them and “prepares them for life offstream.”

She’s currently exhibiting until the end of May at Toronto’s Peak Gallery, which has more images of her work online. The images that really interest me are the ones set in domestic situations, pictures like the ones below that evoke the lonely disconnect inherent to Peep Culture.

The images evoke the personal but also seem all too aware of the camera. They leave us perplexed, on edge, wondering why we’re watching and why nobody is watching us.

Below are three images from the exhibit for you to check out.

The news is all over a bar owner who turned a meat smoker into a remote controlled robot – the Bum-bot – in order to roust the unwanted from his downtown Atlanta neighbourhood. You can watch the bot in action here.

So here’s the peep part of this: the robot, which is equipped with a bright spot light and a hose that sprays water, also comes with a infrared camera that broadcasts its exploits on big screen tvs over at Terrill’s bar. Patrons can sip their beers and watch Terrill soak the poor, addicted, helpless and homeless.

What fun.

Okay, this is one of the weirder ones: Max Mosley, head of Grand Prix and son of Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Fascist party in the 1930s, gets caught having a sadomasochistic orgy involving NAZI regalia. Apparently, he was set up. Writes the New York Times: “The Sunday Times of London reported in last weekend’s editions that Mosley was the target of a setup involving a van with a hidden video camera parked outside the Chelsea basement flat where the sex session took place, and that a miniature camera was concealed in one of the women’s bras.”

I mean it’s hard to have sympathy for this guy. Here’s a description of the video that the Sunday Times of London posted then later removed: “two of the women wore black-and-white striped robes in the style of prisoners’ uniforms. The video showed Mosley counting in German – ‘Eins! Zwei! Drei! Vier! Funf!’ – as he used a leather strap to lash one of the women. ‘She needs more of ze punishment!’ he cried in German-accented English.”

But who really needs more of the punishment here? The video proves Mosley has weird fantasies and the money to act them out. But as he quite rightly says to the press: “As it is, the scandal paper obtained by illegal means pictures of something I did in private, which, although unacceptable to some people, was harmless and completely legal.”

He’s got a point. Does the public have a right or need to know what this guy does with his spare time? Irrelevant question. Peep culture trumps privacy every time.

“MySpace is the anti-Christ for children” says the dad of a 16 year-old after finding out his Florida cheerleader daughter was savagely beaten by a group of teens. The teens initiated and recorded the beating so that they could then post it to YouTube and MySpace, though later on they thought the better of it, which didn’t help much since at least one of them still had a recording when she was arrested.

This is the dark side of peep culture – people who do bad things primarily because they want to record them. And while the video was never posted and YouTube would have taken it down immediately had it been uploaded, there are tons of video sharing sites that would have been delighted to upload the entire lengthy beating (which left the girl unconscious).

They may get their opportunity yet as for some reason clips were released by the police handling the case. For now, you can watch a clip on various news sites like auk’s Sky News. There’s no particular reason to upload the clip onto a news site other than the fact that it will attract eyeballs. It’s not as if watching this girl get repeatedly punched will enlighten us as to the nature of violence in general or how this specific incident came about.

So what does all this prove? 1) that peep trumps any other consideration, and 2) that if you clicked or are about to click on the link above you are no better than the rest of.

Okay, so I just fell into a major hole and spent a couple of hours viewing videos on Justin.tv. I was looking for interesting clips to potentially use in the peep documentary and interesting people to interview. But I have to say I'm pretty disappointed with what I saw. The original concept was that people were supposed to have their own channels for lifecasting - you could get the apparatus from Justin and his crew and go out there and broadcast your life for all to see. We would see what you saw from your perspective. But it's become something more of a video blogging site, a cross between a Facebook and a youtube. The camera is mostly static and pointing at the person as opposed to pointing outward at what the person is looking at.

I'm sure that others have noted this better and much earlier than me. But hey, too be honest I don't really care what business model Justin follows. I was disappointed because there wasn't a lot of material on there that was of use to me. Mostly it was people being silly in front of their webcams. Some of it was live but most of it was "highlights" like someone burping loudly. The two clips I liked best were both ones in which young women were having somewhat confrontational phone conversations with males.

This one here features one of the better known lifecasters, Sarah Meyers, arguing with a stalker. This one shows a young woman arguing with a soon to be former boyfriend. Both are kind of entertaining in that weird, creepy, why-am-watching-this way, the boyfriend break up one probably more so than the Sarah Meyers stalker one.

I'm tired, it's the end of the day and I don't really have any great pronouncement on any of this right now except that I was disappointed by Justin.tv. Furthermore, 956 people watched a girl fight with her boyfriend and I am one of them.

Article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail today on a blogger and BBC columnist who chronicled their own demises from illness. “Blogging the process of dying is becoming a small yet poignant fixture on the Internet landscape.” The piece doesn’t give us any sense of why people might want to blog or otherwise make public their deaths, which is too bad.

But peeping death (our own and others) is an interesting piece in the peep puzzle. If we peep ourselves and others in order to be less alone, then it makes sense: what could be lonelier than death?

Of course peep culture has always had an interest in death: the 1978 Faces of Death cult film/montage of death scenes of humans and animals (some real but most fake) has spawned something like six official spin-offs and any number of unofficial imitators.

On the artistic side, there are documentaries like Silverlake Life: the View from Here a video diary of the death by AIDS of Tom Joslin. Here’s a description of the final moments of Joslin’s life as depicted on the video and described by John McGrath in his book Loving Big Brother: “Massi [Joslin’s partner] focuses the camera on each of Joslin’s eyes in turn. One, the lid covered in lesions, is barely visible; the other is clear: ‘that eye he can see in the camera with’. Massi then asks Joslin how he feels and Joslin mutters in a breathy voice, barely intelligible, with Massi attempting to translate: ‘he feels pretty bad, but wants his friends to feel good.’ The video is showing a frame of Joslin’s face, it cuts suddenly to the face again, a slightly different angle. There is a howl then Massi’s voice: ‘This is the first of July and Tommy’s just died.’ Joslin’s clear eye still stares towards the camera.”

Couldn't resist one more post before I go. There's a new Kleenex site that harnesses the energies of peep to the marketing of tissue. It's called Let It Out and it's basically videos and short posts by anonymous individuals venting about their problems. It's like Post Secret meets Hallmark. Corporations are jumping on the peep bandwagon like there's no tomorrow. Why not? People all over the world generate the content for a fraction of the price a traditional campaign would cost and they just sit back and enjoy the branding. It makes you want to cry. It makes you want to...Let It Out! I don't have time right now but when I get back from vacation I'll try posting some possibly "inappropriate" letting it out posts to the Kleenex site and let you know how long they last. You do the same and posts the links in the comments.

So a long gap between my first post and the next two posts. That’s because the launch date for the blog got put off until Sally (director of the peep culture documentary) got back from Paris. You see, the doc people want to film the launch of the blog. So everyone’s coming over today to capture this exciting moment. I spent the morning cleaning my office. You can see the floor now. It’s nice. I’ll take a picture.
Anyway, I’m feeling a bit anxious about the whole thing. I’ve never blogged or really had much about my personal life out there. As a writer I like to re-read and re-think everything I put out there. I’ll need to get over that. Plus, of course, the whole idea of developing an audience of people interested in peeping my life. I can honestly say that I have no idea what that will feel like. So we’ll see.