JenniCAM can't. Well kind of.

Hello again! My computer mistakenly 'error' messaged this post from last week but I've re-written it...

When I think about JenniCAM, I think about Mr Jean-Luc Godard who said "Cinema is not a dream or a fantasy. It is life." It would seem that Jenni’s hyper-realistic form of ‘lifecasting’ is part of a movement achieving a new ‘art imitating life’ status never before seen, to the degree that arguably the ‘art’ becomes life. To this extent I’m not actually sure whether there is in fact any art on display. To merely film your life for however many hours for however many months/years instinctively seems a little too unmitigated to be classifiable as art. And yet Jenni obviously acts – i.e. stripteases – for the camera in ways she would presumably not do otherwise. Contrastingly, perhaps Jenni’s performance occupies a subtle yet lofty ‘life imitating art’ headspace that is not quite either. Indeed the article “A camera with a view” seems to view it as more than a mere capturing of reality, and discusses the various underpinnings including the voyeuristic/fetishistic elements of Jenni’s display.

While it remains unclear exactly what the whole thing is, we can certainly say that it has never been more clear that the cyborg is, as quoted in the article, ‘[n]o longer structured by the polarity of the public and private’ (Haraway 1991b). We are all intensely public and private individuals, and maybe we’re not filming ourselves dancing or copulating or passing wind, but our ambivalence remains through our dissemination of information about ourselves via social networking site’s/corporate databases/instant messaging/etc.

[Regarding the voyeuristic nature of contingents of Jenni’s viewership, it may also be of interest that nude pictures of Jenni (of JenniCAM fame) were sold on ebay for more than $800 and her bed for more than $3000.]

More interesting than JenniCAM-esque ventures such as Big Brother - those who seem merely to film their lives for the enjoyment of people who want to waste their lives watching you waste yours - are artists who blog. The interaction of their mere opinions and abstract thoughts in the context of their art is an interesting intertextual situation. See for example the intense poetry of black poet Saul Williams, and then his blog. Any insight into the internalisation of art as seen by intensely figured artists is always going to be compelling. A lot more so than watching someone sleep anyway in my opinion...

Andrew