Currently Off Sight is an art-based project that explores the politics and poetics of
visibility on sex webcam platforms. Rather than exceptions, Currently Off Sight considers sex
webcam platforms paradigmatic for the entanglements of work and daily life in a discriminatory
environment. As such, sexcam platforms become a magnifying lens to investigate what it means to be
visible and invisible online, querying the different strategies and tactics that modulate this
visibility. In a context of constant deplatforming, banning, and discrimination of sex and sex
workers1, Currently Off Sight interrogates visibility as a governance tool.
Despite the asymmetry of power between the sexcam platform and its performers, Currently Off
Sight resists a binary understanding of what is visible and invisible in that context.
Instead of just making visible what is hidden, this project questions the purpose of rendering
things (hyper)visible at the expense of others while exploring the many shades between visible and
invisible. Foregrounding webcammers’ voices, this project examines the ways in which visibility
manifests on the platform, and the various degrees of agency the different actors have there
Currently Off Sight interrogates the poetics of visibility on the platform by engaging with
the forms that this visibility acquires. The project is divided into chapters, concerning the topics
addressed by the webcammers’ testimonies: the circulation of money, the making and presentation of
identity, the space of the transmissions, moderation, and surveillance. These topics are formally
explored through the media elements present on the platform: audio, video, chat windows, images, and
animated gifs. Citing the aesthetics used by the sexcam platform and webcammers’ profiles, these
elements are placed on a simulated desktop that works as a stage and place of observation. The
desktop serves also as a way to acknowledge the presence of the user in this sexcam entanglement. It
is the user, the audience, who must decide what they want to know about the functioning of the
platform, what they do want to see.
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Antonia Hernández is a theorist, designer and media artist whose work explores infrastructural
relations of intimacy, combining theoretical investigation with arts-based practices to understand
the fleshy, living, and domestic aspects of media. She has presented her work and research-creation
methodologies widely at conferences, exhibitions, and in artist talks, and is preparing a book on
the role of fictional currencies in sexcam platforms.
antoniahernandez.com
Lotte Louise de Jong is a media artist from the Netherlands with a background in filmmaking. Her work
is research-based and ranges from physical, digital and online installations to more traditional
forms of narrative. Her practice addresses how we, as a society, view and shape our identity through
mediated spaces like the digital world. The internet as a space for exploring intimacy has been the
main focus of her past projects.
lottelouise.nl
Thanks to Jason and Fawna for sharing their insights.
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