Bachelor of Science in Art History and Theory Thesis
Queer Operations on the Digital
A Chronological Analysis of Queer Interactions with Technology
Ronan Adams
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Bachelor of Science in Art History and Theory, School of Art and Design
Division of Art History
New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York
2023
Signature line Ronan Adams, BS
Signature line James Hansen, Thesis Advisor
Abstract:
Through the film No No Nooky T.V by Barbara Hammer, the Pixelvision videos by Sadie Benning and We’re All Going to the World’s Fair by Jane Schoenbrun, queer
interactions with technology are analyzed. Issues of the origins of technology and their limitations for queer representation are continuously raised by these artists across time.
These artists use abstraction, manipulation, and identity creation to interact with the technologies they exist alongside.
Acknowledgments:
I want to thank my thesis advisor James Hansen for all his help through the writing process. I didn’t know what to expect and he helped guide me in an especially busy time in my life. I appreciated all his patience. Thank you as well to my mom who always wants to know about what I am working on even when it is not interesting at all to her.
You never let me forget you are proud of me.
Introduction:
Innovations in technology often quickly become central to our daily lives. Interactions with technology become commonplace and mundane. Despite this, technology has complicated origins and implications for many. By addressing how queer individuals specifically interact with different technologies over time, I will be analyzing how origins of the tech can complicate interactions. On the other hand, it will become clear that queer people have worked around this, finding ways to utilize the technology in interesting and fulfilling ways. Through Barbara Hammer’s 1978 video No No Nooky
T.V, Sadie Benning’s Pixelvision videos and lastly, the 2021 horror film written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair I will chronologically analyze these different ways of interacting with technology. Through methods of
abstraction, manipulation and identity creation, these artists make attempts to understand the technologies with which they are surrounded by.
No No Nooky T.V.
No No Nooky T.V, a film created by Barbara Hammer in 1987, uses a 16mm Bolex and Amiga computer to create images of queer sexuality and desire. No No Nooky T.V represents a shift in Hammer’s film style. Though the medium of video would not be new to her, in this case she still uses a 16mm camera to record. She also notably adds to the technology used in previous films by experimenting with the Amiga computer.
This short-lived brand of personal computers was released in 1985. It quickly became obsolete as a machine, but the visuals of the recorded screen seem familiar and recognizable. Hammer uses the screen of the computer to create shifting images and glitches. She films the screen with the 16mm Bolex camera while also occasionally zooming out to see the full body of the computer. Hammer creates images drawn with pixels of the female body coupled with sexually explicit phrases. The computer, as a technology with male heterosexual logic, is taken over by Hammer. She acknowledges this history of the device while also manipulating it. The film both acknowledges the abstract and experimental potential of the technology of the computer as well as the complications of queer representation on a device representative of male control.
No No Nooky T.V. begins with the mechanical voice of the device saying “I am a male voice, I was created by men in their own image, so I am a man’s voice”. In these words,
the origin of the technology is brought to the attention of the viewer. The male voice of the computer recalls the past of machines, levers pulled, and buttons pushed by women under the command of the male voice. As Wendy Chun described, “the dream of
“programming proper”—a man sitting at a desk giving commands to a female “operator”
as the origins and ideals of technology1. Programing and software came into being when “commands shifted from commanding a girl to commanding a machine”2. This history of the machine lives in the current machine and the voice of the computer.
Through the male computer voice, Hammer acknowledges the contradiction of her actions as a lesbian on the computer and the computer as on object of male
heterosexual logic. Throughout the film she deliberately creates these moments of interruptions to continue to stress the complications of queer interactions with technology.
No No Nooky T.V. is filmed with the 16mm Bolex camera. Despite this, because of the presence of the computer screen, the film has a video-like quality. In “Video Haptics and Erotics” Laura Marks argues for the haptic visuality in video. She defines haptic visuality as the “eyes function[ing] as organs of touch”3. Film can be very easily imagined as a tactile medium as it can be manipulated by the hand. To see video in this same way, Marks points out specific electronic effects like pixelation, graininess and under or over exposure. Hammer deliberately uses the tactical medium of film while also using the digital in abstracted and experimental ways that reinforce the digital’s haptic quality. By filming the digital she is recalling the history of lesbian film, and acknowledging the
1 Wendy Hui Kyong Chun; On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge. Grey Room 2005; (18): 33.
2 Chun; On Software. 33
3 Laura U. Marks, Video haptics and erotics, Screen, Volume 39, Issue 4, Winter 1998, Pages 331–348. 332.
experimental potentials of video that Marks argues for. Hammer reveals the haptic quality in film and video in No No Nooky T.V. Hammer also takes control of the
technology by interrupting with the unexpected medium. By filming the computer, she can alter and manipulate the outcome outside of the technology of the computer in addition to the internal manipulation throughout. She can subvert the functions of the male machine of the computer internally and externally through these interruptions.
The potential for external manipulation is clear is one sequence of the film. A blue screen appears, “more & more and more much more” typed out across it. Only the screen is visible within the viewer’s field of vision. The video shifts and the camera zooms in. The screen hasn’t changed, but we are brought closer to “more” written twice, suddenly flickering. The scene changes and the screen is cut off, only the bottom half visible. The darkness of the space outside the illuminated screen is black. On it typed, “I wonder if she fucks”. There is a quick zoom out, making a telephone resting in front of the computer screen visible. We can almost see the whole of the device for less than a second before we are brought back to being limited by the barriers of the screen again.
The glimpse of the telephone recalls earlier moments in which the words “phone sex”
flash on the screen. By representing the telephone as a technology open for sexual interactions, the computer easily becomes understood as an extension of this. It is a new place in which sexual interactions can take place and fantasies can be shared. The viewer is also again reminded of Hammers control and manipulation. She can record outside the barriers of the computer and also come back again due to her use of film in addition to computer technology.
In addition to this external manipulation, Hammer is able to challenge the heterosexual male logic to the computer further through image creation and glitch. Jamie Faye Fenton in her piece Digital TV Dinner manipulated the Bally Astrocade home computer and gaming console. The technology was created by her, and the piece created in 1978, 10 years before No No Nooky T.V. Whit Pow analyzes this piece in their article “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Error”. With Digital TV Dinner, Fenton’s knowledge of the computer and gaming console opened her up to manipulating the system.
Though glitch as a phenomenon is seemingly accidental, both Fenton and Hammer do so deliberately. Fenton does this through ejections of the cartridge, hitting the computer and otherwise misusing the device. Pow writes “using [the] computer to produce
imagery that was happenstance and beyond the binaries and boundaries of
computational rule sets” characterized this work as trans.4 Hammer follows along with this manipulation. In No No Nooky she creates images on the screen, fast forwards them until they are unrecognizable, She represents the computer as a body, and gives images little time to rest before they flicker and change. Glitch is also central to the film.
They are a motion from one image to another, or the thing that obscures. This misuse of the system becomes the primary form of internal abstraction seen in the film. It also lends the video to a queer and trans reading. By deliberately interrupting the operation of the system, Hammer again goes against the established functions, subverting the binary operation of the device.
4 Pow, Whitney (Whit). “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors.” Feminist media histories 7, no. 1 (2021):
197–230. 200.
These abstractions and manipulations by Hammer enable her to confront the computer as a space for queer representation and interactions. Throughout the film, the computer becomes a sexual object. In one moment, a pair of underwear are stretched across the screen. From underneath, she draws pubic hair peeking out, turning the screen of the computer into the space between a woman’s legs. In another scene, the word bondage is written and repeated on the screen. Suddenly the image shifts, we are taken outside the screen to see the whole computer. The computer is then covered with fabric and a rope is tied around it. It replicates scenes of BDSM through this binding. By covering the screen with fabric, it becomes softened, recalling the sensation of touch and skin in the viewer. Despite this, underneath the illuminated screen is still visible. Hammer also includes videos of her and her partner having sex. She zooms in, giving close ups of one of them being fingered. Her use of glitch continues here, the screen around the video flickers and shifts. The video moves so quickly it is hard to make out much detail before a new image appears. The words “A herstoric event. Did you see it? A lesbian body!” come on the screen after the video with her partner ends. The text Hammer puts on screen address the spectacle lesbian sex can be on the computer space. By
manipulating the video and obscuring it she considers the potentials for appropriation of these expressions of queer desire. It calls into question the case in which Hammer is not in control of the image.
She expands on this element of concern in one sequence of the film. In it a woman narrates a sexual experience. In this story, they are blindfolded, tied up and degraded by their partner. As the story is told videos play, sped up. They are almost like home videos, though so obscured and pixelated they are often hard to make out. Close up of
faces, bodies, or animals will become suddenly clear before the image shifts. Glitch often interrupts the video, and as the story continues it intensifies. The story ends when they say, “finally I beg for it and my partner fucks me very hard”. It is a clearly human voice presented in contrast to the robotic male computer voice heard prior in the video.
It is also noticeable how she calls the other person their partner, a gender-neutral term that further separates the story from maleness and heterosexuality. By the end of the story, the screen, previously a drawn image of the United States, is shredded and reorganized. It becomes no longer an image, instead pixels of various colors that flash and flicker. The male computer voice returns, repeating the works fuck and suck, ending by saying “I repeat; do it, do it, do it”. Words flash on the screen as the voice speaks,
“Boob” then “Cunt” then “Pet”. The easy to follow narrative of the sexual experience the women describes becomes a frantic display of explicit words and demands. It is almost as if the story is taken over, put through the machine, and repeated as understood by the machine. It is reordered and confusing, deliberately taken apart by Hammer and narrated by the male voice. The sexually explicit nature of the story remains, but It is not a representation of sex and desire that resonates with Hammer or the narrator of the original story.
Through this misrepresentation of the spoken story, Hammer articulates the potential for the device to misinterpret and appropriate. In her 1993 essay “The Politics of
Abstraction”, she argues against the current scene of lesbian filmmaking. She reads films like Desert Hearts (1986), Lianna (1983) and Personal Best (1982) as
disappointing examples of lesbian representation. About them she writes, “the lesbians
act out heterosexual gender roles and positions rather than claiming any difference”5. In these films, she sees the male role being replaced by a woman, creating a visually lesbian film, but not an experientially lesbian film. Like these films replace the man with the lesbian, the computer removes the lesbian from the story. By removing the literal lesbian voice and narrative, she makes it clear the ways in which technology can work against representation.
Pixelvision
As queer individuals use technology to represent queer identity, elements of control are crucial. In No No Nooky T.V. this was seen in the use of manipulation of the system and glitch. For Sadie Benning in their Pixelvision videos this appears in the bodily
abstraction, creation of characters and ambiguity. Benning predicts ways in which queer people will interact with the internet as a kind of diary. The internet will eventually
become a place of identity and character creation, which Benning foresees in how they record themselves with the toy camera.
Sadie Benning uses the Pixelvision camera to film. This camera, created by Fisher- Price in 1987 used audio-cassette tapes to record. This created a fragile product with a low-resolution black and white video quality. As described in relationship to No No Nooky T.V., the haptic qualities of videos Laura Marks argues for are again clear in the pixelated and unfocused video. In “Video Haptics and Erotics” Marks claims that this quality of the Pixelvision camera makes it ideal as a haptic medium6. In “Video’s Body,
5 Hammer, Barbara. “The Politics of Abstraction” Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video.
Edited by Gever, Martha, Greyson, John and Pratibha Parmar. New York: Routledge, 1993. 71.
6 Laura U. Marks, Video Haptics and Erotics, Screen, Volume 39, Issue 4, Winter 1998, Pages 331–348. 332.
Analogue and Digital”7 she also described both the analogue and digital video as having a body. She points out the potential for manipulation and morphing and transforming of images that video has. This morphing becomes central to her argument that the body of all video is a queer one. Benning manipulates and morphs images in the Pixelvision videos, centering queerness and queer desire. While the haptic qualities of video lend to the abstraction that becomes clear throughout the videos, the queer body of video reinforce the queer reading of Benning videos at the same time.
The main form of abstraction seen in the Pixelvision videos is through Benning’s body.
In these videos, Benning often films themselves not as a whole, but in parts. Shots appear of their eyes, their hands, their lips lingering until another image interrupts. The resolution of video again lends itself to this abstraction. Because of the blurry, pixelated, monochrome video, moments in which the camera makes attempts to focus on any part of Benning’s body often fail. In If Every Girl Had a Diary a particularly long sequence includes Sadie Benning’s hand, rendered completely white against a black background.
They move, contract and stretch their hand and fingers creating different shapes of white on black. As this happens, they say the words “I want badly to yell out, but I don’t want to cause a commotion, attention makes me nervous”. By focusing on their hand, less as a hand and more as an object that can become shape and line, they focus the attention elsewhere. Benning’s abstraction of their hand recalls pieces like Richard Serra’s Hand Catching Lead (1968) in which the artist’s hand is captured in front of a white wall. Pieces of lead fall from outside the frame as the Serra attempts to catch it.
7 “Video’s Body Analogue and Digital” in Touch : Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Marks, Laura U.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.
The hand is the hand that writes as well, calling into mind the writing of a diary that the title of the Pixelvision video implies. The abstraction that Benning uses, detaching features of their body from the whole serves to ease communication, allowing for the possibility of vulnerability and honesty. Like Hammer, Benning gains a level of control in the medium by using this abstraction to represent their identity and tell their personal stories. The abstraction by Benning also furthers the connection between control over representation and identity that make interactions with technology possible for queer individuals.
Queer people, especially queer youth have begun to use the internet as diaries, often unintentionally leaning into the abstraction inherent to the online space to create a version of themselves that is new and unique to the real-life version of themselves, but also in some ways perhaps more authentic. Benning’s early videos anticipate vlogs and social media interactions. By capturing their face interspersed with written text,
Benning’s videos recall the trend of notecard confessions on YouTube in the early 2010s. Users like Amanda Todd posted videos of themselves in black and white, holding notecards in front of their face confessing stories of self-harm, bullying and suicide. Methods of storytelling of this sort would continue, and similar trends would appear like ‘draw my life’ videos in which a life story is told, narrated by the creator, while supplemental images are drawn on a whiteboard. In addition, Benning’s representations of their face with overlaying dialogue can be seen as eventually
reflecting the image and caption that we often see on social media sites. By combining all these visual and auditory elements, the Pixelvision videos speak to the future of the internet and ways in which narratives are told online.
In the video Me and Rubyfruit, Benning references the novel Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown. This novel, published in 1973, follows Molly Bolt a young girl who becomes aware of her lesbian identity as child. It is a coming-of-age novel that follows Molly as she enters adulthood and has her first lesbian experiences. Benning draws from this novel for the title of the video. The video opens with a close up shot of their face. After that, they pan across a sheet of paper on which they have written “Have you ever thought about getting married?”. This starts the narrative of this video. Benning follows this question with their face, they raise their eyebrow almost suggestively. Their voice follows answering “Yeah I’ll get married and wear an apron like my mother”. The conversation continues with Benning playing both parts. One confidentially asking the other to marry them and elope, the other written voice arguing that two girls getting married isn’t allowed. By using the Pixelvision camera, they can play these two characters. The video space as a space open for exploration and experimentation in identity is what connects it most clearly to the future of online interactions.
Like No No Nooky T.V. Queer desire and sexuality also features heavily in the
Pixelvision videos. In Me and Rubyfruit, Benning asks the question “Does your stomach feel kinda strange?” after the two girls kiss. The other replies through writing “Kinda.”
After this, they zoom in on images of pornography. It is heterosexual porn, but Benning always lingers on the women, her face and body the focus. In ‘Video Haptics and Erotics’ Laura Marks not only argues for the haptic visual quality of Benning’s videos, but also the eroticism of them. She claims that haptic images are erotic despite their content, claiming the eroticism comes from the video’s “incompleteness, the inability ever to see all, it figures mere suggestions”. Even so, the content of Benning’s films
reinforces this eroticism.8 Marks points out a particular scene in It Wasn’t Love to argue this point. In this scene Benning tells another story of a love affair. As they do this, a scene appears in which they slowly suck their thumb. Like many other moments in Benning’s films, they are mere inches from the camera. Marks sees this moment as a clear example of the potential for video to be erotic. By “replacing the visual with the tactile and identification with embodiment” the erotic content of Benning’s videos is heightened9.
Outside this focus on sex and eroticization, many Benning videos focus on fantasy. In Me and Rubyfruit the word fantasy literally appears rotating around the screen after Benning says they have plans to run away and become famous actors. Benning treats the video like a diary. A back and forth between open vulnerability and hesitation runs throughout all the videos, deliberately blurring the lines between their own truth and stories. The abstraction and manipulation of their body on camera is central to
Benning’s videos. They imagine love affairs from the space of their room. They narrate stories of desire, using the Pixelvision camera to capture them. The possibility of vulnerability in queer desire is controlled by Benning in how they film themself and the ambiguity of truth. Their ability to create characters enables them to exist in this world of fantasy with some sense of safety.
Throughout the Pixelvision videos, Benning explores identity and representation. They are able to do this through their method of filming, abstraction, and identity creation.
Benning predicts the ways in which queer people will interact with online spaces
8 Marks, Video Haptics and Erotics, 340.
9 Marks, Video Haptics and Erotics, 342.
through these different methods of creation. Their interactions with the camera as a diary also lend to future queer interactions with the internet.
We’re All Going To The World’s Fair
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is a horror film written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun. The film follows Casey a young girl alone in her room filming herself as she participates in the World’s Fair challenge. The game takes the form of YouTube videos. Participants “take the challenge” through an initiation, then record their
“symptoms” as they supposedly experience changes. The film opens with her initiation.
As the film continues, her wellbeing and safety become more and more concerning as she falls further and further into the game. In We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the internet appears complexly as a tool for identity creation and transformation. Even so, issues of surveillance and representation are still seen as central to experiences of the internet through the film.
World’s Fair was released in 2021. The version of the internet which Casey interacts with is the most contemporary of all the technologies that have been discussed. The internet of the early 90’s was on the brink of a shift that would carry us forward to where Casey is now. In Updating to Remain the Same, Wendy Chun analyzes the internet and the shift it took in the mid 1990’s. She argues when the internet’s “backbone was sold to private corporations” it shifted from a “noncommercial, military, academic and
governmental public good to a mass medium”10. The internet of the early 21st century according to Chun is a “semipublic/semiprivate space of ‘true names’ and ‘authentic images’”11. In this time, the freedom of the internet that previously stemmed from a perceived anonymity, now arises from hypervisibility. The transformation the internet underwent created the idea of the internet as ‘Big Data’ in which every action is noisy and surveillanced. Chun argues that the common belief is that transparency online is the solution to the dangers associated with the internet and social media. The danger Casey puts herself in with her transparency and desperation for connection quickly becomes clear.
Casey lives alone with an absent father and fills her life with videos of people online.
She is isolated and lonely. Using the internet to soothe loneliness and find community is a familiar solution for many queer people. Casey turns to the game as if to ease that loneliness as well as to seemingly understand a feeling or desire inside her she can’t articulate. Schoenbrun speaks of her own personal connection to the film, describing a queer youth of writing Fanfiction and browsing forums, especially interested in the dark and disturbing. The potentials of the internet for community in addition to play with identity is what appeals to queer youth and seemingly what appeals to Casey as well.
Most of this openness for identity creation and community is seen coming from the game.
This opportunity for community is most clearly seen in the game that is at the center of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. From the start of the film, you see and hear people
10 Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Updating to Remain the Same : Habitual New Media. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. 104.
11 Chun. Updating to Remain the Same. 107.
describing their experiences playing the game titled the World’s Fair Challenge. Casey plays their videos on her phone, projected on her wall, and on her laptop. People playing the game narrate their experiences as they become less and less like themselves. This game is reminiscent of lots of online games, especially alternate reality games (ARG’s) that often attempt to blur the lines between truth and fiction, real life, and online life. The transitions participants undergo vary from person to person. In one scene, Casey lays on her bed, watching a video created by someone claiming they have begun turning into plastic. Another sees Tetris blocks filling up his body.
Participants become something new, no longer the person they were when they began.
The statement in the introduction video, “if other players like the direction you are taking the story, they will help you expand it further”, continues to emphasize a community central to this game. Despite this, Casey is not seen interacting with one. Her videos get few views, and even as she sees herself transforming there are no vocal viewers to support her. The community that she expected going into the game was more complicated to get a hold of than expected and she is still left just as alone.
When talking to JLB for the first time she says she knows some of the changes of the game are big but isn’t frightened. Later, she tells him “It’s not like that for me. It’s making me different. It’s making me bad”. The changes she sees in herself are different and worse. This transformation is representative of a transgender awakening. Schoenbrun, in discussing the film emphasized the importance of the word “bad” in this context.
Casey, through the game is both role-playing as a different, perhaps more desirable person. But as Schoenbrun states, she is also “expressing a part of herself that has a
level of catharsis and autonomy denied to her in her IRL life.12” Casey is unable to explore that outside of fiction and the internet. Even as she is given this opportunity, feelings of disgust and fear are still impossible for her to escape. Though the internet opens this opportunity for freedom for Casey, it is also a source of fear.
Even as she struggles to find an audience through the game, she still participates for the potential for identity exploration and transformation. In the directors note for the film, Jane Schoenbrun claims it is a film about transness and dysphoria. Casey is repeatedly shown to be concerned for her appearance and representation. Her gaze in the camera is intense and ambiguous. She could be looking at the lens of the camera or herself reflected, concerned with her own image. The film opens with her filming her initiation.
She rehearses the introduction. She says hello once, waits a second and gives it a second try. When she is finally ready to record, she turns off all her lights, setting the final scene. When it is over, she slouches in her chair again, her eyes leaving the screen. There is a distinction between the version she projects and the self that she is alone. Scenes of this sort reoccur often in the film in which Casey rehearses and refilms videos. She is conscious of her appearance online and the identity that she will be projecting to her potential audience.
When a new version of Casey is created is unclear, but a particular scene of
transformation comes when she records herself sleeping. In the video she pulls herself up while still asleep, bringing her face close to her bedside lamp and smiling. This is
12 Bodrojan, Sam. “Portal to Portal: Jane Schoenbrun on We're All Going to the World's Fair: Filmmaker Magazine.”
Filmmaker Magazine | Publication with a focus on independent film, offering articles, links, and resources., April 15, 2022. https://filmmakermagazine.com/114086-interview-jane-schoenbrun-were-all-going-to-the-worlds- fair/#.ZFfG7Ham72c.
only the start of her identity seemingly being split in two. Later in the film, she covers her face with paint that makes her face glow in the dark, tearing apart a stuffed animal that has been with her since the start of the film. When she finally seems to come back into herself, she is distraught over it being destroyed. She asks herself “what did I do?” while holding the pieces in her hands. She begins to recognize less and less of herself. Her actions are unknown and scary to her. Capturing them on camera and posting for JLB seems to be the only way for her to feel as if she is not going to a place she can’t return from. She eventually becomes convinced the real world isn’t real. As a game focused on identity creation, it seems it would hold potential for Casey to come into a new
version of herself that she can control more than her offline self. Despite this, it slips out of her hands, becoming something that frightens her and puts her in danger. This danger of the game becomes representative of the dangers of the internet in general, in which the true consequences of actions online begin to seep into the real world.
This concern for the dangers of the internet continues when Casey meets JLB. Casey stumbles across JLB’s response video on accident. She lays on the couch in her father’s garage, watching an ASMR video and trying to fall asleep. When the video ends, autoplay takes her to JLB’s video. It is a screencap from her initial video, with her face distorted and manipulated. The words “You are in trouble” and “I need to talk to you” written on top. This is his attempt to contact her. A few scenes later, they talk over a Skype call. This begins their relationship that will continue throughout the entire film.
He becomes the only active viewer of Casey’s videos. He is more knowledgeable about the game than her, giving her information to help her deal with the outcomes of the game. Though he plays a seemingly helpful role of guiding Casey, he also becomes
representative of the dangers of the internet. He is an example of relationships many young people find themselves in online as well as representative of the dangerous potentials of the internet.
The dangers of the internet as a place of surveillance and information sharing is personified through the character of JLB. When Casey first meets him, they call on Skype. Immediately it is noticeable how JLB has a pseudonym. In the Skype call, his video is off while Casey keeps hers on. They start to talk regularly, and he guides her through the game. It becomes a very familiar scene. An older man grooming a younger woman who is alone online and seemingly neglected by her father. He watches her daily. He sees the videos of her sleeping and checks in with her over calls. Even from his distance, he sees everything.
This concept of surveillance is heightened by how JLB obtains and watches the videos.
The videos of Casey simulate a webcam, a livestreaming of content that JLB views. As a webcam “show” it mimics voyeurism and authenticity that is unexpected of the game.
This seems to attract JLB most strongly to Casey. In addition, there is a type of power and control he gains from the ownership of these videos. When he first reaches out to Casey it is through manipulating a photo of her, creating a video to frighten her. This action of downloading an image, Chun argues, gives a type of thrill. The images (and by extension videos) downloaded don’t need to be sexual in nature to give into cycles of power and pleasure.13 His manipulation and the effect of fear he has on her is an extension of this expression of power and control. As Casey becomes more and more
13Chun. Control and Freedom, 104.
affected by the game, the words of JLB have an increasing effect on her. She listens to his advice, she believes in the solutions and answers he gives, trusting him. She gives into the power he holds over her. The voyeuristic nature of the webcam and the ways in which he possesses her videos mimics this power experienced as sexuality that Chun describes.
The film ends with Casey cutting JLB off. Before this, she says “I know how it’s going to end now. I’m going inside the video. Through the computer. Inside the screen.” After the fight with JLB, this is what happens. JLB reveals over this last Skype call that he is worried for her wellbeing. He says he thought about contacting the police and is worried that she believes the game, a game of fiction and play, to be real. He is concerned for the changes that she seems to be seriously experiencing. This angers her and she hangs up. She tells him to never contact her again. After this moment, we never see her again. The film shifts to focus on JLB. He later tells a story of meeting Casey years after this argument, but the truth of this is unclear. It is similarly unclear what the effects of the World’s Fair Challenge are on Casey. This ambiguity continues to reflect the
complex potentials of the internet as a place in which actions online can have concrete physical consequences. Whether Casey entering the screen means she is entering a space of community and freedom in queer identity, or whether it means her physical body has disappeared, leaving behind only the online traces is deliberately unclear.
Conclusion:
From 1978 with Barbara Hammer to 2021 with Jane Schoenbrun, queer people have interacted with technology and made attempts to understand their identity through these machines. In the films and videos, No No Nooky T.V, Pixelvision and We’re All Going to
the World’s Fair the artists use different methods to operate within the technology.
Abstraction, manipulation and identity experimentation/creation are all methods from which these artists see the technology being open for queer interactions. By
chronologically analyzing the work by these three artists, the variety of ways in which innovations in technology can be understood and manipulated are clearly seen. Even as the technology limits the artists, they make attempts to find ways around it, making it a space for complicated by often fulfilling queer interactions.
Bibliography
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