. bookShow-n-tell
webAffairs
<book> Eighteen Publications
ISBN 0918290023
The personal porn phenomenon is one of the top three biggest repercussions of the web popularity. The tons of free porn available are definitively tempting everyone in following his own instinct online, projecting his own hidden desires onto pictures, movies, texts or drawings. This is probably silently changing our perception of bodies forever also because playing in these territories means to definitive deleting the border between what we perceive as real and what we perceive as virtual. Show-n-tell (the nickname of the artist/author) did a unique work as a sort of envoy in the world of the adult video chat. She was an active part of it, trying to go beyond the bodies exhibition and the relative disembodied sexual interaction. She recorded dialogues and personal opinions and sensations, collecting rare honest individual motivations and visions of how to sexually expressing themselves safely, behind a screen, in the comfort of their own house. The contradiction between being very 'public' with webcams watching from all over the world and feeling safe because being at home is clear in the brief parlous textual disclosures of the people involved. Playing with so intimate and deep instinct and feelings like the one involved in sexuality is a territory where people could easily get lost if they don't know when and where to stop. In this sense the book cover is emblematic. It's not an eye-catching female nude (that would have been appropriate, once in a while), but a man staring at the screen with his face illuminated by the pixel-emitted lights, as the symbol of a substantial part of humanity staring at itself through a mediated screen image, still inconceivably interconnected.