Cyber*Babes >>
Lisa Hutton
Cyber*Babes appropriates other websites to complete a dialogue on the
Telecommunications Act of 1996.
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||| HIAFF 3.0 | university of colorado | department of art and art history | digital arts area | in conjunction with alt-x | atlas | blurr
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Katherine Taft: I wondered who the majority of your audience includes?
The net-
savvy, activists, art critics?
Lisa Hutton: In the case of cyber*babes, as with most net art, one cannot
really say who the audience is only who the author expects their audience
to
be. I made cyber*babes as an open-to-all dialog about the TCA and its
relationship to the first amendment. The net is a demand-pull
environment,
meaning that if you don't want to see something you can simply turn it off.
Further, in 1996 there was software available to keep the children away
from
the objectionable material. That said, the audience falls into two camps.
Bluntly put, the audience either "gets it" or doesn't. Cyber*babes promises
porn in name only and fails to deliver. Some of the audience looking for
porn
and not finding it will be frustrated, those looking at net art think the site
is great fun, and some who are seriously looking for porn also "get it" and
think the project is great. This is how the general public seems to view the
work.
There is plenty here for critics and the net savvy as well. Using outside
links
to create a dialog is what I call, using the net as an object, where one can
take other parts of the net and recontextualize them into a larger dialog. I
think the outside links are of particular importance to critics because of
what
the TCA deemed to be objectionable--nudity--and the TCA's lack of
consideration
of the greater amount of objectionable material also available on line. In
the
end, cyber*babes asks a better question about the use and placement of
censorship. For some reason, common sense eludes us as we
(Americans) tend to
ask the wrong question when confronted with any objectionable
circumstance. For
example, people express horror at school shootings and ask, "how could
this
have happened?, or "why would a teenager do this?" when the better
question is,
given society and mass media, "why doesn't this happen more often?" or
"why
should we expect the student to behave in a non-violent way?"
KT: What sort of responses has the work received and from who?
LH: Cyber*babes received critical acclaim in 1996 in the form of an
honorable
mention at Prix Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. Cyber*babes was later
included in the Walker Art Center's beyond.interface exhibition, curated by
Steve Dietz. On occasion, I still get email about the project from people
who
have surfed in and enjoyed it. In 1996, I had one or two hate mails from
highly
frustrated porn seekers who didn't "get it." Cyber*babes was also
reviewed in
context with the work of Stelarc in the French language journal Archee
(http://archee.qc.ca/) in an article written by Pierre Robert
(probert@videotron.ca).
KT: What were your original intentions for the site as artwork?
LH: To not use any pornography to get to my point. To use very low
bandwidth
for maximum distribution. To have fun with a medium which had not been
described or validated. To develop an expressive medium which exploited
wide
distribution.
In addition, I should talk about the images and why I chose them. The
images in
cyber*babes take up pornographic images in terms of objectifying the
body and
body modification. To do this I collaged parts of men and women into a
single
grossly exaggerated body type. Again, any nudity (primarily the nipple) is
quickly covered up with what appear to be little pieces of black tape. I
chose
images from muscle and fitness magazine and playboy and playgirl to
demonstrate
how the body is exaggerated for particular types of consumption. In
bodybuilding, sexual dimorphism is diminished, while the pin-up
objectifies the
body as highly masculine or feminine. In the end, both styles exaggerate
the
body by constructing a kind of masculine or feminine drag. The
exaggeration of
combining male and female was intended to titillate the audience not by
way of
nudity per se but by triggering a visual response akin to that experienced
at
car accidents. When confronted with striking visual information we know
we
shouldn't stare but can't seem to help it. See Robert Williams "rubberneck
manifesto".
KT: Have they changed at all as a result of changing context?
LH: In 1996 it was not obvious that the outside links would go away and
need to
be updated. Interestingly, it almost seems that with the increasing
number of
web pages available it has become harder to find objectionable material
which
is not pornographic in nature.
I say this because some of the original outside links in cyber*babes are
no
longer working and so I had to replace them. On the other hand, this is a
natural consequence of working in any digital medium. It is simply a fact
that
technology breaks, projects need updating to current software and OS's to
remain alive, and the gallery exhibition becomes a web site and a
CD-Rom
project.
Since I have to update the outside links to keep the project going, in
critical
moments, I wonder if the new links are as pithy as the originals.
Around 1998, I duplicated the terminal outside link, "Squirty's nude picture
archive." I think Squirty's is a classic in its own right and I was concerned
that it too might lose its URL. I didn't replicate the other outside links
because I felt it was important that they be live active sites. I duplicated
Squirty's because it was a one page special interest site. Conversely, I
didn't
feel the net would ever stop generating objectionable material for my
perusal
in cyber*babes. In the end, cyber*babes evolves, and while this
summarizes the
state of digital art, I don't think one could have predicted this evolution in
advance.
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