Symposium

Sorting Daemons Symposium

Program Information

Cheryl Sourkes is a lens-based digital artist, writer and independent curator. She grew up in Montreal and studied at McGill University before moving to Vancouver in 1967. There she became involved with Intermedia, a Dadaist context within which she began to make art. For the last decade, Sourkes' work has investigated the visual dimension of technology, especially the social and cultural developments that have arisen with Internet web cameras. Selections of this work were published in her book Tons of Webcammer Babes, 2009, and in the catalogue Public Camera, which was released at the opening of her exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 2007. In addition to mining the web for source material, Sourkes is a Board member at Art Metropole in Toronto. She lives in Toronto and spends part of each year in Manchester, England.

 

"Live Free Webcams"

Artist Cheryl Sourkes presents images and movies she has generated from home-cams while she considers issues raised by this webcam phenomenon. She entertains the following ideas. By presenting physical space in virtual space, home-cams participate in a mixed reality that vexes the traditional boundary between public and private domains. Although they are primarily driven by desire, home-cams have an aspect that can be read as documentary. Government surveillance plays a lesser role in the world of home-cams than does self-surveillance or exhibitionism. Home-cams along with cell phones and iPods operate in an ever-expanding zone of distributed consciousness.