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Chatroulette Inspires Art Exhibition

Not surprising considering all of the, um, “creative expression” on there.

The internet and its effects on our peer-to-peer relationships and the social ecosystem at large have long captured the imaginations of artists — from Facebook to Twitter to SecondLife and even message boards and listservs before them (see this great series on the history of Social Media Art from Hyperallergic). Video chatting site Chatroulette is the most recent incarnation of this phenomenon and although the site has only been live for less than a year, it has already inspired a number of art projects like the traumatizing fake suicide committed by Eva and Franco Mattes aka 0100101110101101.org, a live “concert improvisation” by Jason Sloan, and the ever-popular Merton the Piano Guy.

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The most recent artistic exploration of Chatroulette is from Brooklyn-based artist Liubo Borissov, whose show Crowdsource is up through July 25th at Eyelevel BQE gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Inspired by the myth of Narcissus, Borissov created custom software that would turn the video chatting site into a reflecting pool — taking his remote partner’s video stream, inverting it and playing it back to them as a mirror image. The resulting works, all part of what Borissov calls the Narcissus Series capture his video chat partners during their moment of self-recognition when they realize that they are looking at themselves upside down.

The most striking piece in the series is Narcissus Lament, a video grid composed of 108 frames of video footage depicting people’s reactions to encountering themselves in such an odd and unexpected way. The viewer is confronted with 108 different faces selected from a collection of several thousand which were captured over a three month period earlier this year. Once you start focusing in on the individual faces, the overall effect is a bit discomforting — this is a kind of voyeurism we’ve never seen before. You are watching people encountering themselves when they expected to encounter an other, and the process of them becoming self-aware, then reacting to that self-awareness is somehow deeply compelling.

We caught up with the artist to learn more about his intentions and process:

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What interested you about Chatroulette as a social platform? Why did you choose to work with it, aside from it’s “new-ness”?
I first came across ChatRoulette in a New York Magazine article in February. The idea about the Narcissus Series formed in my head as I was reading, before I’d even tried it. There’s something very attractive about having immediate access to the reactions of a large random audience from across the world. I knew I could show them anything and record the response. When I saw the interface and experienced the site, it became very clear what I wanted to show and why.

How did you collect this footage? How long did it take you?
I wrote code to take the partner video stream from ChatRoulette, reflect it and feed it back as my camera video source. That in itself is not hard to do and there are free applications out there that can do the same thing or I could have just pointed the webcam at the screen and flipped it. The reason I had to write my own code is because I wanted to filter out the nudity, advertisements, blank screens, signs and other junk footage (since I was mainly interested in the Narcissus effect) and I wanted to automatically record and separate the clips creating a database of sorts that would later be the palette for the pieces in the series. I was hoping to run the code overnight for a few days and have everything neatly organize itself. In reality, things were much trickier — Chatroulette or Flash likes to crash after a while, so I had to babysit my code, then after some time, you end up connecting to the same five guys over and over until a few times zones change and finally it turns out that certain configurations of the male torso looked remarkably like a human face, at least to my face-recognition software. Long story short, it took most February through May to fill up 100 Gb hard drive. After all the filtering I ended up with a pool of about 4000 faces.

Did you approach the project with any preconceived notions of what the outcome would be? Or did you let the work guide you and have the concept develop as the project developed?
I had very deliberately set up a process and wanted to see what the outcome will be. It came from my interest in perception, cognition and the specific conditions created by ChatRoulette, which I approached as a controlled environment for psychophysical or anthropological experiments. I did not know what the outcome would be but I was personally invested it finding out. It was inevitably going to be a sort of a serialist piece , a frame around human nature or reality, or its digital extensions as it were. I did not set out to make a commentary on the complex relations between society and social networks, but ultimately that subtext is inevitable because of the choice of subject matter.

Were you surprised by anything? What did you discover, if anything, about the nature of interactions on Chatroulette? Did it reveal anything to you about its users and the way they communicate with one another?
The things I’ve seen… I did not expect that anyone would spend more than a few seconds looking at themselves upside down. I did not expect the range of reactions. My instinct was that seeing themselves, in a situation where they expected anonymity would help dispel the illusion of privacy and control. I would have probably been scared and angry if I were on the other side of my program. The majority of the reactions, when it was obvious that there is self-recognition, were genuine surprise followed by some kind of a friendly response. One could argue that there is a selection principle at work, and this is definitely not a scientific study, but it is unavoidable to draw conclusions about the mutations of the notions of privacy and the erasure of boundaries between self and society in this environment. I am still processing the results of the works for myself, looking for patterns, answers and questions.

The exhibition also features several of Borissov’s other (non-Chatroulette) video works, which he terms “video paintings.” See more of his work on his Vimeo channel.

How would you use Chatroulette for artistic purposes?