According the journalist John Tierney, throughout history, sex and the erotic have always had "a peculiarly creative impact on communications technologies," sometimes a driving force in its innovation, but virtually always one its first and most successful uses. The VCR, which was saved from sure extinction in its early days by the sales of pornographic videos, is a shining example. But similar stories can be told about print, photography, television, and film-all technologies whose commercial success and everyday popularity were bolstered by their close affinities to this "most enduring killer app." Given this history, it should not come as much of a surprise that every month approximately 31.3 million people, or 36% of everyone online, visits an adult website-a figure that has remained constant throughout the history of the web. Or that each year Internet pornography contributes to the U.S. economy approximately 2 billion dollars--roughly 10% of the total amount of money spent online.
The phenomenal success of the online adult industry is the result, however, of not just the web's high-speed connections and its promise of anonymity, but of something much more low-tech: the presence of Asian bodies. For in this multi-billion dollar business, Asian porn sites are, according to some statistics, pulling in 25-30% of its revenue. While it is difficult to judge the accuracy of any estimates given the notoriously capricious nature of the industry-sites rise and collapse over the course of weeks-those involved in the trade are sure of Asian porn's popularity. SexTracker, a company that provides data about online pornography for adult webmasters (to help "maximize their profits"), shows that nearly all adult portals offer Asian porn. Tellingly, in its lineup of "Elite" links, SexTracker lists 1008 sites showcasing "Asians," as compared to merely 69 for "Blonds."
The ubiquity of these sites confirms what cyber-skeptics have always suspected: that despite corporate promises of a disembodied techno-future, bodies still matter very much in cyberspace. Quite early on, the theorist Sandy Stone showed us that while we could not strictly see the body in cyberspace, it was there nonetheless, existing in the "descriptive codes that `embody' expectations of appearance." On pornographic sites, the body, as real as it can be, is in fact what is being offered; its gender and race not only legible, but the main draw. What it sells is not just flesh-digital or "real"-but much more precisely the underlying histories and myths that such bodies invoke. Asian porn sites trade on long standing (certainly pre-digital), and relatively unimaginative assumptions about Asian women: exotic and holding limitless sexual knowledge, yet docile and eager to please. Hardly a product of the web alone, they produce, reflect, recycle, and make easily available those fantasies already existing in the social world.
Neither the adult industry's techno-savvy nor its insatiable desire for "Asian digiflesh" was lost on the artist and performer Prema Murthy. A few years ago she "was searching for interesting art sites that were up-to-speed on the technology and found that it was the porn industry that was way ahead of everybody. They were using the newest [and easiest] software.and making money at it as well." Indeed, as researchers have since confirmed, it was adult entrepreneurs who streamed in images, sounds, and videos, even before artists and designers, and it was they who, through online sales mechanisms like monthly use fees and pay-per-view, managed to turn cyberspace into a marketplace. This discovery became the inspiration for Bindigirl, a digital art installation cum "tongue in cheek amateur porn site." Part website, part performance, Bindigirl was, as Murthy put it, her "ironic response to the fascination with Asian female bodies and the ways technology facilitates such voyeurism."
Bindi made her debut in 1998 on the web art warehouse Thing.net. At first glance, the site looks quite like any other adult portal, with its boldly posted adult-content warnings and its various legal disclaimers. Upon closer inspection, however, the viewer notices that the usual 21-and-under prohibitions are surprisingly matched with cautionary quotes from the Kama Sutra like "Women are hardly known in their true light," and may "extract from [men] all the wealth that they possess." A red Bindi dot guards the entrance to the site. Once visitors enter, they are greeted by hot pink lotus flower, and introduced to Murthy in the character of Bindi, who is entirely nude except for strategically placed digital Bindi dots. Gifmation images of Bindi frantically loop through the screen, superimposed with texts, also from the Kama Sutra, offeing advice on how to be a successful courtesan. The courtesan, it is urged, must "do everything to [a man's] satisfaction," must not "act too freely:" must "adapt her tastes and actions to his liking;" and, most crucially, must always "remain silent."
Audiences navigate the site through the use of a remote control, choosing from options like: "Love Chat," a comic, fictional dialogue between Bindi and an impotent admirer ("My measurements are 36, 24, 36"); "Bio," Bindi's meditations on her life ("Its so lonely in here."); or "Harem," a photo portfolio of other South Asian women sporting nothing but red dots. Avid fans whose interests extend beyond visual stimulation were invited to join Bindi's interactive "performances." Every Wednesday evening, for a small fee of $5/month and a free download of Cu-Seeme software, audiences could actually speak with her. To own a little piece of Bindi, however, cost much more; prices for the "Exotic souvenirs"-Bindi's socks, panties, and even her sacred dots ("All editions worn, signed, and numbered by Bindigirl")-ran from $50-$150 dollars.
There is no doubt that Bindi and her fellow models are seductive-coyly revealing, and imminently sexual. There is also no doubt that they understand something about the art of the courtesan. And yet there is something uneasy about this sexuality. All the images of Bindi, particularly the gifmations at the beginning of the site, are violently cropped and confined in small circles. While Bindi herself is quite physically exposed, the composition creates an impression of contraction rather than of expansion. Throughout the site, there is an obvious tension between the images' voyeuristic allure and the way that they undoubtedly produce a feeling of claustrophobia. And the juxtaposition of images that would be at home on any adult site (excepting the Bindi dots, of course) with proto-feminist quotes from Indian religious texts, like "Women are the perfection of wisdom," certainly solicits some contradictory readings. There is power and freedom in Bindi's sexuality, but there also seems to be resentment that her sexuality is the only thing we can see. Here Murthy makes a fine distinction: her critique is not against Asian women's sexuality-which is at once powerful and mysterious-but against the desire to see Asian women as only sexual.
This overwhelming feeling of constraint, visually produced by the restrictive composition, seems to echo Bindi's complaints. In her "biography," Bindi asks the viewer pointedly: "What is the reason for my existence? Why am I confined to this space? Who and what do I need to get out of here-to go beyond my boundaries? At first I thought technology would save me, arm me with weapons. Then I turned to religion. But both have let me down. They continue to keep me confined in my "proper" place." "Place," the scholar Dolores Hayden reminds us, " is one of the trickiest words in the English language, a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid." It carries the resonance of both "location" and "position in a social hierarchy." According to Hayden, the idea of place has historically had both spatial and political meanings; phrases like "knowing one's place" or "a woman's place," still carry the weight of both. Such double meanings are clearly at play in Bindi's lament; she feels restricted, partly by the boundaries of the screen, but certainly also by those of the social world. And, surprisingly, it is technology and religion-social creations usually lauded for their ability to extend humans' physical and mental limitations-that have confined her to her place.
As Murthy explains, Bindi is an avatar, but in more than just one sense of the word. She is both "an alias in the virtual world" and "a play on the word which in Hindi means the incarnation of a deity or the embodiment of an archetype." In both the technological and religious sense, Bindi exists only in the abstract, in an idealized form that is unburdened by the complexities of daily life. But to her, this abstractness, often-heralded as one of the web's most powerful new advantages, looks very much like an old and familiar trick. It smacks of the colonialist feint, where representations are used precisely to deny the complex subjecthood of the colonized population. It hints of the Constitutional ruse, where a system of abstract citizenship recognized and conferred advantages only to white, property owning, males. Hardly liberating, abstractness is for Bindi less a hope than a demand, a condition foisted on her by both technology and religion.
Though, as Bindi admits, neither religion nor technologies can help her to "go beyond [her] boundaries," she does not passively accept her digital predicament. Bindi knows she's being watched and she asks for something in return. In part, that something is the $5 monthly membership fee and the sales of merchandise on the site, and in part it is something much more costly.
By stealing from the porn's profit-making model-albeit much more modestly-Bindigirl is not only mocking its use of Asian women, but also actually extracting revenue from that relationship. The fees are small but significant, both as a matter of good irony and as a pragmatic response to the market conditions for digital art. While web art has recently gained a certain amount of institutional legitimacy, as indicated by its showcase in two major exhibitions this year, there is still much debate about what precisely it is and how it fits into the art economy. More specifically, there are still questions about how to reward digital artists for creating works that, unlike traditional art objects, are widely accessible, highly reproducible, and do not easily fit into a traditional museum or gallery system. Murthy's pay-per-view approach, popularized by pornography, is one model being taken up by other artists beleaguered in their search for monetary compensation.
But these fees are nominal compared to Bindi's real demands: for the audience to recognize their complicity in her plight. When viewers tuned into Bindi's Wednesday night "performances," they saw Murthy (as Bindi) in her studio working on the computer, sleeping, painting her toenails, putting oil in her hair, and carrying out other entirely mundane activities. There were no overt acts of seduction, only the site of a woman coding. This provoked participants to raise questions about what they were actually watching. Was it real? Live? Video? What was this "performance"-which was no performance at all-supposed to mean?
Murthy's use of Cu-Seeme, a low-tech video conferencing software originally designed for distance learning, holds the key to these questions. In Murthy's own work and in her collaborations with the performance art collective Fakeshop, the use of Cu-Seeme is central to her aesthetic practice. The software appeals to Murthy and other artists because its two-way transmission makes it an ideal interactive tool; with CU-Seeeme, the artwork is never created solely by the artist(s), but by their interactions with the audience. As she put it, "[It is like] the surrealist game where someone would draw something, fold the paper and someone would add to it unknowingly and it would create this work of art. We were using chat in the same way." With this device, artists could potentially draw on the millions of people already online to create a unique collaborative work.
Cu-Seeme's only requirement is that exchanges be mutual, or that users must transmit images in order to receive them. As a result, those watching Bindi on Wednesday nights were forced to also put themselves on display; the real performance, of course, was their participation. This demand for reciprocality fundamentally challenges the producer to consumer relationship made profitable by online pornography. In fact, it is presumably this two-way exchange that has kept sexually explicit Cu-Seeme content from winning much of a following; after all, most consumers want to be sexually gratified without the burden of having themselves to gratify. By insisting that her viewers participate in the performance, Murthy forces them to contribute to the creation of the narrative, and along the way, to recognize their own implications in it. She makes very visible the often hidden connections between the consumer and what s/he consumes. As Murthy says, the idea is to put "the responsibility is on the viewer," a sensibility that is noticeably absent from the porn industry.
Bindigirl is meant to provoke art audiences to think about questions of representation, commodification, technology, and even Murthy herself. "By placing the project in an art context," she explains, "I hope to get people to ask if I'm making a comment or just using my girlish wiles to get some attention." The intentional circulation of the project within an art context (first the online art "warehouse", then a museum) is significant. In these circles, audiences are generally primed to detect subtle ironies, and to expect that things may not be as they appear. As such, the project can successfully play with the gray areas, and can perhaps destabilize the dichotomies that have historically constrained Asian women's lives-traditional v. modern, goddess v. whore, proper v. improper. These are Murthy's limited goals. She accepts "the fact that my work is made mainly for an art audience and that effective activism targets a more widespread mainstream audience, an audience that I may not necessarily want to engage with in all my projects." The aim here is neither to present a truer version of Asian women's sexuality, nor to convert wayward sexual consumers. While the piece is highly politicized, its political possibilities are self-consciously limited.
The fascination with Asian bodies, in flesh and pixels, has everything to do with the representational histories and political ideologies that pervade the social world and, by extension, permeate cyberspace. By refusing the role of the passive consumer-indeed refusing the smooth flow between production and consumption-artists like Murthy have forced renewed public dialogue about these histories. While these types of "dissident cultural creations," to use Sau-ling Wong's term, remain on the margins of the porn industry, hardly posing a threat to its proliferation or profits, they can serve an important political function. They can break open the seamless flow of information that presents Asian women's historical conditions as historical necessities.
1. John Tierney, "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress," New York Times, Arts and Leisure 1:1, January 9, 1994.
2. When the VCR was introduced in 1979, sales of pornographic videos accounted for more than 75% of its market.
3. Tierney, "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress."
4. Study on Online Adult Entertainment market conducted by Jupiter Media Mextrix (an online marketing consulting firm). See:
5. Frederick Lane, Obscene Profits: The Entrepreneurs of Pornography in the Information Age (New York: Routledge, 2000), 70.
6. Estimate received from the CyberAngels Network, a child pornography watchdog organization..
7. www.sextracker.com. It is interesting to note that Asian porn seems most popular among the online market, taking up a proportionally greater share than it does in print or video. The reasons for this are as yet unclear.
8. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures," in Michael Benedikt ed., Cyberspace: First Steps (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), 102-103.
9. Prema Murthy, interview with Eric Baudelaire, June 3, 1999, http://rhizome.org/print.rhiz?1459.
10. Prema Murthy, interview with the author, January 21, 20001.
11. Bindigirl is now housed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN, but can also be found in The Thing's archives at:
12. Says Murthy, "I have always seen sexuality as a source of power for women which in earlier feminist agendas has not always been the case. There is something very seductive and empowering in allowing others to see you as a sexual being but at the same time it can be constraining if what people see does not move beyond that." Prema Murthy, interview with Ricardo Dominguez, December 10, 1996, http://www.thing.net/~rdom/decrev96.02.html.
13.
14. Dolores Hayden, The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), 15-16.
15. Beaudalaire interview.
16. See: Homi Bhaba "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and Discourse of Colonialism" in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
17. The "Bitstreams" exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the "010101" exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art are the first significant shows featuring digital arts in a major arts institution. Digital art was included in the Whitney Biennial for the first time in 2000.
18. Journalist Mathew Mirapaul argues that the pay-per-view model, first used by artists like Murthy, is catching on in digital arts circles. See: Mathew Mirapaul, "Pricing of computer artwork continues to evolve," Austin American-Statesman, Weekly Business Review, 1, May 29, 1999.
19. Cu-Seeme is a video conferencing software developed at Cornell University. It allows users to send and receive images and sounds in a small screen format through a simple video camera and video card capture.
20. Prema Murthy, interview with Josephine Bosma, January 25, 2001, nettime-l@bbs.thing.net.
21. Though it is possible to use CU-SeeMe to lurk, most adult reflectors discourage this by not allowing users to receive images without also transmitting them. The software is specifically designed to detect if a user is broadcasting or simply lurking.
22. Other factors that may have contributed to its lack of commercial activity include the relatively small number of users, the technical challenges of using the device, and somewhat erratic video quality. See: Frederick Lane, Obscene Profits, 249-251.
23. Interview with the author.
24. Interview with the author.
25. Interview with author.
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