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Areas of Focus
A headshot of Chris, a white person, with blue medium curly hair and white facial hair, wearing glasses, a black leather jacket, gray top and black triangular tattoos on their chest.A headshot of Chris, a white person, with blue medium curly hair and white facial hair, wearing glasses, a black leather jacket, gray top and black triangular tattoos on their chest.
With Christopher Clary
FeedOral History
Edited: June 26, 2023
Pronouns
He/they
Date and place of birth
b. 1968, Rochester
Current location
Jersey Shore
Year(s) of residency and/or fellowship
2020, Rapid Response Fellow

How do you characterize the media you work in?

For the project I worked on during the Eyebeam fellowship and in my current work, I’ve focused on live streaming, which I’ve grown to love for all of its performative aspects; there’s a group of us working with live streaming who are concerned with it as its own distinct form as opposed to a way to transmit a performance.

How does your practice engage with technology?

My practice has always been interested in interrogating pornography and the ways in which pornography uses the latest technology to distribute an experience or render that experience more intense.

A pink overlay screenshot of Chris in a chat room. On the left is the chat content and on the right Chris, a white person with curly hair and white facial hair, wears a white and black top, white pants and is laid back on a chair.

Image courtesy of the artist

What was your focus during your time at Eyebeam?

When Camming platforms became big, I was fascinated by them on multiple fronts. Instead of exploring them from behind the camera, or as an artist looking from a distance, I wanted to become a performer. My project at Eyebeam was The Chrisy Show, a talk show I held on Chaturbate, which is a sex workers’ masturbation chat website. I wanted to embed myself in that community with the goal of moving off the platform, creating a community less siloed by the specific function of that platform and less focused on the notions of capitalism embedded in it. Some of those ideas have carried over to my current project, in which a collective of four artists is building a livestream platform for artists to explore what is possible with livestreaming when we divest from big tech.

Was there a culminating project?

More than two years later, I’m still doing The Chrisy Show and it has certainly evolved. During the fellowship, I was broadcasting the show daily, and I was an object on which the audience reflected. Now once a week, I have developed a regular audience, and the show has morphed from very sexual to very chill. Sex can be a lure that brings people into the work, but I’m more interested in sex as an everyday phenomenon in which we can find connection.

Artist

Program

Area of Focus

A white person with long, blonde hair, blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick with a white square framing their face with red facial recognition dotsA white person with long, blonde hair, blue eyeshadow and pink lipstick with a white square framing their face with red facial recognition dots
How Can Humanity Live in The Future?
ChangelogEdited: June 26, 2023Published: May 8, 2023

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