Joey Kim Strips Nude Over Live Broadcast In Front of Performance Art Students
This clip was recorded in 2011.
I feel very lucky to have been able to follow my passion in perusing an education in art and was a art student studying fine arts in photography. For a performance art piece, I decided I wanted to bring my live streaming stripteases into the context of a performance art setting. Though live streaming is not seen by many as a art medium, I had always found a lot of parallels between live streaming and the nude self portraiture work I had been doing. I was constantly behind and in front of a camera, allowing myself to be completely vulnerable and exploratory of nudity and sexuality. I realized I had been doing the same exact thing in both mediums, and reaching out to many people via live streaming webcasts. Typically in these shows, commerce is involved and viewers can choose to pay to experience a shared, intimate, real-time strip tease. It explores nudity, sexuality, and even the taboo behind it. This had been something I was trying to accomplish in my nude self portraiture art work.
Definition of Performance Art
"Performance art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. Performance may be either scripted or unscripted, random or carefully orchestrated; spontaneous or otherwise carefully planned with or without audience participation."
However, performance art is usually thought of as an art typically preformed in front of a physical audience.
This is interesting because this made live streaming an incredibly powerful medium for work dealing with taboos. Sexuality is widely explored in the privacy and comfort of our homes. This allowed me to be feel even more comfortable to become completely nude. This also allows the viewer to feel more comfortable being open with their sexuality. The live broadcasting webcam feed and chatroom becomes a safe place to talk about topics we don't normally feel comfortable talking about in a conservative environment. Along with this, it allowed me to reach a wider range of people from all over the world and share my voice, and my art, and my performative body.
It was all of this that gave me the spontaneous idea to present my live stream show as an art. This was my very first time speaking publicly about being a striptease artist on the internet. I was afraid but it was a topic I felt was an important topic I wish more of us would discuss.
As they critiqued me, questioning my motives and the viewer's motives, I try to defend it but with a shaky voice and a heartbeat going way to fast for me to comprehend anything, I choked. This clip was recorded from a remote viewer, who was in the chatroom and recorded the critique portion of this broadcast directly from the live feed. On the very left side out of the webcam's view was the chatroom projected. The student in the physical space and the people within the chatroom were able to communicate with each other via voice (the class) and text (viewers in the chatroom). It was interesting... I did not have to defend myself or webcam work because my remote viewers were defending it without me! This was a very interesting project. Despite it being very embarrassing, and I wish I had said many things I did not say, I felt it was worthy experience to share with you all.
Skip over to several years to the present... I now passionately pursue live streaming as a performance art and I continue to create frozen and real time art with my body behind and in front of the lens of a webcam and my film/digital camera.