In our Workshop this week the subject of David Boltanski came up; specifically, the agreement he made with David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art to broadcast his entire life into the gallery until his death.

It’s an amazing story, and has just made it even more clear to me that I need to find my way to MONA sooner rather than later, but it also reminded me of a weird relic of 90s culture that has always fascinated me: life casting.

Back before people streamed their every thought to YouTube, back even before reliable internet video really existed at all, there was a small, strange subculture of people who recorded every detail of their lives and placed it online for the world to see. The most prominent practitioner of life casting was JenniCam (Jennifer Ringley), an American who began broadcasting her life in 1996, at the age of 19, by placing cameras throughout her college dorm room. She continued the practice for almost a decade.

The compulsion to live your entire life in public is something I just cannot understand, no matter how much I try. I didn’t even appear in my own “creative self-portrait” video for Project Brief 2, that’s how little I want to be on camera. But there are others who are so secure and comfortable with themselves and what they’re doing that they give strangers unmediated, unrestricted access to it via internet video. It’s crazy to me, but it’ll probably continue to grow and become normalised over the next decade or so and I’ll be even less in the mainstream.

If you’re interested in the topic, JenniCam and Jennifer Ringley was the subject of an episode of the Reply All podcast – it’s a great episode and definitely recommended.