What Texting While Naked Reveals
Exposing how digital communication is rewiring our brains and bodies
By Drew Tewksbury
A young woman enters a brightly lit booth and begins removing her clothes. One piece at a time, she sheds her attire into a crumpled puddle on the floor. The room’s walls are the hue of a flesh-colored crayon but the woman’s skin is a glowing porcelain, refracting the white of the incandescent lights overhead. She stands tall.
Naked, she picks up her phone and begins to text, her back hunching as she bows closer to the warm glow of the screen. It seems like a private moment of solitary intimacy, but it’s not.
She is being watched.
Through a glass pane at a January 2016 installment of the Los Angeles Art Show, an audience of art-world types — from men clad in Technicolor suits to women in gun metal gray dresses — examined the woman and other texting subjects who would follow, also nude. The subjects’ texts were with the artist Jana Cruder, who sat off in a hidden room, watching the nudes via a video camera and sending them probing questions displayed on an adjacent screen for all to see.
Like director David Cronenberg’s 1983 sci-fi thriller Videodrome, in which a viewer is drawn so close to a television screen that it sucks him in and merges with his body, Cruder’s installation and performance piece, titled “The Way of The Modern Man,” addresses the inescapable gravity of our smartphones. Her project traces evolution backward, from the upright homo sapiens holding a spear to a sloped-back modern day human clutching an iPhone. It’s this bodily unraveling, which happened with each subject who entered the glass booth, that interests Cruder. “I needed to observe the spine,” she says, “mostly that is the reason for nudity, so I can see the skin and the body, and see how it is changing as we communicate through these devices.”
While on the surface Cruder’s premise could echo the Luddite’s “ills of technology” cry, recent studies have shown that our brains and technology have become inextricably linked.
“These devices, and communicating through them, are creating dopamine and serotonin releases,” Cruder says. Through her project, she says, she’s trying to understand “how to trigger those hormonal releases with questions that take people through a range of emotions, so I could observe what we’re saying, how we’re saying it, and how doing that through the device is changing us.”
Dopamine — the chemical rooted in the pleasure center of the brain — is not the so-called “high of happiness” as many believe. Instead, it causes what psychologists call “seeking behavior,” the urge to obtain physical and emotional satisfaction.
Kent C. Berridge, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, has focused on three aspects of pleasure and rewards: liking, wanting, and learning. In short, your body learns that it likes something, then wants more. Then the very act of wanting becomes pleasurable. You want to want.
Or as Berridge writes in his paper “Pleasure Systems in the Brain,” co-authored with Morten L. Kringelbach in the peer-reviewed neuroscience journal Neuron, “In a sense, pleasure can be thought of as evolution’s boldest trick, serving to motivate an individual to pursue rewards necessary for fitness, yet in modern environments of abundance, also inducing maladaptive pursuits such as addictions.”
We become addicted to wanting, to the search itself. And the smartphone provides the endless search, from the infinite scrolling of web publications, or the never-ending voyeurism of Tinder, Twitter, and Instagram. The addiction is tangible. The chemical reward is triggered with each text from a potential hookup — or that emoji with the hearts for eyes. Cruder agrees: “I also have observed in myself and others a sort of addictionlike behavior forming in relation to this technology. The need to check it all the time, the anxiety created when we do not check it, and keep it up.”
In Cruder’s performance piece she observes the phenomenon in the wild and uses the subjects’ heightened states to explore their deeper emotional realms. “I created an intimate space for them, womb-like, warm, and safe so they could feel safe and free to share,” Cruder says. “They couldn’t see out of the box but the public could see in. I think that lent itself to a safe space for sharing vulnerabilities.”
The artist collaborated with psychologist Stephanie Stewart to create what she calls a “somewhat measurable experiment,” in which she posed questions to the subjects meant to prompt an emotional response. She typed: Have you ever been in love? What is your greatest tragedy? If money were no object, what would you do with your life? Those are difficult questions to think about even without strangers staring at your bare behind. Yet, Cruder says the nudity helped to break down barriers. Once everyone’s seen you naked, what else do you have to hide?
Cruder says she aims to explore “the preference to start communication digitally.” Digital communication has in many ways become a means to filter interpersonal interactions. We tweet, text, and Snapchat information to other people as a way to try to control others’ perceptions of ourselves. A completely unacademic look at any Kardashian feed showcases the extent to which posturing has replaced reality. It’s a Bel Air equivalent to philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra theory, where the fake — here, the posed and produced Instagram image — has supplanted moments of real reality with the Kardashian photo team manufacturing a moment. But we still see social media as a mirror, a reflection by which we perceive our reality. Cruder says she’s seen children whose lives are tethered to the smartphone. “I am genuinely concerned for future generations who will eventually know no other means [for building intimacy],” she observes.
Psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan famously identified the “mirror stage” in babies, the moment they see themselves reflected in a mirror, then realize that they are an object that exists outside of themselves, which can be observed and seen. But the image in the mirror is actually a falsehood — the world is reversed. It’s an imprecise representation that we accept as real anyway, and construct the perception of our physical selves by its inaccurate depiction. Social media and digital communication work in a similar way: They are funhouse mirrors, imperfect simulations of real interpersonal relationships. Like the delinquent Alex says in Anthony Burgess’ satirical sci-fi book and Stanley Kubrick’s dystopian film, A Clockwork Orange: “It’s funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen.”
For Cruder, the ultimate test of “really real” happened when her partner, artist Matthew Lapenta, stepped into the booth. She blushed as he undressed. “He surprised me when he tenderly answered questions I had been curious about in our relationship: babies, and what he’d do if I suddenly died.” She was so moved by his responses that she began crying. But LaPenta’s initial mood was different. “I was saying, ‘Shit, I’m having a small dick day,’” he jokes. “I’m sure other guys can relate. So, yeah, I had anxiety of being judged by the size of my penis — which I’ve never even had complaints about. So this is a great example of how our subconscious can attack us.” Once inside, the stress of exposure dissipated quickly: “It’s like, ‘Here I am, with all my perfect imperfectness. What do you want to know about me?’”
Cruder’s principle medium is photography, and like her professional practice the observation booth created a frame around the subjects. There was Susanna, an older silver-haired woman who texted about the pains of aging. Then there was shy Jason, who removed all his clothes except his boxers, until Cruder’s last question when he ripped off his boxers and said he felt liberated. “I came to find out that was one of his biggest fears — being nude in public,” Cruder says. There was Angeleah Carolino, who said she felt empowered by the experience, even with a tampon string dangling from her most private region. “Being in the booth, I became hyperaware of myself as a female body and, in that sense, an object,” Carolino explains. “But the [text] conversation, showing what thoughts are going through my mind, seeing what moves me, put me back into the place of an identifiable, relatable person.”
The desire to watch, the scopophilia — as second-wave feminist and psychoanalytic film theorist Laura Mulvey wrote in her influential 1973 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema — is rooted in detached voyeurism, like the dopamine triggered by waiting and wanting that Berridge researched. In film, the woman is often the object. “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female,” Mulvey writes. “The determining male gaze projects its phantasy onto the female form, which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role, women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote ‘to-be-looked-at-ness.’ Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease…she holds the look, plays to, and signifies male desire.” But women on film, caught in the gaze of the male protagonist or the movie audience, can thwart objectification when the subject is nonsexualized, like in Cruder’s well-lit works. And here, the gaze wasn’t just male, it was female too. Although the subjects couldn’t see the audience — they couldn’t return the gaze — their texts exposed a human side to their image.
With the glass separating the subject from the audience, the booth almost became another screen through which we experience the world. It was a live-action film, and we were the audience. Sociologist Erving Goffman’s dramaturgy theory, from his 1959 book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life,” says that the sense of self is remade according to whatever audience surrounds an individual. We have our “front stage” self, the person we are when we are being observed, and the “backstage” self, the person we are when unobserved. The waiter cheerfully attends to restaurant patrons but talks trash on his smoke break. Parents are polite to their kid crying at the mall, but at home they let loose their frustrations. Yet, social media has merged our public and private selves. And by observing nude subjects texting, Cruder reveals the two worlds at once, the relaxed backstage body, but the front stage mind thoughtfully responding to texts. We construct who we are by who we think is watching. And now that the entire phone-carrying world is eternally armed with a camera, there is no backstage anymore. Cruder’s project, she says, illuminates life in a social media surveillance society. “Have you ever really read a licensing agreement when you sign up or download anything?” she says. “I took the illusion of privacy and shared it publicly. We are all like that person in the booth. We truly don’t know who’s watching us.”
Jana Cruder’s select photographs from The Way of the Modern Man will be on display in a group show April 8–10 at Studio Atwater in partnership with Day Reps as part of Month of Photography Los Angeles.
Featured image courtesy of Jana Cruder
Drew Tewksbury is a Los Angeles cultural journalist, editor, photographer, and Emmy-winning multimedia producer. He’s the managing editor/producer of Artbound, an arts journalism publication and television show, and curates Los Angeles Magazine’s monthly Guide. He also teaches at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. His spirit animal is the Dodger dog.
