About the Project
PGP, the Public Genitals Project, is designed to playfully question the boundaries between inside and outside, revealed and hidden, representation and reality. It deals quite literally with mapping body memories onto bodies, and with projecting body images from layer to layer of social presentation and representation from skin outward to clothing. It also collapses distance and time by using realtime imaging from sites around the world mapped onto bodies in Austin.

Each PGP unit consists of a video broadcast receiver, battery pack, two small loudspeakers, and two laptop computers with flat screens (backlit TFT type) worn by a person walking the streets of Austin. The computers are modified so the motherboards may be taped to the backs of the flat screens. In one version of the design the person is naked except for the screens, which are attached to suspenders and worn so they cover the genital areas front and back. In the second version the person is fully clothed except for cutouts over the genital areas front and back, within which the two screens are mounted. The receiver and battery pack are attached to a belt which is worn around the waist. Hardware and software development was completed by teams of volunteers from the RTF Convergent Media program working out of the ACTLab, supervised by the artist.

In operation, participants worldwide send images of their genital areas via webcams to a server in the ACTLab. The received images are digitally manipulated according to an algorithm driven by the number of times the words "sex" and "violence" appear on the webpages of CNN, MSNBC, and CBS. The digital manipulation smooths and abstracts the images; in other words, they cease to be representations of individuals' body parts, instead becoming more like imperfectly remembered things -- the more the terms "sex" and "violence" appears in the media, the more that actual body images recede toward imagined recollections. The images are then broadcast to the belt-mounted receiver, and thence displayed on the two flat screens. Concurrently, the loudspeakers present ethnographically recorded narratives of personal experiences with nudity, shyness, and desire, which are stored as sound files on the computers. The juxtaposition of images and physical body surface is meant to convey the illusion that the viewer is looking through a transparent electronic window at the surface of the wearer's body. In reality, of course, no actual flesh-and-blood genitalia are directly visible, and no explicit representation of individual genitalia is shown, though it is likely that this distinction may be lost on the naive viewer -- we hope.

PGP (the Public Genitals Project) was originally inspired by Richard MacKinnon and the ACTLab seminar in Theory and Methods of an Unnameable Discourse during the period 1995-1999.