According a building permit from May 15, 1984 from the Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety archives, the architect was Lawrence Boyd and the engineer was Robert Shiang. It was developed by a company called Fine Developments and valuated at $1,482,980. Today Loopnet reports that a unit rents for $36 per square foot a year.
Studio20 also has locations in Hungary, Colombia, and Romania.
Karley Sciortino and Sarah Burke. “What It’s Actually Like to Be a Full-Time Cam Girl,” Broadly, February 28, 2018, ➝.
There’s also an image gallery with low resolution renderings of rooms rather than photographs.
“Cum” here refers metonymically to various bodily fluids produced through sexual arousal including, but not limited to, semen.
“They want that raw, vulnerable sexuality. They want to see something real,” states Nikki Night, who oversees performer training and development at Cam4. “Everything is so force-fed to us in this plastic way. That when you see someone actually have an orgasm for real and the look on their face—even your ugly cum faces—it’s that raw sexual vulnerability that is the juicy center of amateur and it’s even better when it’s someone that could, theoretically, live down the street from you.” Carrie Weisman, “Inside the Rapidly Growing Cam Industry That’s Changing the Porn Industry as We Know It,” Alternet, February 16, 2015.
In a 2008 revision to his 1999 book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Phillip Auslander updates his influential analysis of “liveness” in media to account for new digital technologies. Critiquing theories that valorize the “live” in opposition to the “mediated,” in particular by Peggy Phelan, he posits that “liveness” is a historically-contingent concept tethered to technological change, whose meaning is coconstituted with mediatized reproductions (xii). Auslander argues that early recorded media, such as film, attempted to emulate live performances, such as theater. In turn, the live performance simulates the mediatized performance, which becomes the measure of quality. “{Live} performance is now a recreation of itself at one remove, filtered through its own mediatized reproductions,” Auslander writes (35). Such an analysis can be applied loosely to the context of camming, where cammers mime behavior from professional porn and, in turn, professional porn attempts to achieve the “authentic” quality of nonprofessional media like camming. In fact, “amateur” is currently the 11th most popular porn genre on PornHub, and has been rising the ranks steadily for years. It’s also the genre of video with the longest viewing time. In fact, a “reality porn” industry has blossomed over the past few decades, which emulates the qualities of amateur porn but is professionally-produced. As Susanna Paasonen writes in Carnal Resonances: Affect and Online Pornography, “The transformations effected by Web distribution and digital production tools on pornography—its aesthetics, its economical underpinnings, and the experiences and resonances that it facilitates — cannot be understood apart from the shifting notions of amateur and professional” (71).
It is not just the cammer with whom you cohabit time, but also the rest of the audience—faceless and anonymous.
Cambridge University Department of Computer Science and Technology “The Trojan Room Coffee Machine,” ➝.
The actual resolution and frame rate of a webcam stream can vary significantly depending on the equipment and the connection.
This is just one possible chain of somatic reactions that constitute sexual arousal, and is far from universal. Arousal can involve the stimulation of many other parts of a body besides genitalia, or not involve genitalia at all. Additionally, some bodies are not aroused by stimuli such as camming, while other bodies do not experience sexual arousal in any form.
Meanwhile, banking institutions charge between 7% and 15% for payment facilities for camming sites in addition to a $1,000 annual fee, in contrast to the 2% to 3% typically charged for an online transaction. This is because they allege there are higher risks with the adult entertainment industry, although this has been contested and could very well be exploitation disguised with moralism. In fact, the economy of camming cannot be separated from the circulation of finance capital upon which it relies. Every camming transaction produces a profit for the banking industry, studios and platforms rely on loans or investment capital like any other company, and cammers often cite debt as a reason they got into it in the first place. Value fracked from a masturbating body—amounting up to $97 billion per year if you’re looking at the porn industry as a whole—circulates through the global financial system alongside mortgage securities and bitcoin futures. Capital is sticky. Rachel Stuart, “Webcamming: The Sex Work Revolution That No One Is Willing to Talk about,” September 04, 2018, ➝.
“Camming Sites Hiring Webcam Models (Guide To Get Started),” Webcam Startup, ➝.
Lurking behind this friendly façade, the organizational structure of cam sites reproduces social stratification according to gender identity and race. For example, it categorizes bodies as “male,” “female,” and “trans,” effectively excluding bodies that do not conform to normative expressions of these or other identities. Meanwhile, as Angela Jones has illustrated, sorting systems on the platforms frequently place black bodies lower down on the site, with a user sometimes having to scroll for several pages before encountering a non-white body. This reinforces racialized wage disparity and buttresses the sexual capital of white cammers, which, in turn, has material effects on lived experience. Angela Jones, “For Black Models Scroll Down: Webcam Modeling and the Racialization of Erotic Labor.” Sexuality and Culture 19 (2015): 776–799.
The top destination sites from Chaturbate, for example, are Instagram and Twitter. “2018 Year in Review,” Pornhub, January 31, 2019, ➝.
Sciortino and Burke, ➝.
Far from insignificant, the chatroom constitutes a fundamental aspect of the camming experience, facilitating exchange among the consumers and with the producer. Some cammers are able to gather together an audience of repeat customers, a familial circle of virtual friends who, in certain cases, text each other and even meet up IRL. Allison Tierney, “Meet the Bouncers of Camgirl Chatrooms,” Vice, May 12, 2016, ➝.
Ibid.
Teledildonic gadgets are vulnerable to hacking, and there have been reports of teledildonic companies covertly recording a user. Therefore, the architecture of camming grows even larger and its borders murkier. The subject, prosthetically tethered to this massive and dispersed architecture, gives up a degree of control over their body.
In other words, the pleasure produced by your connection to the body of the performer is in part due to the material fact of the connection itself. This is not a seamless mass but rather the seams—distances bridged not collapsed—are themselves erotically-charged. As an experience of proximity is produced virtually, the physical distance between the body of the pornified other and your own simultaneously comes into focus in a way absent in other porn. Your technologically-enabled capacity to touch the bodies of others virtually also acts to expose your incapacity to do the same physically. In this way, camming affirms the placedness of the various actors involved at the same time as it seems to negate it.
Annie Lord, “The Emotional Side of Camming,” Vice, September 27, 2018, ➝.
“The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it,” writes Georges Bataille in Eroticism (63).
“National Statistics on Sexual Violence,” Connecticut Alliance to End Sexual Violence. ➝.