NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE: REAPPRAISING THE EARLY ONLINE WORKS OF ANNIE SPRINKLE AND FRANK MOORE Toni Sant

NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE: REAPPRAISING THE EARLY ONLINE
WORKS OF ANNIE SPRINKLE AND FRANK MOORE
Toni Sant
Belin | « Revue française d’études américaines »
2022/2 N° 171 | pages 92 à 104

ISSN 0397-7870
ISBN 9782410025705
DOI 10.3917/rfea.171.0092
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Nudity in Digital Performance:

Reappraising the Early Online
Works of Annie Sprinkle
and Frank Moore
TONI SANT
Keywords
Les premières œuvres numériques de, respectivement,
Annie Sprinkle et Frank Moore sont fortement inspirées
digital performance; de leur propre pratique au plateau du point de vue à la fois
live art; artists’ books; de la méthode et du contenu : les deux artistes américains
Annie Sprinkle; Frank conservent la même approche de l’érotisme. Tout au long
Moore; Franklin des années 1990, Sprinkle et Moore ont brouillé les fron-
Furnace; internet; tières entre l’art et l’érotisme pour faire évoluer leurs per-
nudity formances en incorporant le net comme élément majeur.
Leur travail s’inspire de concepts diffusés dans le monde
de l’art à travers ce que l’on nomme les « cahiers
d’artistes », qui sont apparus près d’un siècle avant l’essor
de la technologie numérique.
Looking at nudity in digital performance requires some attempt to locate

the key terms more precisely. The approach proposed here is historical,
and based on observations of the developments that have taken place
over the past three decades. Nudity is different from nakedness in that it
is more concerned with showing the body and less concerned with cover-
ing or uncovering it. Showing is the basis of theatre, even etymologically.
The type of body shown in performance that is the focus of this article
moves away from the theatre of dramatic literature and steps into live art
through the digital realm. Thus, the subject of nudity in digital perform-
ance is here concerned primarily with taking a closer look at some exam-
ples of performance work that has presented bodies as essential elements
of the creative output presented to an audience.
Specifically, the early online works of American performance artists
Annie Sprinkle (b. 1954) and Frank Moore (1946-2013), presented sepa-
rately, draw heavily on their own art practice in terms of method, beyond
92 No 171
NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE
the specific erotic content they produced, which was not too different
from most of their offline work. Throughout the 1990s, Sprinkle and
Moore blurred the boundaries between art and erotica, expanding their
own work to include the internet as an essential component of their per-
formances. Sprinkle and Moore elaborated on the use of concepts popu-
larized in the art world through artists’ books and performance art, or
live art, for many years before the rise of digital technology.
Historical Definitions of Digital Performance

Any thorough discussion of nudity in digital performance needs to
start by declaring a definition of digital performance. This is particularly
essential because digital performance has developed substantially since
the 1990s, taking on several technological developments (Sant 2013). Pre-
vious attempts towards specificity with the term “digital performance”
aimed to establish historical clarity through comparison and elimination,
as much as recognition, of specific elements that make such works differ-
ent from others that came before (Dixon 2007).
Digital performance involves a plethora of other technologies that
are not necessarily connected with the internet, or to it. The internet,
however, is the main digital domain used by Sprinkle and Moore in their
early online works. Situating the internet within the range of digital tech-
nologies in performance may appear simple enough, if not outright sim-
plistic. The term digital performance covers several types of performance
that involve media technology in some way, sometimes even encompass-
ing works dating back to the pre-digital age through concepts developed
by the historical avant-garde in the visual, auditory, and performing arts.
Accordingly, we must move away from the broader digital performance
mode to an already more specific term: online performance. In other
words, performance on or through the internet.
The interface between theatre, performance and digital arts is domi-
nated by virtuality and the processes of making things seem real when
they are not. More often than not, live art blurs the boundaries between
life and art, presenting the real as art rather than making art based on
virtuality. When live art involves online performance, the notion of virtu-
ality comes up in the aspects of presence associated with the live event,
without necessarily any colocation in the same physical space as the per-
formers or other members of the audience. From a technical perspective,
this can be called a networked performance. Maria Chatzichristodoulou
recognizes that the field of networked performance “is broad and diverse”
Revue Française d’Études Américaines 93

TONI SANT
and “other practitioners/theorists use different terms to refer to techno-

performative practices” (2006). This at once seemingly solves the termi-
nology conundrum and complicates it further.
As the variety of online performance evolved since the early 1990s,
it has often been mislabeled, given multiple names or lumped together
with other types of digital performance, without paying any attention to
the significant distinctive qualities between one type of work and another.
The earliest recorded example of theatrical performance on the internet,
an appropriation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet for Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
in 1993, sits outside the scope of what matters here. Nevertheless, taking
a historical perspective can also help situate theatrical events that involve
digital media technology within a specific type of performance frame-
work, shifting away from fuzzy generalizations, jargon, and buzzwords
that refer to something other than what is actually being examined.
The type of performance work produced by Sprinkle and Moore
relates directly to art in an all-encompassing sphere, known as intermedia
(Higgins, 1984 18-21), regardless of the nudity contained with it. The
intermedia framework of digital performance needs to be narrowed down
not only to internet art—which, as Norie Neumark argues, easily falls
across different intermedia categories (Chandler and Neumark, 2005
13)—but also further still into what New York-based arts organization
Franklin Furnace calls “Live art on the Internet” (Wilson 2005). 1 A
closer look at the performance work of Moore and Sprinkle shows that
their approch to digital performance is reflected in the framework pro-
posed by Franklin Furnace, who have used this turn of phrase regularly
since 1997 in a very inclusive manner.
Franklin Furnace’s refusal to define or delimit “live art on the inter-
net” (Sant, 2011 111-130) makes this an imprecise term, and therefore
potentially not ideal for establishing difference or clarity between differ-
ent types of performance on the internet. It does attempt, however, to
provide a clearer hybrid term than the significantly broader “digital per-
formance.” It is generally distinguished as a subset of digital live art, but
one which operates within a clearly narrower space than that presented
by J.G. Sheridan et. al. in 2007, by simply involving only works presented
1. Franklin Furnace was established as an artist-run organization based in New York

City in 1976. Under the leadership of Martha Wilson, it has gone on to remain active as
a presenter, supporter, and archive of avant-garde artists’ ideas in formats ranging from
artists’ books to live art on the internet, and various other artforms in between. After
presenting artists at its venue in downtown Manhattan for twenty years, in 1996 the organi-
zation “went virtual” presenting various art programs through its website before settling
into its current incarnation at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. See also http://www.franklin-
furnace.org
94 No 171
live on the internet. In other words, “live art on the internet” requires the
use of the internet to produce and/or disseminate works of live art, while
digital live art encapsulates any use of computing, digital technology and
human-computer interaction within live art (Sant 2008).
Franklin Furnace operates, as it has always done, in the spirit of the
work undertaken by marginalized artists—like Annie Sprinkle and Frank
Moore, among many others—who broadcast their artistic ideas by any
means possible. It is also through the development in the working meth-
ods of such artists that Franklin Furnace has evolved its parameters
for“live art on the internet”over time. It is certainly how the organization
first saw the need to move toward using the internet as the preferred
venue and medium for the creation and distribution of new art, and even-
tually realized that it was a natural medium to continue broadcasting
artists’ ideas.
Most artists’ books, performance art, and websites offering live art
on the internet invite direct personal contact between the artist and the
reader/spectator/viewer. This makes the works feel more accessible, unlike
paintings hanging on a gallery wall or sculptures displayed almost like
untouchable holy relics in a museum. A wider degree of participation—at
whatever level of interactivity—rather than passive contemplation is
sought from the reader/spectator/viewer when the art medium is a book,
performance, or website. A potentially larger audience through digital
communication has brought artists and their work to audiences to whom
they never had access before the internet. All this makes these relatively
new methods of communicating ideas also new ways to present nudity,
especially in the context of art.
In considering this terminology, it is also necessary to differentiate
between works made possible through digital technology and performan-
ces where the digital element is only involved in the work’s dissemination.
In many cases, digital or online performance has become synonymous
with the broadcast of live performances or video art through the internet.
Online performance is set in an environment that potentially invites new
modes of viewing, which can be linear but are often also experienced in
a random, non-linear order. This is because the internet interfaces with
works in such a way that it serves not only as a container or transmitter
of information but also to convey ideas about artists and their work.
Creating work that provides an experience or a peek into the artist’s
world is often seen as the primary goal of the artist.
Electronic Artists’ Books

Franklin Furnace has proposed a clear connection between book
art and live art since the 1970s. The organization set out to present work

TONI SANT
by avant-garde artists working in different media, often moving away

from painting, sculpture, and other more conventional forms, emphasiz-
ing concepts and ideas in art above form. Through a series of artists’
book exhibitions, produced by Franklin Furnace in New York between
September 1979 and June 1980 under the title Page as Alternative Space
(1909-1980), we may find our way to a 1977 article by Howardena Pindell
called “Artists’ Periodicals as Alternative Spaces.” Pindell’s article deals
with artists’ books from 1900 to 1977, matching them with a selection of
historical events. This highlights the long history of the printed page as
an alternative space for presenting art, which has provided great possibili-
ties of innovation and dissemination for artists. 2 Significantly, Pindell
points out that “artists’ periodicals continue to provide a means for the
artist to put him or herself directly into art history without the aid of the
critic or dealer or curator as mediator—an alternative space” (99). Frank-
lin Furnace’s move toward presenting artists’ work on the internet in 1997,
after twenty years of presenting artists’ books and performance art in its
downtown Manhattan loft, extends these ideas into the presentation of
artists’ works as digital performances. The material relationship has
changed considerably, from artists’ books to live art or digital perform-
ance, but the engagement with artists’ ideas remains as strong as ever.
Visual art theorist Johanna Drucker has introduced a new way of looking
at artists’ books, proposing that the best examples of this type of work
are “those which interrogate production and content so dynamically that
such distinctions are moot” (359). This observation is even more valid
with regard to what can be called “electronic artists’ books,” a term that
extends the continuum from paper-based books of physical pages to elec-
tronic books with virtual pages on the World Wide Web.
The concept of artists’ books as a democratic art form has been a
banner carried by many artists in the field for many years; however, mass
interest in cheap art books never materialized. Drucker explains this in
terms of affordability and accessibility (69-83). Problems of distribution
2. In her contribution to introducing Artists Books as an alternative art space, Martha

Wilson explains that “artists all over the world are producing books and periodicals which,
when scrutinized, are not ‘books’ or ‘periodicals’ in the conventional sense. Ed Ruscha’s
Thirtyfour Parking Lots, for example, is not ‘about’ parking lots, as its Library of Congress
classification would suggest; it is an artwork which contains pseudo-formalist images of
white lines on dark shapes. […] Thirtyfour Parking Lots is distinct from conventional
books, and conventional artworks, which are produced in expensive, limited editions or as
one-of-a-kind works. What function does an artwork which is cheap, portable and poten-
tially unlimited serve? It functions, as so many artists are aware, as alternative space—a
channel which circumvents the exclusivity of galleries and the critical community.” (Wilson
1978)
96 No 171
in the art establishment make affordably produced works of art less

profitable as accessible commodities. Commodification is particularly
interesting to consider in terms of nudity, as it is a way to discuss the
main differences between pornography and erotic art. While both can
be—and are—presented as commodities, the latter is clearly less profita-
ble, as it is normally not designed for a mass audience.
Looking closely at formal aspects in the erotic art of Annie Sprinkle
and Frank Moore with all this in mind provides insights that are not
necessarily immediately evident to a general audience of their online per-
formance work. Through their work, created and presented independ-
ently from each other, the creative link between artists’ books and
performance art extends easily to electronic artists’ books produced for
an internet audience, particularly because several other artists not
engaged in erotic art have adopted this same model. Without proposing
that pornographic books, magazines, and other manifestations of sex on
paper should be automatically included in the general rubric of artists’
books, it is clear that the making of many such bookworks would
mechanically qualify to be categorized in any broad schema of books by
artists and books as art. 3 This refers mostly to sexually explicit works
produced underground, outside the big-business sex industry historically
dominated by major adult entertainment corporations such as Larry
Flynt Publications and Playboy Enterprises.
A Historical Perspective on Sprinkle and Moore

On January 26 1984, professional sex-worker Annie Sprinkle had
what she calls “a transformative experience.” 4 On that day she did her
first performance art show and started to change her professional path
toward the creation of erotic art rather than continue making porn films
and doing nude photography modeling for sex magazines. Franklin Fur-
nace was sponsoring Carnival Knowledge, a women’s art collective, which
put together a series of performance art events investigating the role of
sex in art. One of the pieces was entitled Deep Inside Porn Stars, and
3. For an example of this type of schema see Clive Phillpot, “Books by Artists and
Books as Art.” Artist.Author: Contemporary Artists’ Books. Lauf, Cornelia & Clive Phill-
pot, eds. New York: Distributed Art Publishers/American Federation of Arts, 1998. 57-80.
4. All the quotations from Annie Sprinkle that appear here come from a document she
wrote in 1997 called “Some of My Performances in Retrospect,” solicited by Martha
Wilson for Franklin Furnace. In January 2003, I corresponded with her by email to con-
firm and update some of the information. In 2011, with her permission, I reproduced this
text in my book Franklin Furnace and the Avant-Garde: A History of the Future, 52-55.

TONI SANT
featured seven female porn stars who met regularly at Club 90 “to discuss
problems, share successes, to network and to gossip.” The event was
essentially a reenactment of one of Club 90’s meetings. Each performer
had a personal moment in which to share something about themselves in
any way they wanted. For her spot, Sprinkle “chose to illustrate with
slides, words, and a few props, how shy, insecure, scared Ellen Steinberg
had recreated herself as Annie Sprinkle, exhibitionist, confident, fearless
sex slut.” This personal visual poem was later re-titled Ellen.Annie and
presented as a performance art piece in various other locations. It was
also featured in Sprinkle’s book Post-Porn Modernist (based on the per-
formance by the same name), and eventually reworked into an elaborate
online documentary with the Robert J. Shiffler Foundation of Dayton,
Ohio, giving access to the full script of the performance, all the slides
used during the show, images of Sprinkle performing and close-ups of
her props, and single-camera video clips available for viewing on
demand. 5 Three different versions of the script were offered on the web-
site, reproduced in their original format, to give an idea of the way the
work evolved over time.
Sprinkle has now worked as a professional performance artist for
over thirty years, constantly blurring the boundaries between live art and
mediated culture. Throughout the 2010s, she developed a series of works
based on the concept of ecosexuality, which she developed over the previ-
ous years in collaboration with her wife and creative partner Beth Ste-
phens (b. 1960) imbuing environmental art with eroticism. By her own
admission, in the 1980s she was “titillated and intrigued by the art world,”
and she believes that this new audience has been equally titillated and
intrigued by her work ever since. She maintains that “doing controversial
performance work requires a heck of a lot of energy, and can be a really
hard job.” Sprinkle proposes “total creative freedom” and “far less cen-
sorship” as the two main reasons why she gravitated towards making
performance art, eventually preferring it to porn and other conventional
sex performances. “In art you could dress how you wanted, act how you
wanted and perform for as long or short as you wanted, and there didn’t
seem to be any very specific laws about the sex and nudity.” This view
was shared by Frank Moore, who spent more than thirty years (before
his death in 2013) creating paintings and performances built around this
premise.
5. The Robert J. Shiffler Foundation, which also developed online works by Linda
Montano and Barbara Pollack (among others) in the 1990s, is now long defunct. Annie
Sprinkle retains an online archive of this work through her website at https://anniesprin-
kle.org/ppm-bobsart/, accessed 15 March 2021.
98 No 171
Sprinkle and Moore’s work has overlapped more than once. One
instance of this is documented in the Franklin Furnace Archives. Moore’s
performance work Intimate Cave was presented at Franklin Furnace on
Thursday, May 14, 1987, and Journey to Lila on four different weekend
evenings following Friday, June 9, 1989. He described both events as
“long ritual performances.” 6 Each performance lasted about five hours
and featured his nude body along with those of other performers in vari-
ous configuations. Intimate Cave included a troupe of fifteen New York-
based performers. Annie Sprinkle was one of those fifteen. The Franklin
Furnace press release for Moore’s debut in New York says that the per-
formance featured “silly pranksters who will take such things as nudity
and physical contact out of the realm of adult sexuality.” Journey to Lila
was different than the first performance but presented in a similar setting,
with a cast of sixteen performance artists, including Veronica Vera and
Linda Montano, both of whom have separately developed and presented
other body-based performances, in their own right.
During his performances, Moore gave his audience the opportunity
to converse with him via his “letterboard”—a device that looks like a
Ouija board, which he used as a communication aide to overcome the
quadriplegia he lived with as a result of cerebral palsy from birth—and
to play an active role in situations comparable to some of the classic
happenings from the 1960s. The audience for Journey to Lila was invited
to bring a blanket and “journey to the mythical Island of Lila, where
Frank Moore hopes to achieve his lifelong goal—to help adults lose the
fears and taboos associated with sex, and return to a child-like reality
beyond fear and doubts.” 7 For Intimate Cave, Frank Moore and his col-
laborators produced an artists’ book called Caves. 8 This came about fol-
lowing a similar show in Los Angeles the previous year, where “people
wanted to have something to take with them that would give a context
to what they had just experienced.” While some of the performers in New
York disagreed with the idea of having a book about, or as part of, the
performance, Annie Sprinkle “lustfully hawked” the book, seeing it as an
artistic rendition of the printed nude publications that she had appeared
6. I interviewed Frank Moore by email in January 2003, ten years before he died. All
the quotations that appear here, unless otherwise indicated, come from this interview and
related email correspondence I had with him in the weeks before and after.
7. From the official Franklin Furnace press release for Journey to Lila, issued in May
1989.
8. Available at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as part of the Frank-
lin Furnace Artist Book Collection. See https://arcade.nyarc.org:443/record=b539156~S8
Accessed 15 March 2021.

TONI SANT
in since the early 1970s. This followed another book, called The Art of
Living, also published by Moore and his collaborators in 1987. Book-
works were a form that Moore worked with frequently. Consisting mostly
of photocopied sheets of paper stapled along the edge, some of these
works are now housed in the Franklin Furnace Artist Book Collection
in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
By 1992, his most important work on paper appeared as a self-
published periodical called The Cherotic (r)Evolutionary. The periodical
featured the work of several contributors, including artists, photogra-
phers, performers, writers, poets, and Moore’s close collaborators. Eight
issues were published by 1999, and the publication of this periodical was
reluctantly abandoned because the time dedicated to it was transferred
to the upkeep of a web project called Love Underground Visionary Revolu-
tion, better known as LUVeR. This now-defunct website (formerly availa-
ble at luver.com) combined live streaming, on-demand libraries of
programming, audio, and video. Styled as LUVeR.com, it prided itself as
“anti-corporate” and “anti-capitalist,” offering resistance toward the web
becoming “just another corporate-controlled selling medium.” 9
Moore was attracted to computers before there were personal com-
puters, and claims to have “wormed” his way into having time on the
big university mainframe, as he studied to acquire a graduate degree in
psychology from the University Without Walls program at Berkeley. He
was active on BBSs (bulletin board systems) throughout the 1980s, using
a personal computer to connect with GEnie, a popular service run by
General Electric. He “quickly became a controversial figure, pushing the
limits, breaking the rules in such a way that made it very hard for them
to censor…. [I]t upset them that [he] talked about Annie [Sprinkle] on
the New Age [chat] room.” His postings about Sprinkle were deleted by
the board moderator, and “the topic of course became why Annie was
New Age.” At this time, nudity was not easy to convey or experience
online, as the technology had still not developed enough to enable the
sharing of images—still or moving—in ways that have become so ubiqui-
tous by the turn of the century. The World Wide Web was invented in
1989, and the technology that enabled the experience to include multime-
dia rapidly developed to make the early years of being online a very
different experience to what we now understand when we speak of the
internet or online media.
9. Although the website disappeared from luver.com around the time of Moore’s death,
aspects of it have been preserved through the Internet Archive at https://web.archive.org/
web/*/luver.com
100 No 171
This was in the early 1990s, when Sprinkle was exploring the link
between spirituality and sexuality in her own work. 10 After GEnie closed
down, as most other similar BBSs did with the coming of the web, Moore
continued his relationship with other friendly BBS members, eventually
creating The e-Salon, a community of about two hundred creative people
brought together by regular emails. In 1996, one year before Franklin
Furnace launched its website, Moore started The Web of All Possibilities
with his life partner Linda Mac and fellow artist Michael LaBash. 11 This
was the very first website by any artist presented by Franklin Furnace
before their initial program of live art on the internet in 1997. At first
Moore’s website consisted of writings, art, and photos by LaBash and
Moore, but eventually they also started adding the work of other artists,
as well as a live webcam, giving the world a glimpse of their everyday life.
Some of these works involved nudity, as Moore felt that this was a joyous
celebration of the human body, including his own. Streaming audio and
video documenting Moore’s rituals/performances followed soon after,
and in 1998 Joey Manley, director of Free Speech TV, gave Moore unlim-
ited space and all the required bandwidth to archive all his audio/video
works. 12 Through this initiative, Moore also created an online archive
from tape recordings of his work, which previously sat in his closet. In
1998 he was also invited by the short-lived FakeRadio.com to do a weekly
two-hour Internet-radio show called Shaman’s Den.
A year later, Moore and his collaborators left FakeRadio.com and
started doing all of this activity on their own through LUVeR.com. Annie
Sprinkle was the first guest on LUVeR.com’s Shaman’s Den. Moore had
a very sharp eye for communication and believed that “each medium does
different things, reaches different people.” When I asked him about using
paper less frequently since the rise of the internet as a mass medium, he
exclaimed that “people don’t need to limit themselves to one medium!”
Indeed, he continued delivering live performances, mainly around his
hometown in Berkeley, California, where he also hosted a weekly cable
10. For a detailed account of this work, see Annie Sprinkle’s Hardcore from the Heart:
The Pleasures, Profits, and Politics of Sex in Performance. Ed Gabrielle Cody. London and
New York: Continuum, 2001.
11. See http://www.eroplay.com Accessed 15 March 2021.
12. Free Speech TV is a non-profit organization based in Boulder, Colorado, which
works with activits and artists using television to advance progressive social change. It
launched in 1995 and became a full-time channel on the DISH Network in 2000 and a
national channel on DIRECTTV in 2010. They have also offered low-cost web hosting for
all artists and activists since their inception, developing what was the largest online archive
of activist audio and video content before Google bought YouTube in 2006. See their
website at http://www.freespeech.org

TONI SANT
television show and other regular audio-visual programs on the LUVeR

websites.
One of Moore’s main goals was “to create communities and pipe-
lines for art.” To this end, the works of many artists were also included in
the online archives at LUVeR; some of these survive through eroplay.com,
which continues to be maintained by his collaborators, the aforemen-
tioned Linda Mac and Michael LaBash. Moore was thrilled that a per-
formance art piece that had a live audience of ten people was being
watched by thousands on the web over time. Getting feedback from inter-
net viewers and hearing from other artists interested in presenting their
work online through LUVeR made interaction a major element of the
LUVeR experience.
Normalizing Erotic Art

Although nudity was always a draw for a substantial part of Moore’s
audience—and understandably more so for Sprinkle’s—there was an even
larger part of their audience that understood that they were producing
work that did not have the exclusive purpose of sexual arousal. It is very
evident that this type of nudity in digital performance is rather different
from pornography, as broadly defined as that may be, even if both artists
had their fair share of raised eyebrows from those seeking to apply and
broaden obscenity laws to include the type of nudity they presented
through their digital performances.
More than twenty-five years have passed since Sprinkle and Moore
first appeared online in the 1990s. Their early online presence revolved
around performance art that contained significant nudity. The way such
works are now perceived cannot be divorced from the art historical con-
text presented here. Moore and Sprinkle’s groundbreaking initial forays
into live art on the internet need to be remembered in the context of the
culture wars emanating from the so-called decency clause, for work
funded through the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), introduced
by Republican senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato in 1989. Nei-
ther Moore nor Sprinkle were recipients of NEA funding at that time,
but NEA Fellowship recipients and a small number of venues presenting
live art which involved nudity and/or sexually explicit content, had their
public funding rescinded. 13 The road to normalization was long, and
beyond the scope of this article.
13. An in-depth contemporary analysis of this issue in its social setting is presented in
Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America by James D. Hunter, New York: Basic
Books, 1991, as well as Steven C. Dubin’s Arresting Images: Impolitic Art and Uncivil
102 No 171
The use of digital technology to transmit this type of nudity in per-

formance has arguably made it easier for erotic art to be presented as
distinctive from pornography. It is not clear whether this point matters
much in terms of the artists intentions, for either Moore or Sprinkle.
The normalization of nudity in broadcast media and mainstream culture
throughout the twenty-first century, and the acceptance of less restrictive
legislation regulating nudity in performance, have both contributed to the
penetration of erotic art into the public sphere, especially in terms of
digital performance, even if this raises a new set of concerns that include
the inability of currently-available image recognition technology to tell
the difference between nudity in art and ordinarily naked bodies.
In the work of Sprinkle and Moore, both separately and together,
these considerations were far from an everyday reality. The scarcity of
nudity in mainstream media during the first years when both these artists
became active online in the 1990s, made their work stand out in ways
that are unlikely now that the proliferation of naked bodies on screens
has permeated mainstream culture. However, it is now more evident that
their politics, aside from nudity, was also a significant aspect of their
work. The way their works were received could also benefit from analysis
that is not dependent on the impact that nudity made through their per-
formances.
WORKS CITED
CHANDLER, Annmarie, et al. At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on

the Internet. London: MIT Press, 2005.
CHATZICHRISTODOULOU, Maria. Cybertheatres: Emergent Networked Per-
formance Practices. Goldsmiths, PhD Disseratation, University of London, 2010.
http://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/28792/ Accessed 15 March 2021.
DIXON, Steve. Digital Performance. London: MIT Press, 2007.
DRUCKER, Johanna. The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books,
2004.
HIGGINS, Dick. Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia. Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.
PINDELL, Howardena. “Alternative Spaces: Artists’ Periodicals.” The Print Col-
lector’s Newsletter, 8.4 (1977): 96–121.
Actions New York: Routledge, 1992. Richard Bolton’s Culture Wars: Documents from the
Recent Controversies in the Arts New York: New Press, 1992, provides excellent accounts
directly from the artists, legislators, lobbyists, and critics involved in the issue.

TONI SANT
SANT, Toni. “A Second Life for Online Performance: Understanding Present

Developments through an Historical Context.” International Journal of Perform-
ance Arts and Digital Media 4.1 (2008): 69–79.
—. Franklin Furnace and the Spirit of the Avant-Garde: A History of the Future.
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—. “Theatrical Performance on the Internet: How Far Have We Come since
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(2013): 247-59.
SHERIDAN, Jennifer G., et al. “Encouraging Witting Participation and Perform-
ance in Digital Live Art.” BCS Learning & Development, Sept. 2007.
doi:10.14236/ewic/HCI2007.2
WILSON, Martha. “Artists Books As Alternative Space.” Exhibition catalog for
Artists Books Bookworks, the Ewing and George Paton Galleries, the Experimen-
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104 No 171

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NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE: REAPPRAISING THE EARLY ONLINE

WORKS OF ANNIE SPRINKLE AND FRANK MOORE

Belin | « Revue française d’études américaines »

2022/2 N° 171 | pages 92 à 104

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Nudity in Digital Performance:

Looking at nudity in digital performance requires some attempt to locate

NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

Historical Definitions of Digital Performance

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 93

and “other practitioners/theorists use different terms to refer to techno-

1. Franklin Furnace was established as an artist-run organization based in New York

NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

Electronic Artists’ Books

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 95

by avant-garde artists working in different media, often moving away

2. In her contribution to introducing Artists Books as an alternative art space, Martha

NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

in the art establishment make affordably produced works of art less

A Historical Perspective on Sprinkle and Moore

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 97

NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 99

NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 101

television show and other regular audio-visual programs on the LUVeR

Normalizing Erotic Art

NUDITY IN DIGITAL PERFORMANCE

The use of digital technology to transmit this type of nudity in per-

CHANDLER, Annmarie, et al. At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on

Revue Française d’Études Américaines 103

SANT, Toni. “A Second Life for Online Performance: Understanding Present

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