Janković’s A Woman On The Internet was conceived we a filmic response to Lynn Hershman Leeson’s seminal text, Romancing the Anti-body (1985), exploring the jarring juxtapositions of friction, toxicity, joy and liberation that trans people, queers and femmes experience when playing as their own custom character creations in video game spaces. This is how Hershman Leeson introduced her work:
“In 1972, I created my first non-body work in an actual hotel room in The Dante Hotel. The objects that surrounded her taste and background defined the identity of the occupant. In painting, it would be called negative space. Books, glasses, cosmetics and clothing were selected to reflect the education, personality and socioeconomic background of the provisional identities. Pink and yellow light bulbs cast shadows and audiotapes of breathing emitted a persistent counterpoint to the local news playing on the radio. Thus my path to interactivity began, not with technology, but with installations and performances. Visitors entered the hotel, signed in at the desk, and received keys to the rooms. Residents of the transient hotel became “curators” and cared for the exhibition. I intended to keep the room permanently accessible, gathering dust and being naturally changed through the shifting flow of viewers. But “real life” intervened. Nine months after the opening, a man named Owen Moore came to see the room at 3 a.m. and phoned the police. They came to the hotel, confiscated the elements and took them to central headquarters where they are still waiting to be claimed.” (Lynn Hershman Leeson, 1985)
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Watch A Woman On The Internet
