Goldmine
March 1998

People with voyeuristic tendencies should definitely visit the home page of Minneapolis-based recording artist Ana Voog. A performance artist as well as a songwriter, Voog has set up a perpetually-running video camera inside her apartment, offering a 24-hour-a-day window to her life for anyone who cares to watch. "I set up the camera on August 22nd of last year," she says, "and in the six months since then things have just exploded. I get about 700,000 hits a day, so everything's kind of nuts." Voog, whose first CD for Radioactive Records (a division of MCA) is scheduled for summer release, is a former member of the all-female band The Blue Up?. After eleven years together and a brief tenure on Columbia, the group disbanded, and Voog subsequently forsook guitar-based songwriting to concentrate on electronica. Her forthcoming CD, entitled anavoog.com, features production and instrumental assistance from ex-Prince and The Revolution members Bobby Z (who is also Voog's manager) and Dr. Matt Fink. Although her website advertises the album's first single, Voog insists the live cam and her musical endeavors are not related. "I want to make it clear that I didn't set up the cam to promote my record," she says. "They're two separate things that just happened to merge. Everyone seems to think this [site] will go away as soon as my record comes out, and that's totally not true." Not surprisingly, the vast majority of e-mail generated by the web page has come from men. Among those who've indicated publicly that they visit the site on a regular basis are Jane's Addiction/Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist Dave Navarro and science-fiction novelist William Gibson. (Gibson, incidentally, coined the term "cyberspace.") Voog is hopeful, however, that more women will discover the site, and indeed most of the artists she admires have been ardent feminists. Besides obvious influences such as Yoko Ono and Laurie Anderson, Voog says the work of a lesser-known but more controversial performer named Annie Sprinkle has been especially inspirational. "She's a sort of post-porn modernist something. She does performance art about sex, but she has a great sense of humor about it, and about prostitution. She's kind and open and good, and seems to have no bitterness about anything - unlike, say, Diamanda Galas. Her outlook on life makes me really happy." Asked about the future of the site, Voog says there are no plans to dismantle the web-cam, and that indeed it could conceivably be running ten years from now. The project is currently being financed with the help of a friend, but Voog hopes to soon generate advertising revenue. She has, however, encountered obstacles in her efforts to take a commercial approach. "It's hard to find advertisers," she says, "because we don't want porn. We have a lot of nudity on the site, so people think I'm porn, but I don't think I am. So I'm trying to figure things out. I would like people to advertise, but I don't know who wants to be associated with me, because I'm so radical."
-Russell Hall