“On her final day as a pioneering internet celebrity, Jennifer Ringley got up some time after 7.30am, used her computer for a while at around 1.15pm, had something to eat at 6.15pm, and then apparently went out for the evening.” (The Guardian, 3.1.2004)
On December 31, 2003, JenniCam.org, the first live streamer on the internet, went offline, never to return.
As a painter and writer, Krys Huba’s research centers on what they call the “pre-streamers” of the twentieth century who addressed the camera directly and sustained a permanent gaze. Early on in what we know as today’s internet culture, Jenni became one of those pioneers, shaping live streaming and social media before either existed as such.
Jenni bought a webcam in 1996 and became famous for broadcasting her life 24/7 from her college dorm room, essentially inventing what is now known as “lifecasting.” She rigged the webcam on her computer to take photos every 15 minutes and upload them in real-time on her website JenniCam.org, giving her rapidly growing audience a peek into her everyday life: Jenni browsing the internet or reading a book, working or doing nothing, having friends over, having sex or sleeping, coming and going (much of the time, viewers saw an empty apartment) – Jenni regarded her website as a document of real life, and she wanted to present an authentic version of that real life to her audience. At its peak, JenniCam.org got 7 million hits per day, making it one of the most popular websites on the internet at the time. When Jenni went offline, she offered no public explanation. Her exit happened on her own terms, echoing how she had introduced herself eight years earlier: My name is Jennifer Ringley and I am not an actor or dancer or entertainer. I am a computer geek … I don’t sing or dance or do tricks (okay, sometimes I do, but not very well and solely for my own amusement, not yours).
Drawn to this strange beauty of reclaiming one’s own body, and the fight to possess it, Jenni’s story became an impulse for Krys Huba‘s series of paintings and writing, following the traces that trans, non-binary, agender, intersex, and women pioneers have left online across the history of the internet; traces that remain largely unread. Huba brings the stories they tell into dialogue with a digital present caught between the renegotiation of Foucault‘s Panopticon [1], the stalker as a figure of unauthorized access, and the deepfake that strips bodies of their consent.
“I am wary of nostalgia when it reduces the past to consumable fragments”, says Krys Huba, “rather, it is about how certain materials – a screenshot from 1996, a low-resolution still – act as vessels for overlapping temporalities. They are not purely past; they keep circulating and shift meaning as they move between contexts.”
The few grainy, still images that have remained as the sole traces of JenniCam’s existence, once uploaded to the website with a 60-second delay, would not hold a candle to modern live streaming. Yet they were utterly compelling to her audience. Where today’s internet demands total transparency and predictive data, these early fragments offer a radical opacity, capturing the raw friction of a body discovering its own digital agency. In a reversal of the Panopticon, instead of being trapped and neutralized by an invisible, policing observer, Jenni claimed the power of visibility. She slept with the lights on, not out of fear, but as a courtesy to her fans.
Krys Huba treats the painting itself as a relic of the screen, a durable monument to a fleeting transmission. The distance between the historic webcam and the physical room collapses, pulling the viewer into an immersive surrender, a sensation of falling into the pixelated gaze of the past. As the border between the observer and the observed dissolves, these bodies do not yield to our presence. Instead, they materialize as a fierce site of resistance.
To cross from the documented reality of Jenni’s room into Huba’s imagery is to step over a threshold where the logics of time, space, and gravity have dissolved into the grotesque. Operating within this dim, intuitive realm, Krys Huba gives attention to how the past permeates us, and to its shadowy absences. Drawing connections between image, body, and narrative, the artist transfers fragments of buried digital relics onto the canvas, bringing them into conversation with references from historical portrait painting, early performance practice and queer feminist activist histories. Entangled bodies emerge, occupying the space like a fresco on the walls of a streamer’s grotto. Figures recurring in expressive, life-sized gestures in oil, returning our gaze, falling into you.
[1] Panopticon: A circular prison design where inmates are visible to an invisible guard in a central tower. Philosopher Michel Foucault popularised the term in his book Discipline and Punish (1975) as a metaphor for how modern society uses the psychological threat of constant surveillance to enforce conformity and create “docile bodies.” For a contemporary analysis of how digital subjects invert and reclaim agency within this dynamic, see Johanna Brewer, “Seeing Like the Streamers: Reprogramming the Panopticon,” in Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture, eds. Johanna Brewer et al. (MIT Press, 2023).
Krys Huba is an artist working across painting, printed matter and writing. Through dialogues with artefacts and memories, they create paintings and fabrics with over-life-size figures, and immersive, body-oriented installations. By centering the fluidity of representation through fragmentation and overlaying, they often work with porosities in coloring, writing and semi-transparent materials like latex. Influences from pop culture and activist networks are woven together with archival research, drawing on the beauty of reclaiming (their/her/his)stories and one’s own body within a digital future and in an economy of looking. Their visual works are often activated by performative readings and collective collaborations.
Krys Huba’s works are presented nationally and internationally, most recently in their first institutional solo exhibition at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin, 2025), as well as Mouches Volantes (Cologne, 2024). Group exhibitions include presentations at the Biennale für Freiburg 2 (2023), Kunstverein Freiburg, Kunstraum Tropez (Berlin, 2023), during Zurich Art Weekend 2023, at Villa Renata (Basel, 2022), Museum im Bellpark (Kriens, 2020) and Tate Exchange / Tate Modern (London, 2019). Huba received invitations for international residencies such as Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, CRAC Alsace in France and Residence Secondaire II in Zurich.