Where are you?

When? When I am performing?

Or when you are not performing.

I’m circulating.

Like…tumblr?

Like currency.

Ah…I see. And this is your “real job”…

What’s a GWC?

Guy with Camera.

Ah. Are all the people you work with men?

The ones that pay me are.

What about here?

I’m not getting paid.

So it’s something different? Do you consider yourself a “net artist”?

I’m a net worker.

What about persona?

I’m not interested in multiple selves, but multiple capacities. Talking to cameras, this is a skill-set I learned on Myspace. But the ability to produce the self carries with it an antagonistic capacity when the self becomes something to deploy and consume.

Audience?

I’m more interested in consumers. And reblogs. 

What does it mean to be “at” work? Like at the site of work?

Work is just the task of manipulating and formatting my body. This is the case whether I am a barista or just reworking my Facebook. Penelope Machine is an entrepreneurial solution to making the relationship between myself and my representation a contractual one.

So you are yourself? Or someone else?

I’m an interface. I just shuffle signs, along with the denial and promise a certain gesture might carry. Movement here, before the camera, is synchronized with the movement of information and capital. I’m inextricable from both the gaze and the lens, but Penelope Machine has an autonomous existence… I’m the image trafficker—independent from, but always in relation to, the images I produce.

So if I said, “give me innocence” or “give me sadness” you could do it? Like acting?

Well I can’t give you any of those things. But I could convince you that whatever happens is what you’re paying for.

How much money do you make?

Is time [duration] the medium? Or is money? I set my rate at $100 per hour but sometimes I have to work slower.

PENELOPEMACHINE is a cyborg tasked with the weaving and unweaving of contemporary selfhood across the beams and shuttles of the internet. ModelMayhem.com, a social media platform for internet models, is the primary venue for this activity and the stage upon which the boundaries between labor and performance can be twerked.