Anyone reacting in shock and disgust to the news of the recent Scarborough apartment murder caught live on a lobby camera connected to the tenants' TV sets was likely to have as a next thought, "Didn't the killer know there'd be a camera present observing everything?"

Yet all are engaged in some thoroughly revealing activity, whether that means they're masturbating, singing, arguing or merely looking terribly morose.

But this begs the question: Why? Why has everyone in Sourkes' show thrown privacy to the wind in order to broadcast her or his daily life via the Internet?

"Perhaps there's some frisson felt in being seen," she suggests. "We must remember that for every exhibitionist, there's a voyeur, and for every voyeur, there's an exhibitionist.

The National Gallery – mounting a parallel exhibition, Cheryl Sourkes: Public Camera, a retrospective survey, April 20-Oct. 21, with seven years' worth of the artist's webcam work – has its own concerns about what's entertaining and what's not.

Indeed, much to the dismay of the artist herself, the Ottawa gallery is housing some of her more explicit images – a few in evidence now at Peak Gallery – in their own little childproof viewing studio.

But the gallery isn't budging from its protective position even when the artist notes that another National exhibition, featuring huge sculptural pieces by artist Ron Mueck, "has a lot of oversized penises in it."

In George Orwell's novel 1984, "Big Brother is Watching You" – the slogan posted everywhere throughout the state-controlled city of the future – terrified its victim/hero, Winston Smith (and presumably, the reader).

Orwell's inspirational source for Big Brother's method of fear-mongering went back to The Panopticon, a late 18th-century theory conceived by philosopher Jeremy Bentham on the potential for endless prison-like surveillance.

In Bentham's imagination (and in Orwell's), endless surveillance should ensure docile compliance through the fear of exposure and eventual punishment.

But from the vantage point of the 21st century – where Abu Ghraib-level war crimes are more likely to be filmed than sex acts – surveillance no longer works as a certain scare tactic.

The pale, skinny guy naked and alone on a couch shown in Homecammer: Woody (2007) is calmly taking time away from attending to his aroused state in order to reach for something – a laptop? a martini? – placed on a nearby table.

Being sexually aroused and naked to the world is not enough for him. He wants to be as comfortably exposed for the community of webcam users he expects will be watching him on the Internet.

Why should he sweat it? Surveillance systems have so thoroughly saturated society they're now an accepted presence in our lives, rather like the weather.

"I'm on the shady side of being 60. I was around when television first came into Canada. I perceived the difference in our culture before and after it arrived, how there was a different existence after it came. For instance, there was more streetlife before. It's somewhat the same now."

Jenni Ringley, one of the first webcam stars on the Internet revealing her day-to-day existence, "eventually turned her camera off," Sourkes notes.

"But then she turned it on again. Why? She said she felt lonesome without it. There's a different sense of self and a different sense of privacy now. I don't yet have the answer for it. That's why I'm taking these pictures. That's what drives me."

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