Girlhood and the Plastic Image

Three: Networking Girlishness

three. Networking Girlishness As for Mouchette’s site, it is not likely to disappear. On the contrary, it is expanding. It grows and multiplies. It multiplies? How on earth is that possible? —Mouchette, interview1 http://mouchette.org/flesh/tong.html?text1=as+much+as+me+as+you+will+ever+see .+++Don%27t+try+to+know++more+than+I+want+to+tell.++Don%27t+try+to+see+ more+than+I+want+to+show++This+is+&text2=gh%2C+leave+me+alone.+++Browse +my+site%21+Quit+my+site++Leave+me+alone%21+++++Leave+me+alone%21 +++++++This+is+enou&SUBMIT=come+closer&text3=allowed+to+show+any+other+ photo.+I+became+so+famous+as+a+web+person+that+people+might+recognize+ me+in+my+own+street.++My+school+friends+still+don%27t+know+what+I%27m +doing+on+the+web.+If+they+ever+hear+about+it%2C+I%27ll+never+be+the+same +for+them+anymore.++++I+am+not+. —Mouchette’s url2 i. The homepage of Mouchette.org gives me a close-up of a flower. Its stamens , drooping, are dusted in velvety chartreuse pollen. Its petals have goopy orange streaks, shiny and salacious. A tiny picture of a girl sits in the upper left-hand corner of the page. Her eyes may be closed, or perhaps she is looking down; either way, she refuses to meet my gaze. This Mouchette is either ashamed or defiant (plate 13). Hovering my cursor over her image produces a speech bubble. “I’d rather sulk in my misery than be in oblivion forever! . . . ,” it says, trailing off into ellipses (I later discover that these words have been provided by users and change over time).3 Above the text is a link that prompts me to reload in order to reveal her “next mood,” so I do. Now I see an image of a pink flower with petals covered almost pornographically in water droplets—a flower, always a damn flower: Mouchette works the cliché of adolescent sexual awakening. In every version of the home page, 88 • girlhood and the plastic image this image is traversed by some animated ants and a fat hypercaffeinated fly. Her name means, after all, “little fly” in French. This time, but not always, clicking on the icon of the girl brings me to a new page. These pictures of Mouchette are easier to make out. She is a kid in a striped sweater looking down at a daisy. Scrolling text implores me to leave her alone, not to try to know or see more than she wants me to know or see, and both to “browse [her] site” and “quit [her] site.” A button puts pressure on one side of this ambivalence by provoking me to “come closer.”4 I’m not sure I want to, but I do anyway. I’m brought to another page that shows another Mouchette’s lips and tongue appearing to press up against my computer screen from the inside. “Want to know what my tongue tastes like? Try it on your screen and tell me,” she directs, literalizing the word “interface” (plate 14).5 I can type my answer in the box provided; however, I have to give a name and email address. I don’t. I’m worried. I have several other opportunities throughout the site to participate in the production of the work through this kind of registrational interactivity . My words may later be incorporated into scrolling text, speech bubbles, and, if I want, a forum discussing the troubling topic of Mouchette’s suicide, which she has been threatening since the site was born. The first time I visited Mouchette.org, I entered my email address after answering one of her questions. A week later, I received a chilling email from Mouchette: “you clicked on me causing my death, the last words I read were yours [. . .] Every night before sleeping, I hear them again, they became part of my ‘lullaby’ [. . .] They are also stored in my database, forever.”6 Mouchette.org, a landmark piece of Internet art, has been in continuous operation since 1996, only three years after the release of the first Web browser to integrate text and images within a single window, and the same year as the creation of the first machinima animation, a milestone in the history of prosumer manipulations of commercial media.7 It claims on the homepage to be the personal website of an almost thirteen-year-old girl living in Amsterdam. The identity of the real adult artist primarily...