Published on 4 November 2019

The music video for Erase the Time, conceived in collaboration with director Lisa Bass, makes use of Times Square as a site of inevitable public record. Employing four simultaneous methods of capture— HD and SD digital video, VHS, and hacked downloads of the live streaming webcams planted throughout the district— the video draws inspiration from a performance ritual developed by Jennifer Vanilla to make the presence of video surveillance in the area more transparent. In this ongoing ritual, Jennifer formally greets the network of 24-hour live streaming web cameras in the district, known as “Earthcams,” with a wave, a held pose, and sustained eye contact with the camera lens. These performances are screen recorded from the Earthcam livestream and edited into short videos or screenshots dubbed “third party selfies” and “digital postcards.”

In the music video for Erase the Time, Jennifer and Lisa recreate this technological collaboration in an attempt to tease out a more symmetrical veillance relationship with the surveillance system. They openly acknowledge and call attention to the presence of the Earthcam: Jennifer Vanilla, her mascot Jennifer Bear (who you may recognize as the orange Grateful Dead bear) and her cadre of dancers wave to it, pose and perform for it, give it a show. They consciously occupy its stage as actors and contribute to it as consenting participants, rather than as passively “captured” unwitting pieces of content.

First of all, nice to meet you and what’s on your schedule today? 

Nice to meet you too :) First on the docket, I opened my ~door of life~ (the energy gate) with some lite youtube Qi Gong in my kitchen. Then I went into Manhattan to record a commercial voiceover audition for a futuristic toaster product that I am not at liberty to name. At the time of writing this, I’m prepping for my EP release party in New York, so after that I went downtown to shop for an ensemble at my favorite chintzy club wear store in Soho, Mystique Boutique. 

Why Jennifer and why Vanilla? How did you come up with this pseudonym? 

It was a very simple and sudden epiphany; the name came to me like a soap bubble floating into view. The soft, resonant consonants felt good to say, and as someone who likes to speak words aloud, that is particularly important to me. The J, N, and V produce a soothing vibration that rewards the speaker every time they utter it, which has the potential to encourage mantric repetition (a goal). The name fits the project more and more as time goes by. Numerologically, Jennifer Vanilla’s number is 9, which, according to my manual by writer Florence Campbell, means she “belongs to the universe,” "is ready to give her life to humanity,” and feels compelled to “broadcast herself and her message to benefit the world.” It gets even more accurate when we turn to Urban Dictionary. For example, my favorite excerpts:

“She’s mysterious. Everyone wants to know who she is but cant figure it out.”

"Omg jennifer is so awesome. Everybody is gonna be jennifer.”

“Jennifer was laughing at her own joke lol"

“Jennifer you smell like flowers."

"Look at that Jennifer!"

"Wow she's a Jennifer”

“I want to spend the rest of my life with Jennifer.”

“A Jennifer is my type of girl"

“We all love Jennifer ...okay ?”

"That one person: Is that Jennifer?

That other person: Yes we all new she would become big!”

Jennifer is a people person. She’s a people’s artist. So it’s very fitting that the people would choose to describe her in these ways.

Tell us briefly about yourself and your story as a creative, how did you first get into performance acting? 

I seem to have been born with a flair for showmanship. Growing up an only child with two doting lesbian mothers made it pretty easy to flex that muscle, as they were willing to sit down on the living room couch to watch my “ironic ballets” set to Beethoven’s Fifth and film my projected 2008 Academy Award victory on my uncle’s camcorder for a school project. My first proper acting role was a dog at age 5 (not the last time I played a canine); my line was an endless series of “woofs” uttered while crawling through the aisles of parents in the school gymnasium. I grew up doing Ethel Merman impersonations, idolizing Bette Midler in Big Business, and wanting to be a Broadway star, but also a Rockette, a comedienne, a drummer, dancer, and a general genius. “What do you call someone who does all of these things?” I asked one of my mothers one day. “A performance artist,” she offered. And so that’s what I decided I would be. A performance artist in New York City.

How would you describe your character’s aesthetic in three words? What are the crucial differences between Becca and Jennifer? 

Power, Fluidity, Action. Crucial differences: Jennifer has an indestructible and perfectly balanced ego. She has no fear, is incapable of embarrassment, plows through difficulty— she is something of a miracle worker. That’s because she’s also not a human being, but rather a nourishing substance who takes up residence in me, the host body, or what I call The Artist Known as Jennifer Vanilla, when the time is right. Like BitTorrent, she is compiled in a crowdsourced fashion. She is patchworked together via the collective projections, fantasies, and pressing psychological needs of the public to reflect a newfangled view through the looking glass. Lastly, she has no genitalia and is hence impenetrable. Being a perpetually unanswerable question, there are innumerable ways in which she cannot be pinned down; gender is just one of them.

What themes do you explore with your performances? Do you feel empowered and able to make a statement through your work? 

I think of Jennifer as a social custodian, clearing communicative pathways by offering herself as a kind of conversation starter and a trigger for release— you could think of her as the “wake word” for a particular shared experience, haha. 

Can you talk a bit about the Jennifer apparel? Do you plan to make it something more? Like a high-fashion sustainable brand, or you’d rather wear other designers’ garments? How strongly do you think you connect to fashion? 

I have zero plans of turning my arts and craft routine into a high fashion brand! Though I’d love an assistant or two to help me crank these babies out at a faster pace (prospective interns, email me: [email protected]). The factory, i.e. me and my kitchen table, have a hard time keeping up with the demand. Right now I sell my Jennifer t-shirts and turtlenecks through my bandcamp page, but I recently consigned a small edition to NYC record shop Commend and they sold out in two days! I’d love to distribute them to more independent boutiques around the globe. At their core, though, they are companion pieces to the music and the entire scope of the Jennifer Vanillaverse. A souvenir to remember me by, a relic from our trippy escapade, a jenniferological motto, and most importantly, a conversation piece. “Who the fuck is Jennifer Vanilla?” For me, Jennifer is an exercise in turning myself inside-out, which is to say, attempting to understand, activate and convey my deeper instincts in their most authentic and relatable form. The aim is to self-actualize. Building the world of Jennifer via aesthetics is one entry point into articulating what can’t be put into words.

How long did it take to shoot your Erase the Time video? It looks gorgeous! Which particular work are you most proud of? 

Well, since it was the hottest day of the entire year — the city issued a weather advisory warning people not to leave their apartments— we worked hard to make the shoot as quick as humanly possible! Lisa Bass, the director, and producer Kate Sweeney saw to it that the whole production ran as efficiently as possible. We had some permits to film in Times Square, but not all the permits, so we were aware of the fact that the production could be stopped by the authorities at any point. Not to mention we were filming smack dab in the middle of the most popular destination on Earth (they call it the “Crossroads of the World”), so we were working against the clock to beat the swell of tourists as well. All of these factors had us moving at lightning speed. The video poet Elsa Brown, who plays my mascot Jennifer Bear and also contributes to the JV Universe as dramaturg and theorist, was the real hero of the day— she was encased in a giant furry Grateful Dead bear suit for three and a half hours in 90+ degree heat. Everyone hydrated responsibly and spent their down time gabbing and vaping in the shade of the Times Sq umbrellas. Somehow, not a single bead of sweat is visible in our perfect music video.

What fascinates you about the art world today? Which musicians or artists have been the most influential to you? 

I’m most influenced now by my peers who are pursuing their artistic craft as a viable, self-made career. I’d like to make Jennifer a personally and financially sustainable enterprise that I can support myself with. I’m inspired by my friends who are artists who continually give themselves permission to rewire and reinvent and do whatever it takes to stay engaged, stimulated, authentic, and original.

How are you hoping your art practice will evolve in the future? How do you feel like social media has changed art? Who do you love to follow on Instagram? 

I look to an even more collaborative future involving the members of what I refer to as the Jennifer Triad. The Triad consists of producer/technologist/web developer Brian Abelson, coder/poet/project manager Elsa Brown (aka Jennifer Bear), and me. We operate under the canopy of Jennifer Vanilla and use it as a framework for dreaming up creative concepts, inventions, systems and strategies together. I am a huge fan of the work my friends @pileoftears (comedian Lorelei Ramirez) and @loutides (the music project of Teeny Lieberson, former lead singer of the band TEEN). 

Who would you like to collaborate with from within the visual arts and fashion spheres if any? 

NYC nightlife queen Susanne Bartsch, Chinese fashion designer DI DU, shapeshifting self-portraitist Mae Elvis Kaufman, Times Square Arts public art program, choreographers and theater directors (I want to be choreographed! I want to be told what to do, I want to be in somebody else’s piece) and I’m courting the Japanese musician Cornelius for a future Jennifer Vanilla remix.

How do you plan to spend the rest of 2019?

The rest of 2019 will consist of my musical collaborator, Brian Abelson, and I honing our live show and putting in dozens of hours in the studio finishing up the tracks for our next release (on vinyl!) with our label, Beats in Space Records. 

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