Traditionally, viewing rooms that display pornographic films or live performers are dark rooms in which viewers can passively watch, masturbate, have sexual encounters with other viewers, or in some cases issue requests that are acted out. In such shows a glass partition typically separates the viewer from the performer, and coins or bills are used to keep the curtain between the two open alternatively, the viewer can pay the performer directly for the show. In private viewing booths, as in the camera obscura, peep shows also may feature live action in which performers-most commonly women-strip or act out scenarios on command either alone or with others for the pleasure of the user. Less often used in bars and commercial consumer spaces and more often built into burgeoning sex shops, these modern viewing rooms require a viewer to purchase coins or tokens that are fed into a slot that keeps a movie playing or an aperture open. Once film technology advanced enough to allow consumers to buy personal film and video players, crankable peep shows and peep boxes were replaced with viewing rooms in which one could look at short pornographic films in private booths that were reminiscent of secure chambers. Such shows often appeared at bars and cafés and could be viewed for a minimal charge. As precursors to moving film, devices with manual cranks that flipped through a series of images on cards were developed to create early pornographic movies. Correspondingly, the old box and cardboard peep show predecessors began showing pornographic scenes in the place of commonplace cultural scenarios. Such rooms were popular into the mid-nineteenth century, when in some cases the actors involved in the camera obscura were replaced by live actors in private rooms, or "secure chambers," where sexual scenes were acted out. In the camera obscura (literally "dark room") observers could watch and, to some degree, participate in live scenes that were "projected" through a hole in the wall of the darkened room and onto the wall opposite the aperture. Other early inventions, such as the camera obscura, which was popularized by Giovanni Battista della Porta in 1558, were precursors to the modern voyeuristic peep show. Early Chinese and Japanese perspective art also developed as precursors to modern peep shows (Balzer 1998). Around 1730 the artist Martin Engelbrecht created miniature theaters that were small boxes into which could be inserted cards that, viewed together through the aperture, created three-dimensional scenes. Similarly, in the late seventeenth century Samuel van Hoogstraten created peep show boxes with one open side that allowed light to enter miniature interior views of homes. Smaller peep shows were constructed in the eighteenth century as children's toys that, not unlike kaleidoscopes, were hollow tubes or boxes that contained images that were used to create three-dimensional scenarios that sometimes had moving parts (Balzer 1998).Ī precursor to the peep show artist, the Renaissance architect Filippo Brunelleschi, created interactive perspective art in which painted panels with silver backgrounds were viewed through a peep hole and reflected in a mirror. The boxes varied in size, scope, and detail, and many of them were circulated as exhibitions, often referred to as "raree shows," that were popular as public displays of private entertainment. In those models intricate miniature scenes and stages were constructed inside a box with a viewing hole, and in those miniature scenes various elements could be manipulated to create a three-dimensional scenario in which figures could move. PREDECESSORSĪlthough some scholars have cited the emergence of the peep show as occurring as early as 1437 in Leon Battista Alberti's perspective art, in which transparent colored glass was backlit to project or distort images, others note that voyeuristic peep shows emerged in the mid-seventeenth century with traveling exhibitions. Peep shows in the past often depicted scenes or scenarios of modern life, whereas contemporary peep shows typically depict pornographic scenes intended for adult audiences. Contemporary peep shows also rely on voyeuristic appeal but are not as innocent as their juvenile precursors. Peep shows, or images, scenes, or scenarios viewed through a hole, partition, magnifying glass, or other division of space, have their origin in children's toys, three-dimensional art, and other methods of manipulating space and perspective, such as those used in Japanese rock gardens (Balzer 1998).
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