Since discovering chatrooms at age 12, she has made subversive appearances on reality TV as well as her own YouTube channel. She explains why ‘in five years, everyone will be showing their vagina on the internet’

I’ve seen more of Ann Hirsch than I have of possibly anybody else on the planet. To be specific, I watched her one-minute film of her vagina “singing” I Feel Pretty, which is brilliant and hilarious and joyful, and makes you feel sad and angry about all the other vaginas on the internet which are shaved, penetrated and exploited. But we’ll get to Hirsch and her vagina later.

We meet at the Zabludowicz Collection gallery in north London, where Hirsch, a digital and online artist, is creating a new installation of Playground, her 2013 play, as part of a group show. There are no vagina videos here. Playground is far less playful but touches on the same issues: how to be female and in an online space, and how and when women can express their sexuality, and at what cost. It is a biographical work – as a pre-teen in the 90s, Hirsch discovered AOL chatrooms which were, at first, a way to talk to new friends. When she was 12, she started an online relationship with a man in his late 20s, which quickly became sexual (although they never actually met).

At the time, she says, she didn’t see it as exploitative – but she was the one who felt ashamed in the years afterwards. “Obviously now that I’m older, I can see this guy preys on young girls so he can manipulate them. As I started to think more about that, I thought: this makes a lot of sense. This is why some men like younger women. There is this idea that [it’s because they’re supposedly] prettier but I don’t think it’s that at all – I think some men like younger women because they can manipulate them and use their power, and they prefer to be in a relationship in which they are dominant.”

Hirsch grew up in Baltimore and now lives in LA. She describes her family background as “conservative”, and says that at the Jewish school she attended, “any girl who was sexual or flirty at all would be shamed by teachers and students”. She was intrigued by her emerging sexuality but says, “I didn’t feel like I could be a sexual person. AOL was a way for me to do that, but in a shameful, secretive kind of way.” At high school, she says, she didn’t spend much time online, but after studying sculpture at university, then video art, she was drawn back to the possibilities of the internet.

Hirsch is one of a number of female artists asking similar questions about what it means to be a woman online. They include Amalia Ulman, whose performance via stereotypical Instagram images (including motivational quotes and selfies in her underwear) lasted for several months, and Angela Washko, who goes into “hostile” spaces such as the online game World of Warcraft and stages feminist conversations. Jennifer Chan’s videos take on gender, Tabita Rezaire is a video and new-media artist whose work looks at power and oppression, and Faith Holland uses porn as a way to look at sexuality and women.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scandalishious

One of Hirsch’s first big projects was Scandalishious – a YouTube channel she set up in 2008 featuring a character (played by Hirsch) called Caroline – and was her attempt to look at two types of women who had emerged on what was then a relatively new site. “There was the woman whose face you never saw, she wouldn’t speak, and all she did was booty dancing for the camera; she was a sexual object with no identity. Then you would have the girls who would talk to the camera but they would never be sexual. My idea for that online identity was to combine those two things, be a person you could see and also dance and be sexual for the camera, which at that time you didn’t really see.”

Caroline, a cutesy hipster who liked to perform sexualised dance routines, became a bit of an internet sensation, picking up hundreds of thousands of views. Was Hirsch surprised? “I was. I was making the videos compulsively and not really knowing why I was doing it. But most of the attention I got was very negative and very scary. It was an intense thing to go through.”

Comments – left by viewers who were unaware Hirsch was putting on a performance – were mostly gendered, remarking on her appearance and whether or not she was attractive.

“If I was a woman of colour, there would have been so many racial stereotypes as well. That’s how the internet operates at its most base; people want to tear you down and silence you. But then I got a lot of positive feedback as well. And I started to get all these young female fans, and that’s what scared me the most, [the idea that] young women are going to want to be like me. But then I was like, so what? I think we want to deny young women their sexuality, but we shouldn’t. The problem isn’t that young girls want to be sexual, it’s that people want to exploit them for it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ann Hirsch on A Basement Affair. Photograph: Basement Affair

By 2010, Hirsch was fascinated by reality TV and the way young women in particular were often portrayed in a way that reinforced stereotypes while also providing fodder for viewers who liked to shame such women. She managed to get herself on A Basement Affair, a show in which a group of young women moved into a house with reality star Frank Maresca and his parents, and tried to win his affections. Hirsch was cast as the “nice girl” by producers, though scuppered that by performing a filthy, highly sexualised rap in front of Maresca and his parents in the “singing round” of the competition.

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In both projects, the YouTube channel and the reality show, Hirsch says she wasn’t doing a parody – it was important to her to really become those women. “Empathy is important in my work and a lot of my pieces have involved me becoming the things that I have grown up going, ‘Tsk tsk, you shouldn’t do that.’ And so, instead of continuing with that feeling, I’ve become that person that the old me would have shamed, and understand what it is to inhabit those roles. With both projects it doesn’t make sense for me to say, ‘I’m above that, I’m an artist.’ No, I’m not, I’m the same. They want to show their bodies [on] the internet, I want to show my body on the internet. But I’m trying to show it in ways that I, personally, don’t see.”

What does she think of Kim Kardashian’s “nude selfie”, which the reality star posted earlier this month? “It wasn’t even nude,” Hirsch laughs. “It had black [censor] bars on it. Don’t give me this clickbait with this ‘nude selfie’ and it’s not nude! I want to see a vagina and nipples. I felt very misled by that.”

What sets Hirsch apart from the young women who are doing it for “real” is that she places herself in the gaps she sees – in Scandalishious, it was the disconnect between the sex object and the human, in the reality show it was subverting the role of the “good girl”. In her most recent work, last year’s Horny Lil Feminist project, comprising a series of short videos, it was putting her vagina on an internet full of vaginas (not all the videos are of Hirsch’s vagina). “The dominant way women are viewed on the internet is through pornography. I wanted to present an alternative way to look at a woman’s body other than through oppressing her, degrading her, having her look a certain way, act a certain way. There’s a lot of humour in these videos; it’s a vagina in the context of me as a human being. You get a real person.” She has been told that men have run screaming from a gallery in New York that was showing one of her videos. “They can’t deal with it because they want it to serve them. I think it goes back to this idea of power and dominance, and if a man can’t have a vagina on his terms he doesn’t want it at all. It’s not shaven, it’s not pornified and he doesn’t want to see it because that means it belongs to the woman it’s attached to and not to him.”

In 2008, when Hirsch was making her YouTube videos, she believed the blossoming selfie and vlogging culture would be a chance for all kinds of women to express themselves. “I had these utopian notions that now women can broadcast ourselves instead of relying on TV and film, we can portray ourselves and this is going to be great for women and minorities – we get stereotyped all the time. But the reality of what happened isn’t what I thought.” The “like” economy, where some people get huge amounts of attention on sites such as YouTube and Instagram, mainly by being young, thin, white and perceived as attractive (and often showing themselves in a “sexy” way) reinforces many of the more negative ideals, says Hirsch. “Now, as a woman, how do I show myself online [in a way] that feels like it’s moving a conversation forward, doing something new and showing women in a way that they’re not normally seen?” She smiles. “I’m sure that in five more years, everyone will be showing their vagina on the internet.”

Emotional Supply Chains is at the Zabludowicz Collection, London, from 24 March–17 July 2016