Notes on Lifestream : what is a second to boredom
I am delineating the boundaries of an idea and, as always, it's a hard thing to compartimentalize because everything reaches everywhere, every thing is everything is on fire.
This one idea stems from a diffuse feeling, less defined than a diagnosis, certainly less developped and reduced than a framework. Imprecise in certain corners and expansive at the edges.
I've dubbed it "lifestream". I think I stole the term from somewhere (rn i just found the LOT2046 lifestream, maybe it's from there).
Lifestream, so far, feels like approaching the livestream and streaming as a cultural form in its own right, the same way photography or cinéma or painting or prose are their own cultural forms with their accepted legacies, critical touchstones, personalities and failures.
A recurring observation since the end of the 90s has been the feeling that "things are accelerating" which I wouldn't attribute to any millenarian conjonction but rather to information technologies and you already know where this is going, I'm not going to focus on that aspect. I am much more interested in the condition of streaming : The Livestream as a cultural form is found first and most obviously in surveillance, the history of command and control mechanisms for logistical or security purposes and therefore in voyeurism.
I have no firm axes here just insights that relate to a Cultural Form that works to procure the continuous mediation of information through time.
Some of the things that need to be dug in include : the fact that QAnoners at the capitol livestreamed their excursion, as did numerous mass shooters in the last years, the fact that certain people've had to rely on camming to live, the beast that is twitter, aggregators and vectoralists, the cost of surveillance technology relative to command and control mecanisms in large bureaucratic structures which pair layered mediation with on-demand data production/"extraction" (and the complex financial arrangements that condition the processing of that data), and a lot of others that will widen my library a bit more.
The best way to pinpoint a cultural forms' skeletal particularities (ie: what problem space its design and evolution invites) is in its presumed failures to fulfill the ends of the author.
This is how Gysin-Burroughs' cut up method prefigures the Hypertext and Machine Learning poetry in its ramblings and post-stream of consciousness nonsense where meaning happens between the audience and the text rather than in either author or audience.
Livestreaming too, calls to cuts and breaks, but of a different caliber : streaming is always about continuity after all, it sidesteps cinéma's exceptional temporality (time at the Movies' is not regular/everyday time) and in a sense Netflix and youtube are a critical junction between lifestream and cinema in their continuous flow of available videos, the fact is that you can summon Netflix anywhere you have a screen which allows you to fill your occupational void with content, a filler, visual noise.
But livestream has a harder time than cinema in hiding its proximity to perversity(yet) and the need to hide itself behind false pretenses to High Art value is generally memed out of existence, instead it already has a direct explicit relation to porn (filth has always been at the forefront of medium experimentations because cheaply produced media is ripe for experimentation divorced from the need to curate an audience : the audience will always be there, you can just fuck around, at least the milieux lowered costs for the "creatives" when media access had higher barriers of entry than the internet).
This felt true before : an audience will be there for CCTV footage, an audience will be there for camming, an audience will be there for vidya streamers. But the pandemic and its subsequent lockdown measures meant a sizable portion of the global population have had to work from home, at their own desks, interacting through proprietary or open source software depending on the moments and allegiances.
Have people engaged Lifestream proper then ? I'd need to define it before I can give an answer and it's really in the particulars and the failures that an artform reveals itself.
Being late for the start of the class or too early and waiting in front of a loading black screen, maybe this is lifestream : a long and slow descent through something that feels expected and unusual at the same time.