lifestream

Following the work developed within the field of Networked Performance, this project is a theoretical and practical approach to the possibility of exploring the Internet’s infrastructure, and its content, as a way to (re)think the space we inhabit and working upon, as a whole, instead of assuming a difference between the ‘real’ and the ‘digital’.

LIF3STRE/\M is a series of objects-as-research and intends to be another path on the investigation of the mediation process as a way to explore, in this case, the affordances of collective agency through the political and social potential that exists on surveillance aesthetics and the constant monitorization that we are subject to.

By (consciously?) letting our lives to be monitored and feeding those same sources of monitorization with content, the public sphere transforms into an amalgam of private and intimate interactions that happen through the same channels of mediation.

What are we when we are not?

Do we live in a closed circuit where our attention is purposely deviated from?

How can we act, combining mindfulness and affection, towards the development of a sense of (possible) collective agency?

How can the public space, networked, can also be used for implementation of a collective consciousness?

_Everyone is only in one place (?) (recorded Monday, March 5, 2018) - 60'00"

A networked LIF3STR3/\M of events - time lapse - of several live webcams, available online, selected from different latitudes, combining different countries, cities, time-zones, events, cultural differences… A single layered multi networked narrative that aims at reflecting upon the problematics of surveillance; its potential and the potential of networked systems towards promoting a (possible) collective agency.

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_Stream Test (recorded March 1st, 2018) - 60'00"

Stream Test is a portrait of a live ip webcam and what it sees. It focuses on the device as a subject, the mechanism, and captures the “ocular” witnessing process of life in movement, from a specific place during a period of time, remotely (in)accessible to anyone, providing a ghostly representation of the presence of the individual(s) in contrast with their permanent dissemination.

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_Stream Test #2 (recorded Sunday, March 4, 2018) Rue de Bleury, Montreal CA // Saint Denis, Réunion - 34’

In a place between Montreal, Canada and La Réunion, France (Indian Ocean) this object is an editorialization of a networked conversation between artists Annie Abrahams and Daniel Pinheiro, aiming at structuring this place as a device to reflect upon the possibility of promoting agency between individuals resorting to an pre (or semi) existent architecture.

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_Liminal (recorded Friday, March, 9, 2018) - 9’ (one loop)

As part of this project, is an example/prototype to the possibility of developing networked actions between remote places and explore what happens while transitioning between both sides of a threshold. A low frame rate representation of how we move between monitored locations.

On May 16th, 2018, for one last interaction with the idle camera - in Montreal - an event was prepared and shared via facebook and email for possible interested viewers.
Through a dedicated link (on tumblr) they had access to see this ‘last’ appearance in front of the camera and at the same time were invited to join/engage on a collaborative writing on a framepad also embedded on the page.

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Between 1.30PM and 1.45PM (EDT, Montreal time), coming from an unknown place and going to an unknown place I was present in front of the camera for 15 minutes. For this last appearance I decided to wear a t-shirt with letters in the front where the word “ACTION” appeared (although it was barely readable due to the broadcast quality) and performed different actions throughout the time set. Initially a state of unsettled imobility (inaction) would be triggered into motion by external factors such as, person passing by and/or entering the building, or sounds (e.g. elevator, car passing by), this motion would either set me in a different position or to embody some positions I had witnessed when “looking” at the camera as a spectator in my own privacy. At some point one of those triggers would lead me into approaching the camera and look ‘into’ it. When reaching almost the end I removed each letter from my t-shirt, save the word, and use a mirror to approach - again - the camera, this time showing the “outside” of the device to the, potential, (active) viewers.

These actions somehow relate with the key-concepts (#delimitation #position #distance) of what structures (the digital) space as it appears on the book “On Editorialization: Structuring Space And Authority In The Digital Age” by Marcello Vitali-Rosati; and at the same time takes on inspiration from works addressing communication in the field of Media Art of artists such as Dan Graham, Bruce Nauman, Valie Export, amongst others.

While being exposed, during the residency, to different approaches on trying to understand the materiality of literature on the digital sphere and how most of these approaches seem to be intrinsically connected to modes of translation, of how ‘things’ are translated from one matter to another - considering that we’re talking about the (same) space as a whole >> How can we (re)think this Space (of the web) as of one we inhabit, seamlessly traversing between corporality/materiality and mediation?

How can we use it, collectively, as an emergent/alternate context, as we continue to inscribe ourselves with-in it, through practicing it and queering it in a way that more than being an integrated extension it becomes a space for a poetics of translation… translating - through the different combined mediums that make the Internet - as a way of re-shaping its structure towards a more embodied sense of agency.

“The materiality of a word cannot be translated or carried over into another language. Materiality is precisely that which translation relinquishes. To relinquish materiality: such is the driving force of translation. And when that materiality is reinstated, translation becomes poetry.” — Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing”

The collaborative / collective pad made it possible for the distributed space of the (web)page to be activated simultaneously to the presence of the person in front of the camera. The space was shared and practiced by different people, leading into questioning (among other things) the presence of the human in regards to the machine/technology, concepts such as an ecology of attention, time, and also the sense of collective digitally together (c'est NOUSmérique…).

It is this togetherness that is convoked here, both in the videos made initially and in this ‘last’ moment. Last not because there’s a continuity within the flux that it is not dependent of only us, but it’s a flux fed by a collectiveness, simultaneously producing content for it. It is an experimentation of this space in a dérive mode that will allow to arrive to different places, affecting the space in way that might not be predictable and letting it affect us. Traversing the space between (one place and another) letting it ripple with our presence instead of committing to the structuralization that is (can still be) shaped out of all of our interactions within it.

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March 2018

As an Artist in Residence in the Canada Research Chair for Digital Textualities Lab at the University of Montreal the project aims at investigating one of the premisses of the Lab which is that of the conception of the digital space as a sum of our interactions within it. Taking into consideration the non-dissociation of different spaces and how we let ourselves be constantly mediated between the physical materiality of our surroundings and its immaterial extension(s) it is interesting to think about the infrastructure of the Internet as a repository not only of fixed content but of mutable, ever-growing, hyperlinked content that appears as raw material ready to use and to shape in different perspectives. Resorting to this material, or creating new material from that one, is it possible to develop narratives and interactions that will allow for a better understanding of how we can embody this space in its entirety?

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May 2018

While arriving to the end of the residence, during the ECRIDIL 2018 colloquium, co-organized by the Research Chair and held at Usine C (Montreal, CA) on April 30th and May 1st, I was exposed to several presentations most of them concerning the role of the (physical) book in current society. While at first it was difficult to follow or to establish a correlation between my practice and the very specificity of such discussion one of the presentations had a particular moment that stood as it focused on the idea of the book as a node within a network, this taken from Foucault’s writings on 'The Archeology of Knowledge'.

By applying Foucault’s notion that a book or its contents are a node that are themselves part of a larger network, the (im)materiality of the physical object is translated into a series of elements (references) that surround it and that go beyond its physical format, it is in this (im)materiality that the discussion takes place. What formats, digital formats, are best to show, represent this larger network that is invisibly embedded into the object one sees, reads, holds?

One of the recurrent discussions when thoroughly investigating the in betweeness of something we have clearly a problem with aknowledging that might be part of the same, is that there’s a need for quantifying, representing the invisibility of a timeless, spaceless, region where transition happens. In the specific case of this conference was dedicated to the different formats of the digital edition or publishing that would on one hand extend the physicality of the object but at the same time, in most cases, argue the importance of both ends.In trying to establish a correlation with the body and perceiving it as capsule that is itself - also - part of a larger network, filled with floating, invisible, references and the way this body and/or identity is perceived, the digital body and the physical body are nothing but the same.

The in-dividuation of the self across the network happens within a context where the invisible is translated into texts, images, sounds both representing the individual but establishing connection with others through a process which will correlate sameness even if promoting a sense of otherness.

The body and its inscription within the surface of the digital landscape is representative of the invisibility that fully defines it as a specific identity. The term 'numériques' here describes much better what 'digital' stands for. The constant transformation of the matter and its surrounding invisibility, the interstice between one and the other, is filled with numbers and data that in contexts such as the colloquium are then represented into interfaces, applications, softwares that will somehow enhance the experience of the book (in this case), and will give the reader, the user, a sense of agency within the content. As in the book, that wouldn’t happen… or would it? When reading a book, a normal current book, our mind wonders, our thinking is activated in a certain way by the words that we are reading, isn’t that also part of the augmentation process that is now constantly in debate?

What am I while I’m traversing the space across mediation objects and what do you see?