Performing the Feed (2017)
When I was invited by Sam Hart, Melanie Hoff and Francis Tseng to speak at the Cybernetics Conference in NYC on November 18, 2017, I decided to continue my thinking around network culture and the phenomenon of the feed, which I had begun earlier with “Notes on Feeds.” The entire conference livestream is available here. This piece was later published by Rhizome in its Seven on Seven 10th Anniversary Magazine What’s To Be Done? in May 2018, edited by Nora N. Khan.
“I don’t believe that the post is over—rather, we need to negotiate multiple modalities. We need to resist the new boredom and modulate between fixed and flowing information. Maybe this is how we face new forms of media that are on the horizon, like these predictive videos. They’re generated by a neural network from still photographs. These are one second clips of events that have never happened. Bumpy and janky and sort of frightening. I don’t trust them. And yet I suspect that they’ll eventually evolve into realistic scenes, with ultimate resolution.
Are we ready for that? How will we evolve to watch these? The authors of this research say that they’re training their network to predict plausible futures of static images. Who is training us to perceive them? What happens when these turn into smooth feeds, as I’m sure they will. I’m squinting and I see a not-too-distant future where these dream scenes evolve into total believability, fictional futures that are indistinguishable from live events, detached from their origin, livestreams spun out of thin air.
Are we ready for future feeds that surround us with limitless realities—not simulations, but a present moment that branches into any number of options to be experienced, all real-seeming, all possible, filling up our view forward, forever.
If there is some new, future version of us that better negotiates truth and information in the space of flows, then we’ve got a lot of work to do right now. We already tend to our feeds with great care, loving them as extensions of ourselves.
But we need to see these feeds differently—let’s print them, interrupt them, archive, redistribute, and inhabit them with new agendas. With the help of artists, archivists, and activists, let’s de-focus our gaze and look for breaches, breaks, and leaks that resist smooth flow. Let’s teach ourselves new ways to see. How else to prepare for total uncertainty.”