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ITS BETTER LIVE ...

"Streaming" is the term given to the transmission of audio and/or video by internet in real time. This article will explore some of the implications of wide access to streaming technology for artistic and social practises.

 "Para encontrarnos y hablar de los detalles del streaming para el dia 10 de junio (mesa redonda en el CCCB y concierto en el Forat de la Vergonya) puedes pasarte un dia ... "

Messages like this are every day more common in the hazy intersection between technology, culture and activism. A small team of dedicated streamers are turning up at events all over the world and starting to send audiovisual data back to their colleagues. And out of this necessity has emerged a variety of free software tools that configure a people's network - the 3rd audiovisual sector (neither private nor state but civil society), growing gently in the shadows cast by the brilliant light of stock mergers and patents. 

In the year 2000 participants at the net.congestion festival in Amsterdam called for a "network of shared streaming media server resources, a network that could develop into a world-wide facilitator of artistic and tactical streaming media projects. This is an idea that needs to be pushed with great determination. "(1)

This network now exists - it is called GISS and is a server ring (2). A global distributed communications infrastructure open to all. The long hours of coding be a key group of coders and patient testing by a distributed network of volunteers and coders are bearing their fruit.

The codec used by GISS is Theora (xiph.org) - the video layer of OGG of which the audio layer is the Vorbis compression (a free alternative to mp3). The creation of the first and only truly free codec (3) - no patents or copyrights - has a profound political sense and breaks away from the RealMedia proprietary systems of the early streaming days back in the late 90's. The freedom and non-patentability of the codec and the icecast server is fundamental to the creation of the social layer of international communications network.

We have to take a long term view and assure that our work cannot be taken over by anybody, that it exists for the people and by the people. Streaming and realtime independent media will begin to take even more importance as falling fuel supplies force petrol and kerosene prices up and travel starts to become more expensive. Technically the system is working now (june 2006.) Last month the 0.2 version of the java applet Cortado was released permitting any user with a browser and java installed - i.e almost everybody with access to a computer and sufficient bandwidth - to receive a broadcast using Theora. 

On the other hand everyday it becomes easier to become a streamer - install your own system, use commercial software like Quicktime or a bootable CD like Dynebolic or the APO33 cd (4). FFmpeg2Theora is a simple command line tool that streams from a firewire equipped DV-Cam and PD users have the theonice object. Guerilla teams spreading out over the world ...   (though like all voluntary movements everybody does what they can with the time and resources available to them).  

GISS has already been used to cover numerous social events like World Social Forums - for example Yves Degoyon and Lluis Gomez i Bigorda in Portoalegre, Brazil - as well as provide the channel for artistic activities like the Placard Festival (a pioneering streaming festival started by Erik Minkinnen and friends) or a dance performance between Arizona and Sevilla set up by Chaser in the context of Bauhaus Catedrales. Tati & Rama used GISS to stream the Prologue meeting, in Vienna, organised by Marina Gržinić (5) - some of the girls there i knew also (nuns with guns) and we chatted by IRC. It was like being there, almost.

IRC is short for Internet Relay Chat and is the other, inseperable, aspect of streaming - absolutely fundamental in the organisation and communication of a stream. The interactive part, where the streamers and participants do the setup, the testing and communication during streams. It is a way of asking questions, getting URLs related to the stream going on and the basic social space of online life. Apart from the formal or technical aspects of streaming, there is also the development of a form of organisation, international, remote, non-hierarchical, rhizomatic. A good example was the flisol event in may 2006 or the fadaiat medialab of june 2005.

"Pienso en un amplio movimiento nacional e internacional para la diseminación de la cultura libre a través del software libre, por el abaratamiento del hardware, por la construcción de redes y territorios autónomos de conexión entre personas y grupos, por la implantación de espacios públicos de acceso wi-fi a la Internet, por la globalización del conocimiento y del arte, por la defensa de la diversidad cultural y
por la libertad de los cambios múltiples. Finalmente, trabajamos por una política pública de banda ancha y autonomía digital del ciudadano y de las comunidades." Gilberto Gil, Barcelona, May 2006

Today tatiana is streaming from Chequepoint squat in amsterdam. I knew about it because we met in the #madiaq chat - actually she switched it on for me. i'm seeing people walking past with umbrellas. Nothing happens, just the sense of a rainy afternoon in holland. The camera pans around the room, some tables, a boy called Alexei Blinov sitting behind a portable computer. He's a temporary resident of Chequepoint - doing stuff with hive programming (raylab.org). And then back to the passers by in the rain.

Nothing happens but everything happens. I have a feeling for that time, that moment in amsterdam. there is no drama and no story, but there is a SENSE of place. Like Thomas Kohner's video performance of the subtly shifting snow taken from webcam fotos.

Xname is one of the active people at Chequepoint and promoter of the d.r.0p. <Developer in Residence Project>. She studied semiotics  in Bologne, has worked with various known artists like for example Yves and Jaromil. She makes audiovisual performances, and forms part of the Streamtime collective. THe VJ & DJ skills applied to a next level of media - image and sound files get mixed with remote streams - its the
realtime skills applied to media, our hours of nightclub training serving us well for setup and agility and hand crafted software.

The Streamtime performance at fadaiat in 2005 - piloted by Eleonora Oreggia - was a heady vision of what the future of streaming performance could look like - the fragility of real time making itself felt at every moment, political messages combined with art and reflections on communication (6). "We want more voices" says Jaromil (7) at some point in the transmission - speaking from Catania - and this reflects very accurately one of the promises of streaming and internet media, both politically and artistically.

More voices, yes, there is space for us all, from the very public to the very private. The "hurloir" (8) project set up by thierry fontaine and various collaborators is a very simple installation which consists of microphones installed in a public space and speakers in another public space. The most recent was between Montevideo (Uruguay) and Le Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Some speakers are invited but most of the time the microphones are left open for the public to intervene.

At the other end of the scale Ricky (9) tells me of how he stays in touch with his Lucrecia in Medellin - all day the webcam and skype are plugged in and left open. A daily intimacy is developed that, while unable to replace real physical intimacy, develops the psychic connection thousands of kilometres away. I remember the impact of having coffee with jaume, IRC in between, as i got up in Paris and he in Barcelona. 

 And it is here where streaming is so different from television or radio and why the models are often not transportable. The creation of a show that anybody could watch is the domain of television techniques and there are times when this model is appropriate - like in the projects of Dani Miracle or LaTele from Okupem Les Ones ! (10) - especially from the point of view of a mass access that is still not a reality for internet in many parts of the world.  Access for all needs to be a social priority through hacklabs or free cultura points (as they call it in brazil) - its unrealistic to think that everyone in the world can have a computer but that every village or barrio could be equipped is not so idealistic - television achieved that penetration in a short period.

There are time when television is an appropriate model - reporting, informing - and there are times when one wishes that, at minimum, some streamers would learn from it and  really think & work on what is being streamed, beyond the mere fact of connection. But it can also be a very misleading comparison and reduces the possiblities immensely. The model of television is not just a question of content but of social structures and creating monetary value out of time through advertising. Streaming, especially that based in free software, completely sidesteps this model. Bandwidth is plentiful and, once installed, cheap. There can be as many emitters as there are receivers. Time takes on a completely different sense, opening the way to intimate media - an area in which the porn industry has been a precursor. An audience of one is enough. 

After that its entirely a social question. Who watches your emission depends completely on your ability to inform people and on the importance that each gives to that content. Usually streams are archived and many argue that this is possibly the most important part, permitting access from anywhere in the world at any time. But of course it misses the element of live. And it is to this that I would like to return.

There is something undefinibly important in the live, feelings that are generated in the participants that are completely different from a pre-recorded media. Sure, the information is the same. But psychically the experience is different, without danger, without uncertainty. Intuitively i feel that there is a vast area opening up here for artistic investigation - building on the real time a/v movement, adapting those skills acquired, intimacy, accesibility.

Nurit Bar-shai's project "Nothing Happens"  (11) is a performance that lasts for a week or two. A robotic arm pushes an object off a shelf. Each click received from a remote interaction results in a micro movement of the robotic arm - until one day it will fall. Zach Lieberman told me about the project and described to me the disconcerting sense of little machines reacting to remote input - having dinner one day in her appartment and the robot moves a little and you know someone has connected - an eery anonymous presence has made itself real in your intimate space, an intentionality, but disembodied, like a poltergeist. This SENSE of presence, this elusive feeling that somebody is with us although not is one of the most fascinating elements of realtime internet activities.

Presence, sense. Words more usually used in talking about spiritual or artistic activities than media. Ambient media, a radically different approach to media - we are so accustomed to the show - to seperate our art from our daily life, to go to a place. Micro-art, maybe artists like Erwin Wurm or Marc Vives & David Bestué with their "Accions a Mataró" i "Accions a casa" can give us hints to what could be this ambient media :

"Accions a casa és la continuació d'un treball anterior, Accions a Mataró (Visions de Futur, 2002), traslladant l'escenari dins els límits d'un pis de l'Eixample. Són 107 accions emmarcades en el terreny del privat, de la intimitat, que localitzen alguns elements domèstics per donar-los vibilitat, mostrar la seva petita història i les seves contradiccions. L'objectiu és redefinir les nocions de públic i privat, així com d'intimitat, amb accions com disfressar-se de paret, repetir una performance de Bruce Nauman o construir una font ornamental a la pica de la cuina. Accions a casa és un inventari d'intervencions i objectes que dóna visibilitat a la intimitat de la vida privada, revisada des del potencial creatiu i trasgressor del quotidià." Marc Vives.

Intuitions of future art forms and ways of communication. Between the micropolitics of everyday life and the communication of the social movements another reference to the image, another relation to communication, another space for art and society.

(Thanks to Vale, Tati, Alejo for comments  ...)

-------notes--------

(1) http://acoustic.space.re-lab.net/re-netcongestion.php 

(2) giss.hackitectura.net . A server ring is a series of servers connected together so that once the bandwidth of one is used up the client connection is automatically moved to the next server.

(3) seems that new free codecs are currently being developed also Dirac (BBC) and Snow (ffmpeg related)

(4) apo33.org & dynebolic.org

(5) giss.hackitectura.net/flisol , http://endanza.org/bauhaus/, http://leplacard.org,  http://esc.mur.at/06prologue-symp.html

(6) http://fadaiat.net/video/fadaiat_2005/live_streams/live_22_06_05/
documentation
http://observatorio.fadaiat.net/tiki-index.php?page=m05_media_lab_giss

(7)  http://dyne.org - one of the earliest to grasp the revolutionary potential of "everybody a streamer" and develop the open source MUSE software at the beginning of the century to enable audio streaming in the .ogg format.

(8) http://hurloir.net

(9) member of joystick (http://jstk.org)

(10) http://neokinok.tv , http://www.mangorodja.org , http://www.okupemlesones.org

(11) http://itp.nyu.edu/archive/show/spring2005/detail.php?project_id=254