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A Polylogue I’m sitting at my desk listening to music not through earbuds but through my open windows. The street’s alive with salsa. It’s definitely not transmedial. You’d have to be here now. I’ve listened to Henry Jenkins talking about transmedia missionaries on Youtube. I tried to listen to someone named Jeff Gomez, who’s also championing transmedia storytelling on Youtube, though he’s in the entertainment industry and not an academic. I’ve got little stomach for all the applause. So many hands, so little variation. If there are indeed innumerable hands clapping along to The Matrix—or “Yes, We Can”—does this necessarily mean a shift in the content of public discourse? Jenkins talks about a transmedia revolution that will wrest control from power structures, whether the government’s or those of the entertainment industry, and allow the storytelling power of “real” people to redefine social priorities. He sees us as moving from a spectator culture to a participatory one, and I agree, but has our constant participation really challenged the old Situationist model of the society of the spectacle? As we real people Tweet and update our status on FB, most of us seem happy to be images, snapshots, even. It seems to me that we have internalized the dominant models of image and discourse, which we then propagate across lo these many platforms, calling them proof (after proof) of our very own unique participation, shot round and round the flattening globe. It makes me think of Neil Postman’s argument that we are simply entertaining ourselves to death, at the cost of losing the habit, if not the ability, to engage in subtle and effective discourse. Ok, I realize that Obama couldn’t have become president without tapping into the phenomenon of transmedia. But there were also a...

We no longer live in the world of 24 hour news. We no longer live in a world of polished spin, of coif and smile, and the confidence scheme wherein the delivery of “news” is a sleight of hand. Theoretically, LiveNewsCameras.com (LNC) does not contain anything revolutionary, or even new. The world of news aggregators is crowded by bullies; all the major names are represented disproportionately, with varying levels presumed and apparent mediation. Equally, the concept of the unedited news feed has been around since the first commercial satellite dishes could pull in network feeds in the 1970s. Equally, there is a noble history of journalists, researchers, and media-junkies who have dedicated themselves to unmasking the propagandists, so why then LNC? Once upon a time, not necessarily when I was a young artist, perhaps before, and perhaps before I knew what name to give it, I decided that it would be a useful skill to know how to produce the “magic effect.” It was at a time when I was obsessively watching all the con man movies I could find. I was a student of that moment, the split, the turn, the thing that artists and theorists and philosophers spend so much time thinking of new vocabulary for. LNC is magic set to 180 beats per minute. Sugarcane distilled. Poppies refined. 169 self-refreshing and streaming screens of news from around the world in which the commercials have been replaced with a peek behind the curtain. News/reality/actuality presented simultaneously and without hierarchy. Ever wonder what Al Jezeera’s election coverage has in common with that of Bristol TN’s Channel 11? (Hint: they both insist on including and over-pronouncing “Rodham.”) There are, though, more profound insights to be had: It would be funny if weren’t so frightening...