LiveNewsCameras.com
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 to watch the elaborate telephone game in which news travels from its source to the wide world, at each step becoming more pelletized and less communicative. It is there, rippling across 169 little boxes, and in case you missed it, LNC provides a running commentary, minute by minute accounts by monitors and fans, detailing what and why and how news gets made and disseminated. It is amazing that the copyright holders would allow the fragile shell of their careful presentations to be transgressed in this way.
The result defeats logic, defeats news as we have recognized it, dismisses CNN and BBC as 2/169ths of the picture, replaces authority with consensus and consensus with confusion. At the end, it may sound obtuse. It is, rather, a profound redefinition of human understanding. Complex is simple, 60+ years of television have trained us. Remote controls have acclimated us. LNC is, in part, the fast cut taken to its logical conclusion. It is obvious, and I have yet to witness one viewer being overwhelmed by it.
I like TV the same way I like my parents: they seem at home in my home, but I doubt I would invite them to a party. They are antiquated and insistent. They are comfortable being what they have been. They are boring but reassuring. I love the Internet, intellectually, erotically, illogically, and without reservation. Despite this, or maybe because of it, I am often deeply ashamed of it, especially when it tries to pose as television. LNC is not the crashed simulcast of the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. Neither is it YouTUBE. LNC is not passive and LNC is not social. If LNC were one thing, which it is not, it would be a tool, or a premise, or a model for being.
LNC is not one thing, and so far it has resisted what must be an almost inevitable identity crisis. Alberto Santos-Dumont, visionary pioneer of flight, believed that his invention would lead inevitably to world peace, under the premise that if people could connect to remote populations in person then the sources of their prejudice would be undermined and their reasons for conflict would dissolve. I find this to be the noble if naïve stance of most of the people audacious enough to do something great.
The beauty is that for 16 years Santos-Dumont was right: aircraft flew and peace reigned (even if there was no provable correlation). How long will LNC’s act of naïve nobility last?