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"Appropriate
Technology: Artificial Products, Mediation, and Streaming Media"
Excerpt
Streaming media embody one of the more
prevalent paradoxes of digtial culture: live streaming events
over the Web are simultaneously real-time events (in the manner
that music concerts or theatre performances are), but they are
also saturated with complex notions of distance, absence, remoteness
(technological mediations which include networks, bandwidth, software,
computer interfaces). Here the already complex notion of presence
is infused with and constituted through technological mediation,
a tension inherent within the notion of mediation itself (the
distance or buffering which also establishes a connection). Streaming
media are thus put into a unique space of immediacy (live, real-time
event) and mediation (cybercasting via the medium of computer
and networking technologies). Mainstream, commercial media rarely
even recognize this tension, presenting media as simply transparent
and immediate (we are seing this happen now with the incorporation
of RealVideo). One of the tasks of the artist or cultural activist
would be, then, to highlight and investigate this tension - a
tension not only at the heart of streaming media technology, but
a tension indicative of digital culture generally. |
Bio
Eugene
Thacker teaches technology & culture at Rutgers University, where
he directs [techne] New Media & Digital Arts. He is currently working
on a book entitled "Bioinformatic Bodies: Biopolitics, Biotech, &
the Discourse of the Posthuman." He is a member of Fakeshop and a
contributing editor at The Thing.
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