Feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed

macOS native app, reclaimed digital displays, Mac Minis, speakers, aircraft wire


What are the aesthetics and politics of infinite distraction and relentless forgetting? What are the cumulative effects of modern media consumption habits through web feeds? As a hypnotic and overstimulating space that is simultaneously hyper-commercialized and intimately personalized, how is this mode of information consumption affecting our capacity to reflect more deeply on what we're seeing? On the web things increase in monetary value the more attention they get... but what value is this to you, as the end user, if it’s specifically designed to waste your time?

"We live in an age of utter media abundance. Like none before us, we can partake of the greatest works in all mediums of all ages. We do not sip from a fountain laboriously supplied by hard-working artists & authors, nor even guzzle from a fire-hose hooked up to a printing press; we are being shot off Niagara Falls. The impact alone will kill us." —Gwern

“Because of the speed of events, there is a real danger that an online phenomenon will already have disappeared before a critical discourse reflecting on it has had the time to mature and establish itself as institutionally recognized knowledge.” —Geert Lovink

“Without cultural artifacts, civilization has no memory and no mechanism to learn from its successes and failures.” —Wendy Chun

The Mac Minis are running a native application built with openFrameworks, python, and the FFmpeg and streamlink command line tools. Each app is actively pulling the most viral livestreams from a popular platform (Twitch, Twitch Creative, Youtube Live, and Younow) and recomposing them on screen. The livestream compositions are superimposed by layers of other visual elements that I made in Photoshop (rather than appropriated from the web) and generated in C++ and GLSL, overall yielding overstimulating moving images with "scrolling feed" qualities, blurring the distinction between the personal, commercial, user-generated and algorithmic.

The displays were obtained from the Gowanus E-Waste Facility in Brooklyn.