Guest Column: On Art In The Real-Time Stream

Driven by rapid changes in technology and, particularly, innovation in social media, we are seeing a transition from static information to real-time data. Real-time data streams are new ways to consume various media forms through data stream providers like Twitter. It can be argued that Twitter is now the de facto real-time message bus of the internet. This new way of accessing, distributing, and communicating via the real-time stream is still playing out, and raises interesting questions about how it affects politics, economics, social, and daily life. But there's also the question of what does the real-time stream do to the aesthetic experience? Particularly when the real-time mediates art or becomes a site for artistic installation or innovation.

The real-time stream is fundamentally a reconfiguration of temporality, a new construction of experience, which is structured around a desire for 'nowness'. But Twitter messages are never marked as 'now', instead they lie already in the past, whether one second ago, one hour, or one day. However, Twitter is nonetheless oriented towards the future, the possibility of something else happening, others in the loop, pure potentiality, or unfolding, which hasn't already happened. This is linked to an aesthetic experience of commitment to a radical now, an experience mediated in real-time through Twitter where users send tweets, twitpics, and twitvids that document the experiential aspects of their lives. So Twitter becomes, like all content-driven platforms, a vicarious experience; both in terms of the person who is tweeting about their experience while, lets say, at an art exhibit, and the vicarious thrills of the followers—some of them located hundreds or thousands of miles away—who view the work through the eyes of the Twitterer.

So what does this mean when art is vicariously viewed? It's not dissimilar, at least formally, from watching an artwork being remediated through a TV. But the difference is that the television camera focuses attention towards the artwork, rarely able to capture the experiential quality of the presenter who, using tried and trusted media structures presents it as either a lecture, a documentary, or a narrative form. Within real-time streams, however, the artwork and the user merge, the pure singularity of the user—their wobbly half-focused photos, their exclamatory tweets, the geo-location updates—is fused with the artwork they are experiencing. The two are therefore presented as one, less an object of attention rather transformed into a happening, an unfolding, or a pure experiential moment.

The other side of the coin, that of artists using the real-time stream as a site or space for art itself is still nascent. It presents particular challenges to the artist, especially in relation to untethering the artwork from the act of tweeting it, more so if the artwork is the collection of tweets themselves. The radical temporality, the short life span of the tweet, also presents interesting new challenges for an artwork that might disappear in the blink of an eye. Additionally, the architecture of Twitter, its retweets, hashtags, URL shorteners, and @mentions, all subtract valuable real estate from the single tweet, which being only 140 characters long, is already a terse real-time messaging format. While some artists have experimented with the medium—Cory Arcangel has appropriated its search function for Great Twitter searches Volume #1 and #2; An Xiao has used it for art projects, like tweeting daily minutiae in Morse code for the Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans Twitter Art Feed, and many artists from different disciplines use it as a soundboard for their work—we have still to see exemplars of art in the real-time stream. But perhaps the way is signposted in the ability of a tweet to remain on the surface of consciousness, to bob and dance across the real-time stream by raising the desire within the user to retweet and @mention it. Perhaps future real-time art will explore the possibilities offered in the statistical clouds generated by the real-time streams of the coming internet.

David M. Berry is Senior Lecturer in Political and Cultural Studies at the University of Swansea, UK. He has a new book out called The Philosophy of Software: Code and Mediation in the Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan) and his previous publications include Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source and he co-authored Libre Culture: Meditations on Free Culture. His research covers a wide theoretical area including culture, political economy, media/medium theory, software studies, actor-network theory, and the philosophy of technology.