Open the Gate: Livestreaming Portals to Unknowing

Posted: November 8th, 2021 | Author: | Filed under: exhibition, fall, installation, mfa-thesis, works in progress | Tags: , , , | No Comments »

You are invited to join me on the internet as I produce Open the Gate: Livestreaming Portals to Unknowing this fall, for my MFA Thesis with Sierra Nevada University’s MFA program in Interdisciplinary Art program.

For this project, I am working with live internet time. Ever since we were forced by health and safety guidelines to stay at home during the Covid-19 pandemic and many workplaces became our homes we lived our lives evermore in front of our screens. This work was developed exclusively considering the meaning in this context. I have created programming for live-streaming on my Twitch channel towards unknowing each day through December 5th as follows:

Monday: Burning
Tuesday: Moving
Wednesday: Day Shifting
Thursday: Evaporating
Saturday: Glitching
Sunday: Rehearsing

Each livestream is an opening, a chance to live time together. This is a kind of ‘time opportunity’ to rest and reconnect with one another and with a way of being that engages a mediated, perhaps underdeveloped, practice of unknowing. Monday’s Burning stream is an opportunity to experience time through energy transfer in a flame as a wick burns through wax, we can connect to a shared way of unknowing flickering light. Tuesday’s Moving stream is a chance to share movement through space- walking with me, or observing other’s walking can connect us to our shared sense of kinetic experience. Wednesday’s Day Shifting stream is a chance to feel the sharing of our sun across the planet. It says goodbye at sunset and the stream holds time until it says hello the next morning. This is when we can experience waiting together through the darkness. Thursday’s Evaporating stream is a way to connect to water’s mutability. We will be watching liquid transform to gas as a ritual anticipation steeped in unknowing at “teatime”. Saturday’s Glitching stream is a chance for us to experiment with ritualizing technological unknowing- here I create a camera loop live or play with computer mirroring and pixel compositions. Sunday’s Rehearsing stream is a chance for me as an artist to share my mind, camera and sound in an attempt to carry and re-carry the week’s events. This word, rehearsal comes from Old German meaning to re-carry, and although it currently connotes a draft version before a final performance, I am working to imagine a rehearsal as carrying forward into the unknown, to a place not unlike death where a hearse carries a body towards a grave for. This livestream is weekly on Sunday when you can communicate directly through me and observe a lag between your screentime and my cameratime. This lag is an important unknowing experience for our distanced relationships.

Open the Gate: Livestream Portals to Unknowing is the culmination of my research into the qualities of time and process during our period of profound isolation combined with mediated relationships (Zoom family holidays, small screened cultural and political events, large and small). My livestreams are an exploration of finding a way to wait and experience unknowing on the internet simultaneously with others. The hopeful practice here is to sustain a waiting anticipation without expectation or outcome, something that might help each of us sense as a transitional feeling or mental state before some real change happens.

When to watch LIVE:
I am live-streaming daily (except Fridays) from now through December. I am live-streaming from New York City through November 29th and will livestream from Yucca Valley until December 5th.

How to watch LIVE:
twitch.tv/parodyofmyself
My twitch channel is free to watch, and you do not need an account to view my livestreams. However, I won’t know you are there and you won’t be able to chat with me or others without an account, so please make one to engage. Alternatively, “lurking” as a behavior that describes a non-engagement that works well with unknowledge, is encouraged for these streams. But please do let me know if you are there in another way- email, direct message, etc. work well to let me know you have joined.

How to get ALERTS on when watch LIVE:
The easiest way is to follow me on Twitch. If you do not have an account, you can create one to follow me. When I go live, followers will get an alert -email, usually. You can also follow me on Instagram where I try to announce once I am going live that my Twitch livestream is on. I occasionally go LIVE on Instagram, but have focused on sending followers towards my livestream twitch link to view. As I persist with this research, Instagram’s role as an audience announcement platform may shrink or grow as I observe changes in the web ecology.


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