Zoom Aesthetics

New Forms of Closeness

Such qualities are evident in a livestreamed performance by musician and composer Forbes Graham that occurred in December 2021 as part of the Mobius Artists Group Spiderweb series.1 While Graham regularly plays the trumpet with digital technologies, extending the range of the instrument and inviting new ways to play it, such an event typically takes place on a stage in a theatre, club, or gallery context, where he plays at a designated distance from a seated audience—a clear division of space between audience and performer measured in physical distribution. For this streamed performance, the screen provides such a division while inviting novel forms of engagement through technology. The audience perspective is framed by the webcam in his laptop, which places the camera slightly below eye level, looking up and within arm’s reach. A common distance for verbal communication over livestreaming, the shift of spatial range becomes apparent as he begins to play his trumpet over the camera. The size of the instrument fills the space between his face and the laptop, with the end of the instrument dipping out of the frame of the screen. All we can access are the visual and aural perspective mediated through technology. He manipulates some other technical objects off camera, though it is not possible to observe what he is doing, unlike a stage performance where all his gestures would be visible. We are able to watch his face and fingers as he plays at a distance that is closer than what is possible without a camera present, even closer than the end of the instrument. After his performance, some of the audience members comment on the unusual perspective and the closeness that the technology enables—an intimacy drastically different from a theatre or club scenario. The framing is close, and to use Michelle White’s (2003) phrasing, too close, bringing attention to details usually observed at a distance, while leaving other actions typically visible off camera. These new forms of intimacy are the negotiation of the shared technical and geographic milieu of this aesthetic encounter.

“Sing the Love of Danger”: The Zoom Bomb

Increased engagement with Zoom during the Covid-19 pandemic also brought the Zoom Bomb. During early 2022, I was attending a large, private meeting on Zoom. It was a wellness group that prior to the pandemic would typically meet in-person. At this stage, two years after the start of the pandemic, attending a meeting such as this through livestreaming became a matter of course. What made this one notable though was about fifteen minutes into the speaker’s presentation, loud music began to play. Due to the nature of Zoom’s set up, it is not possible to speak concurrently, as once a person starts speaking or making noise, that microphone dominates the soundscape. The main person speaking at the meeting continued, his phrases cut through with musical cacophonic intervention. We had been Zoom bombed. Used to such interruptions at this stage, the person in the meeting designated for scanning the room blocked the bomber. Shortly thereafter, noise returned, this time accompanied by an explicit pornographic video displaying bestiality. Faces on the screen conveyed shock. The intruder was again ejected from the room, which soon was followed by another intervention. This time there were no visuals, just the sounds of a person belching. A few more attempts were made to interrupt the meeting with noise and loud music, each time blocked until whomever was disrupting gave up their efforts and moved on. While at this stage I had witnessed a few Zoom bombings, usually presented as explicit text in the chat window or sometimes audible interruptions, this was the first time where I saw the utilization of intentionally shocking visual material—a video clip that was meant to cause the most damage possible through its graphic shattering of taboos. The persistence of the attempt also stood out, with the bomber (or bombers?) re-entering the room multiple times, attempting over and over again to disrupt our gathering. The bomber(s) engaged with the technical capacities of Zoom that are meant to facilitate group video conferencing. These capacities include selective presentation of audio and, when in speaker view, enlarging the video of the one producing sound (presumably a person speaking, but could even be someone who accidently makes shuffling noises due to not muting a microphone) to dominate the screen. The Zoom bomb, as an aggressive relational phenomenon, is a technological intervention designed to bombard, attack, and literally disrupt the course of an engagement.2 As such, the content, both visual and aural, associated with such bombs is meant to disturb and offend. Such interventions crack through the psychosocial milieu, re-forming it around its relational interruption.

Experiencing this, I am reminded of Claire Bishop’s descriptions of Italian Futurist performances, or serates, of the early twentieth century. These events, which included painters, poets, and sculptors, were meant to offend the aesthetic sensibilities of the time, challenging their audiences through cacophonic and chaotic displays, which “usually included recitations of political statements and artistic manifestos, musical compositions, poetry, and painting,” modelled on variety theatre (Bishop 2012, 41). The effect of these presentations was an instigation of chaos and antagonism, “with performers and audience making direct attacks on one another, frequently culminating in riot” (Bishop 2012, 45). Such an approach was aligned with the Futurists’ aggressive ideological groundings that supported a drastic break with the past, embraced speed and technology, and treated war as cleansing, later affiliated with Benito Mussolini and Italian fascism. The Futurists engaged with communications technologies, which at the time involved the mass printing of manifestos, flysheets, and press releases before and after serates to ensure that the event was promoted and documented. Bishop emphasizes the significance of this “conflation of the press, promotionalism, and politics” that were integral to these events. More than performance art, they became entanglements of artistic action with mass media technologies (Bishop 2012, 43).

I doubt that the Zoom bomb described above was instigated as an artwork (though considering the interventionist and shocking tactics of some performance artists, it is not beyond the realm of possibilities), and without a manifesto or explicit political agenda, like the Futurists, it is not possible to ascertain the exact motivations for such attacks. The utilization of shocking spectacles with technology, however, enables parallels to be drawn to these two types of disruption, albeit over 100 years apart. Considering the Zoom bomb as an aesthetic and ethical encounter, it is possible to become attuned to the relational capacities of livestreaming technology and the Zoom platform. The meeting I was attending has several precautions in place to preserve the integrity of the virtual space. It is a private meeting that requires a password, there is a waiting room for screening, and all people are muted upon arrival without the capacity to unmute unless enabled to do so by one of the hosts. However, with a meeting that has over 200 people, it is challenging to verify the intentions of all those who attend. This means that screening generally took place after admission and a disruption was made. In addition, the bomber, swarm of bombers, or perhaps tenacious few bombers (since the ability to switch Zoom accounts and names makes it impossible to confirm the number) had the capacity to unmute, which means they may have had access to hosting permissions. The ability to silence or eject a person as they speak or intervene in such a direct manner, through a technological click, is a possibility enabled in the virtual space. While processes of inclusion and exclusion are omnipresent to differing degrees in social structures, the speed and effectiveness of muting and blocking are something particular to the digital realm. Even with such measures in place, the bomber(s) in this instance managed to enter the meeting multiple times, with different names and different tactics of disruption.

The disruption of the Zoom bomb not only draws attention to the capacities of these technologies, but cultivates a disturbing encounter of technologies and living beings. Simondon argues that systems do not exist beyond an individual, but a milieu is constituted through individuation in conjunction with the individual. Emphasis is placed on relation, which when applied to interpreting livestreaming over the Internet highlights the connected nature of the medium that is comprised of a distributed network. Relations occur between individual human beings, but also through and with technical objects, institutions, and other material and geographic factors that comprise this milieu of Internet communication. In addition, the webcam and microphone, as the primary tools used for Internet broadcasting, are not reduced to determinist mediation or simply lauded for the capacity to connect. Instead, these enable a particular techno-aesthetic experience and are modified through the relations of engagement that take place in these performances of livestreaming. Here it becomes apparent how aesthetics is transformative but also entangled with ethics.

These encounters potentially instigate transduction through engagement with technical objects. Transduction is a biological and technological term Simondon uses to describe the process of individuation within a domain. The example he uses to present this process is crystallization, where solid forms emerge from a supersaturated solution that exceed and carry the potential for the crystals, while their creation is also tied to the environment and conditions within which these processes take place. Technical objects mediate, but as Brian Massumi observes, Simondon’s definition of mediation differs from what is commonly used in communication studies, media studies, and cultural studies. Instead, mediation “carries ontogenetic force, referring to a snapping into relation effecting a self-inventive passing to a new level of existence” (Massumi 2012, 32). That is, mediation is not a means of control, but instead functions as a kind of bracketing or framing that influences processes of individuation through relation and co-constitution. These technologies alter how we engage with and relate to each other, inviting different forms of intimacy and interaction, but humans also alter the purpose of technical objects through engagement. These relational engagements are ongoing practices of connection between humans and nonhumans, where agencies comingle and clash.

The initial purpose of the discussed meeting was for people to come together as a collective with the intentions of supporting and taking care of each other with a shared purpose, with livestreaming technologies enabling and supporting such a gathering to occur. The format of the meeting and the means people engage with each other are working with the capacities of the technologies. The Zoom bomber(s), in contrast, present a counter purpose with the intention of disrupting the gathering. The tensions that arise from conflicting agencies reveal an ethics of care that is an ongoing process of interaction, as designated individuals work to remove the disrupters. Technological systems act as mediators of the meeting, with technologies both enabling disruption and its cessation. In this context, the implications of care seem straightforward: the bomber(s) are in the wrong and must be removed as soon as possible. However, such moralistic solutions risk reducing the ethical considerations of technology, where the technological capacities to block the bomber(s) with the click of a mouse have the capacity to restrict other users, thereby potentially countering the collective’s shared purpose. Such relations are situated within the context of material engagement, including technological systems that make such engagements possible. Drawing attention to these ethical implications moves away from a generic understanding of care, which according to Puig de la Bellacasa, thickens its meaning and emphasizes its ongoing relationality, ambivalent complexities, and “situated implications” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 24). In the following section, I apply this approach to the activities of camgirls of the 1990s as a first generation of Internet broadcasters who helped define the medium through their practice yet are often undervalued or discredited as being simply self-objectifying exhibitionists.