Patternmaking: Techno-Aesthetics of Mundane Intimacy

The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes Covid-19, is a living, agential being: a “positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus with epithelial cell and respiratory system proclivity” (Machhi et al. 2020). It spreads rapidly from human to human, carried in droplets passed through coughing, sneezing, hand contact with eyes or mouth, and contaminated surfaces. From the lungs, it spreads through blood to other organs, including the kidneys, liver, muscles, nervous system, and spleen. Since the initial outbreak, vaccines have been developed and there are various therapeutic care options, but the virus also evolves as it spreads, producing variants. As a living, agential being, the virus is not a fixed entity, but undergoes processes of transduction and individuation. The Covid-19 pandemic revealed human interdependencies and shared vulnerabilities, making such relational connections undeniable. These interdependencies and vulnerabilities do not just emerge in regard to biological entities. Ruha Benjamin refers to Covid-19 as a “social disease” that also reveals the inadequacies of shared systems of world-making where “ableism, racism, sexism, classism, and colonialism work to eliminate unwanted people” (Benjamin 2022, 10).

What does this have to do with the primary focus of this book: livestreaming? This short book began during the Covid-19 pandemic as part of an inquiry into engagement with livestreaming as a significant means of synchronous connection for many. It shifted from being, prior to the pandemic, a tool used when necessary, though begrudgingly, to the norm of interaction. What these uses of livestreaming revealed, however, was an undeniability of interdependencies with technical systems and shared vulnerabilities that have already existed. The relations experienced through livestreaming are different than those experienced otherwise, which can be said of the phenomenology of relating through and with technical objects generally. This difference of experience evoked a curiosity in me, not just in how it impacted us in the moments of engagement, but how this influenced our becoming together. Therefore, I end this book with the discussion of a performance artist, Ayana Evans, who began engaging with livestreaming over Instagram during the first Covid-19 lockdown of 2020. Evans’s performance practice is rooted in live, in-person engagement with her audience—she regularly instructs audience members to carry her or hold her and welcomes participation in shared actions such as doing jumping jacks or push-ups together. However, when public health restrictions prevented in-person performances from taking place, she engaged with livestreaming in order to continue producing art. Different from producing performances to camera, which is its own genre of artmaking, livestreaming enabled the dynamic interaction with her audience that performance art affords. Through this process, Evans does not just engage with technical objects, but through her techno-aesthetics of mundane intimacy, she engages with an ethics of care, functioning as what Benjamin (2022) refers to as a patternmaker: one who creates new patterns of being and becoming together.

Evans starts her first streamed performance of her five-week “Quarantine Series,” New York Living (April 2020), wearing her signature yellow zebra-striped catsuit and full makeup.1 She holds the smartphone close to her face, which like other streams discussed thus far, makes the camera too close. The smartphone is in selfie mode, which utilizes the front-facing camera to enable the streamer to view themselves on the screen while shooting. She quickly breaks down illusions of a hermetically sealed performance space, speaking to her audience and asking if enough people are present for her to begin. She then gives a brief tour of her studio apartment, moving the smartphone camera rapidly around the room. It is impossible to get a full sense of the apartment’s size and layout from the framing on the screen. Instead, this sequence emphasizes the confinement of the space through the inability to stand back. Evans grabs her window blinds, stating that she is redecorating and that these actions are part of the performance. She is conscientious of the virtual audience’s presence and need for staging when creating a performance, but she does not hide the labor that goes into setting up her space as she prepares for her actions in and out of the camera frame as part of the stream. She engages in mundane chatter that is intimate and personal, drawing connections with the dispersed virtual audience. Evans names specific individuals who text her as she performs, highlighting the indiscernibility of life and art. After putting on a pair of black heels, Evans picks up the window blinds and stands on a chair, looking down at the camera as the height of her body fills the frame. She waves the blinds like a flag, then begins to cut them. The blinds come apart in her hands, hitting objects as she waves them back and forth with her gestures becoming increasingly frantic. Her interactions with the blinds draw attention to the confinement of the space and camera frame, as the cacophonous sound blends with music playing in the background. At one point, she directly addresses her audience and encourages them to post emojis. She speaks of her recent challenges of being sick (Evans had contracted Covid-19 during March 2020, when much about the virus was still unknown) and how the university that employed her at the time did not pay enough to cover her medical insurance, alluding to the challenges that precarious academic staff face in the United States. This combination of seemingly unrelated performance gestures with social critique adds affective weight to the breaking down of the blinds, an object that becomes increasingly unwieldy the more she tries to deconstruct it. She poses with the blinds, wearing them as a sculptural garment, then brings her hand close to the camera and shows a cut she received from the action, which she cleans with a banana peel. The performance ends when Evans turns off the camera.

Evans does not just perform to the camera, but with livestreaming technologies. The camera is not a means of documentation, but the technical objects and systems of the smartphone and social media open a virtual site of performance and mediate the relations that take place within this shared techno-geographic milieu. Through this process, she cultivates aesthetic encounters that offer different means of engaging with these technologies. Evans’s streams can be found on social media platforms, where she engages with technological affordances to facilitate interactions with her virtual audience. In certain ways, her works are evocative of social media content creators, particularly her engagement with an aesthetics of mundane intimacy. These aesthetics of mundane intimacy are not just a stylistic decision based on the performer’s choices, as techno-aesthetics are connected to the technical objects of livestreaming. Through this process, Evans functions as a patternmaker. Not only does she alter the patterns of content online through her aesthetic encounters, as her work stands apart from other social media content, but she also introduces new patterns of social relations that are political and ethical, even when the content is not explicit as such.

Instagram, which Evans used to stream her Quarantine Series, has affordances that simplify the process both for producing and watching livestreams. In order to go live on Instagram, someone only needs to click the option on a screen and the stream begins. The interface displays the stream in portrait format, which is also the way it is presented. Even though it is possible to stream from either the smartphone’s back- or front-facing camera, the portrait mode frames and displays the human face most effectively. That does not mean that all streamers will engage with the technology in this manner, but the formal and material qualities of the technical objects invite this type of interaction. Instagram streams are also designed to be viewed on a smartphone device. Followers receive notification that a stream has begun, unlike Zoom which requires invitations and specific links. The small screen of the smartphone is held in the palm of the hand, designed to be engaged with in less than arm’s length. The smartphone has a touchscreen as an interface, which is tapped and stroked by the user whose fingers caress the glass. If there is already a distinctive kind of intimacy to Internet broadcasts through the closeness of the camera, the smartphone invites yet other kinds of mundane intimacy through its affordances.

This intimacy invites different types of audience engagement from the gallery context. During livestreams, and particularly on Instagram, audience members participated through their shared virtual presence, making comments and observations that reveal inner monologues or chattering among each other about the actions, which would be considered rude or inappropriate in a gallery context but is commonplace within social media. Evans observes how Instagram also enabled her to extend her audience geographically and include people from different spheres of her life, as family members from across the country were able to now witness her perform live. She notes how those who would tune in regularly developed a bond over time, coming to know each other within this virtual space.2 As a result, there is a means of participating in performance for both artist and audience that differs from the in-person context.

“Masks, Gloves, Soap, Scrubs”

In her final performance of the Quarantine Series, Evans both directly engages with social media content while standing apart from it. Like her previous performances of the series, the image is framed in portrait style and is in selfie mode. The phone moves as she handles it and interacts with a material off-camera—the crinkles and stretching noise of tape. Evans tapes her smartphone to the ceiling, commenting on how it serves a similar function as a drone, providing a bird’s-eye view of her bed. For the first part of the performance, music begins to play, with lyrics reflecting the new material reality of Covid-19: “masks, gloves, soap, scrubs, masks, gloves, soap, scrubs.” The song is by drag queen Todrick Hall. Evans, wearing her yellow zebra stripe catsuit, red heels, and a feather boa, dances and poses with masks and blue gloves while lying down in bed. She then pretends to spray a cleaner around her space, dancing in relation to the music. Comparing Evan’s livestreamed performances to Todrick Hall’s music video highlights significant aesthetic differences between these two forms of online media.

Hall’s music video opens with them standing in a bedroom, the shot framed in portrait format. This video does not fill the frame of the screen, but instead there is black space later filled with the videos of other people dancing. The video is well edited to the pace of the music, comprised of footage shot on smartphones later collaged. Video tiles shift and change in rhythm to the music, with colors at times pulsating in the background. Some dancers wear color-coordinated costumes and present their moves with a choreographed flourish. Other dancers include people in very casual clothing, making it evident that they have not left the house for some time, while others are drag queens in full dress. In contrast to the choreographed moves of the first part of the video, these latter dancers present gestures that relate to the lyrics—spray for me spray for me, fold clothes for me clothes for me, get away from me away from me away—presenting their actions in comedic and exaggerated ways. The video, song, and various performers are playful and humorous, which was common for many videos circulating in social media at this time, coping with and providing relief for the extreme, ongoing stress of the pandemic. Hall’s video is edited to emphasize its pithy humor, encapsulating a condensed performance that is entertaining, designed to appeal to large audiences, and to go viral, which this particular video did.

In contrast, Evans’s streams do not involve such features of post-production, as she slips between performed actions through unedited improvisation of the livestream. Evan’s differentiating qualities become even more explicit in the second part of the stream, as she transitions from the more recognizable gestures of Hall’s music video to her own idiosyncratic actions which involve her interacting with food items, including cinnamon swirl toast and a banana. Evans eats the food, throws it to the ceiling, stuffs it into her mouth, and rubs it onto her face. At certain points, she holds her hand close to the camera, squishing the banana, though the shot is out of focus, as she is too close for the smartphone camera to properly adjust. The camera and screen invite a closeness with the performer, where she connects with multiple individuals simultaneously with the same gesture. Evans takes advantage of the distinctiveness of digital intimacy.

Part of her process of streaming performances involved experimentation with what worked well on camera but also live. This process involved inevitable moments of failure, but also enabled Evans to explore ways of engaging with technical objects and her audience. For instance, through the experiences of livestreaming regularly, Evans realized that contrasting the framing of her actions between close-up and far away in the frame of the shot did not work well over the smartphone camera, with audience members losing interest as Evans stepped back. Other shots, such as extreme close-ups of the eye and holding a pair of scissors close to the face conveyed a sense of risk that gave rise to audience responses, despite the fact that this gesture posed no harm to her.3 Unlike the cam girls, who hacked and modified technical objects to repurpose them for webcasting, the streaming technologies of today are designed for broadcasting online, presenting a more accessible yet technically closed system. However, as noted in the introduction, this shared techno-geographics milieu is not just material, but also the immaterial relations that connect to broader social and cultural systems.

Aesthetics of Mundane Intimacy as Transformative

Evans’s streamed performances present a capacity to transform the everyday, as artist and philosopher Adrian Piper does in her interventionist Catalysis series (1970–1972). In this series, Piper presented socially offensive, understated interventions, including soaking her clothes in raw eggs, vinegar, milk, and cod liver oil for a week, and then wearing these garments on the New York City Subway during rush hour (Catalysis I); shopping for gloves and sunglasses at Macy’s while wearing a shirt coated in white paint with a cardboard sign that states “Wet Paint” (Catalysis III); dressing in conservative business attire and riding public transit with a towel stuffed in her mouth and sticking out (Catalysis IV); and walking around the Metropolitan Museum of Art wearing a tight skirt and heels while popping bubblegum so that it coats her face while carrying a handbag full of ketchup (Catalysis VII). In these performances, which were presented outside the gallery context and without indication that these actions were art, Piper turns nonart objects and scenarios into aesthetic encounters. Art here is not a reflection of society or representation of it, but an intervention into social relations, which as aesthetic encounters enables different means of perceiving and understanding these relations while modifying through action. Even though these performances took place in public spaces where strangers tend to maintain distance through social convention, Piper’s interventions infiltrate these boundaries through her sensory offenses, inviting unexpected intimacy.

Like Piper, Evans’s performance practice involves highlighting social interactions through aesthetic interventions, twisting these interactions (which for the “Quarantined Series” include virtual social interactions) revealing shared systems. The gestures and actions may be rooted in mundane intimacy, but also constitute what art theorist and critic Jack Burnham terms systems aesthetics. Burnham (1968) first coined the phrase during the late 1960s in response to the increased emphasis on systems thinking in the mid-twentieth century, including cybernetics. Systems aesthetics was a means by which artists adopt the logic of systems thinking and “even directly infiltrate existing systems to transform them from within” (Gosse and Stott 2021, 5).

These interventions can function as what Ruha Benjamin describes as patternmaking: “if inequity and injustice are woven into the very fabric of society, then each twist, coil, and code offers a chance for us to weave new patterns, practices, and politics . . . new blueprints. The vastness of the problems we face will be their undoing when we accept that we are patternmakers” (Benjamin 2022, 283). Such practices include grand gestures, but also, and perhaps even more importantly for Benjamin, the subtle everyday interactions that comprise daily relations on a micro level. Throughout her performance oeuvre, Evans’s repurposing of mundane objects and actions create atypical scenarios for social interaction that reveal prejudices and biases with focus on the impact of systemic racism on Black women and femmes (shakur 2018; Rodney 2020). For instance, she makes the labor of Black women visible through prolonged durational periods of repetitive physical exercise in a yellow zebra catsuit and heels, as in the ten-hour performance Throwing Hexes (2017), or presenting such exercises in atypical scenarios, as in her series Stopping Traffic (2016, 2020), where she performs chair dips in the middle of busy streets wearing an evening gown. Like Piper’s Catalysis series, Evans’s interventions test the limits of conventions and challenge the constructions of these conventions. A continuation of her nonvirtual actions, Evans’s livestreamed performances exist as part of the new biological, geographic, social, and technological milieu of Covid-19, where engagement with the techno-aesthetics of mundane intimacy enable system interventions.

Evans describes on her website that when she began livestreaming performance, she did not just try to recreate her habitual participatory performances for video, but approached it as a problem that arose from her immediate circumstances (Evans n.d.). As noted in chapter one, Simondon refers to transduction as individuation in process, which occurs within a physical domain. He states: “transduction does not go elsewhere to seek a principle to resolve the problem of a domain: it extracts the resolving structure from the very tensions of this domain” (Simondon 2020, 15). To consider Evans’s livestreamed performances in this way, her practice engages with the physical domain—including her geographic locality, the Covid-19 virus, her body, and technical objects—as well as the social structures of racism and misogynoir in the United States, in order to face the problem that emerged for many people at this time: how to interact with people when needing to stay physically distant from others? There are immediate ethical implications here, as livestreaming became a means to restrict the spread of illness, but this is only a fraction of the possibilities of ethical relations that livestreaming introduces. Treating livestreaming as a performed aesthetic encounter that is relational and technological not only considers who we are, but who we have the potential to become, thereby also making it a speculative ethical encounter to imagine what is possible.

What it means to engage with each other is modified through relations with technical objects. In her response to pandemic restrictions, Kathleen Lynch laments how lack of physical engagement and touch “eliminated a key means by which we cocreate each other in intimate nurturing relations” (Lynch 2022, 216). Lynch argues that such relations are de-physical, with digital technologies unable to effectively fulfill the deficit, despite the ongoing efforts to do so. While I acknowledge the significance of these points, especially when technologies could be used to take on caring responsibilities as a replacement for humans due to advancements in machine learning, sensor technologies, and robotics, I challenge Lynch’s assertion that such relations are de-physical. Rather than being de-physical, such relations involve a different kind of physicality and intimate relationality, as Evans’s practice makes evident. Perhaps the issue here is not the inability of technologies to fill a deficit of touch, but the desire for these technologies to do so in a similar way that occurs with in-person physical touch. Here the consideration of livestreaming as a distinctive aesthetic encounter can enable ways of imagining other ways of relating with and through technology, ones that engage with and acknowledge particular material existences, agencies, and individuations of such objects and systems for a differentiating ethics of digital touch.

Exceeding Quantification

As a performance artist, Evans does not present her actions with the intention of simply entertaining her audience, capturing their attention to go viral. Generally, when content creators present such gestures, videos are edited in order to highlight impact and presented in a manner that minimizes discomfort to engage with the widest audience possible, as is evident with Hall’s music video. As livestreams, Evans’s videos are not edited, and like performance art that takes place in a gallery, the unfolding of the actions over time evoke a range of emotional responses—possibly transitioning from confusion and discomfort to pleasure and anticipation with potential moments of boredom—as the audience comes to terms with what is being witnessed, experiencing it as an aesthetic encounter. Performance art enables Evans to produce encounters that are thick in complexity through her idiosyncratic actions, engaging with materials and a gestural language that she has developed through her practice as an artist. Noel Fitzpatrick argues that such aesthetic experiences exceed quantification as “there are modes of mediation in the world which lie outside measurability and calculation” (Fitzpatrick 2021, 124). Within this context, technologies are engaged with differently in order to “enable reflection, deliberation, conflict and reason” (Fitzpatrick 2021, 124). Evans is a patternmaker, which include the visual patterns like the yellow zebra stripe of her catsuit and other stylistic considerations in the staging of her performances, but also the repurposing of everyday objects and playful gestural actions as exploration, her experimentations with livestreaming technologies, and her ways of connecting to others and with others, all constituting processes of transindividuation. Meaning, therefore, cannot be simply extracted from her work, but instead requires a viewer to sit with and engage with it in ambivalent and ambiguous ways that cannot be easily quantified. In addition, there is a gap between the range of aesthetic sensations a viewer may experience and what can be captured through social media metrics, with the latter only enabling viewers to input comments or hit the like button. This gap is significant as it maintains that there is something to this encounter that exceeds the quantifying metrics of these systems. Evans engages with the affordances of livestreaming technologies on social media, though treating them as a performance art scenario, where the differences that performance art introduce invites an ethical encounter that takes advantage of technological capacities while transforming ensembles of relations through engagement with technical objects.

Conclusion: (Not) Becoming Machine