Conclusion: (Not) Becoming Machine

The forced digitality of the Covid-19 pandemic period made video livestreaming, which had been a more peripheral means of synchronous contact prior to this pandemic, the predominant means of interaction with others. That is, even though digital technologies already had become ubiquitous for many, this engagement changed in 2020 as we became even more dependent on these networks of communication. Simondon emphasizes how technical objects function as mediators. It is essential to treat technologies with the same scholarly and critical scrutiny and expertise that we use in sociology and psychology in coming to understand human interactions. However, many times digital technologies like those that comprise livestreaming are taken for granted, considered merely as a means to an end, as opposed to grasping just how these tools shape relations, resulting in alienation from technologies. Simondon warns that such alienation is dangerous:

the most powerful cause of alienation in the contemporary world resides in this misunderstanding of the machine, which is not an alienation caused by the machine, but by the non-knowledge of its nature and its essence, by way of its absence from the world of significations, and its omission from the table of values and concepts that make up culture (Simondon 2016, 16).

This is where aesthetics comes in, in particular Simondon’s techno-aesthetics, where aesthetics is grounded in the engagement with technical objects. The aesthetic encounter is the means by which the sensations of world phenomena are experienced, which are inherently relational and therefore ethical.

I describe three techno-aesthetic modes in relation to livestreaming: glitch and noise, duration, and mundane intimacy. These three modes influence the encounters that livestreaming provokes, which are dynamic engagements of relations and transformative processes of becoming through a shared milieu. Moreover, techno-aesthetics are also techno-ethics in providing ways of countering alienation from streaming technologies, as the features of technological mediation are accounted for when considering aesthetic encounters: aesthetics are directly related to how technologies are engaged with and how they act upon the world, thereby also making such encounters ethical. The aesthetic experience is not simply restricted to the formal or stylistic qualities of a work; how technologies function is integral to this encounter. The glitch aesthetics of the camgirls, which resulted from breakdown of technical systems, are formal instances of these technologies in action, constituting and mediating relations of global milieu, while supported and modified through maintenance as care. At the same time, these broadcasts established digital aesthetics of duration and aesthetics of mundane intimacy, as camgirls streamed their lives uncensored, at times so up close and personal that the viewer is “too close to see” (White 2003).

As the technologies of livestreaming developed, becoming more accessible and ubiquitous, it took on a more prominent presence in different spheres of engagement, including social-justice activism. The techno-aesthetics of activist streaming is considered in terms of production, itself a durational performance that negotiates engagement with technologies through an unfolding milieu that relates virtual audiences to on-the-street activities. It also makes evident the different experiences of time that the virtual enables. While activist broadcasting shares some stylistic characteristics with slow media, particularly slow cinema and durational performance art through exceptionally long takes and lack of overarching narrative structure, social media interfaces invite engagement from viewers that cultivate hyper attention rather than the deep attention that the more experimental forms of artistic production involve. I raise these points to highlight how the aesthetics of this encounter, which can be traced to first-generation camgirls, is a distinguishing characteristic of how digital technologies mediate these encounters. Understanding how these mechanisms function through these encounters can enhance activism’s engagement with technology in the ecology of attention, as grassroots efforts to counter the dominance of hegemonic narratives and thereby modify the field of political and ethical action.

I then shift from the role of livestreaming as social-justice action to the livestreamed videos of police brutality and murder that may instigate such activism. Diamond Reynolds’s Facebook livestream of Philando Castile’s death raises significant questions regarding the ethics surrounding the sharing of these streams on social media platforms, both through the commodification of trauma and the perpetuation of anti-Black violence as spectacle. These issues come to the fore when the sharing of such content is involved in performative allyship, which itself functions as a performed aesthetic encounter of online impression management. Aesthetic encounters, therefore, are not simply experiences of form, but involve technological, political, and ethical relations.

Finally, the transformative capacities of aesthetic and ethical encounters are evident in the livestreamed performance work of Ayana Evans, in particular the techno-aesthetics of mundane intimacy. Streaming over Instagram, Evans’s “Quarantine Series” diffracts the aesthetics of social media content creation through her interventions into everyday technological relations. Her performances make evident the new forms of intimacy that digital technologies of livestreaming afford, while extending understandings of participation that reveal and expand her ecosystem of support and community. Understanding livestreaming in this way highlights this ongoing capacity to transform, individuate, transindividuate, and become different. Even as people are shifting away from engaging with livestreaming technologies, returning to more face-to-face engagements in the current moment, the aesthetic encounter of livestreaming challenges the alienation of digital technologies, cracking seamless interface design by revealing, acknowledging, and modifying technological engagement, encompassing a relational ethics of care.

Through this analysis of livestreaming as aesthetic and ethical encounter, I cannot help but think about the dependence on livestreaming video in many facets of work and social life after the start of the pandemic when it was treated as a panacea at a time when physical contact was limited. The transition to video calls to replace the in-person engagement of classrooms, meetings, conferences, seminars, and other formal gatherings was quick once public health restrictions were put into place. Even though this technology facilitates conversations with the ability to look at a person’s face (if the camera is turned on), prolonged engagement with video calls reveal that these experiences are different. Livestreaming has also changed group communication through this different milieu. Simondon states:

the living being resolves problems, not just by adapting, i.e. by modifying its relation to the milieu (like a machine is capable of doing), but by modifying itself, by inventing new internal structures, and by completely introducing itself into the axiomatic of vital problems. The living individual is a system of individuation, an individuating system, and a system that is in the midst of undergoing the process of individuating (emphasis in original, Simondon 2020, 7).

The problems that living beings experience cannot be resolved with a simple fix, a key stroke, or a change in mechanism. Human individuals are not static creatures; they are dynamic beings that are part of shifting ecologies. Even in a state of crisis, like the Covid-19 pandemic, when these always already present moments of flux are stark (there is no stability, only temporary metastability), there is an expectation to pivot and engage technologies to maintain a façade of business as usual. Though, humans are living beings and not machines—simple adaptation is not possible.