The Aggregated Disorder of the Socially Broadcasted Space

Written by Randall Packer on
Activism • Artist Broadcaster • Flow of Information • Social Sphere • The Third Space • Transmission
Artists (left-right/top-down): Annie Abrahams, Domenico Dom Barra, Michaël Systaime Borras, Violette Bule, Cürt Clonïnger, Carla Gannis, Carrie Gates, Claudia Hart, Johann Baron Lanteigne, Daniel Pinheiro, Dominik Podsiadly, Randall Packer, Bia Rodrigues, Jackson Castiglione, Benji Blessing Sayed, and Paul Wong

Despite the fact that the video revolution began some 50 years ago, with the introduction of the Sony Portapak and the first generation of artists challenging the hierarchical primacy of broadcast television, we still face today the same old tired anachronistic paradigms in social media live streaming. This is an ironic predicament given that social media is inherently a distributed flow of communication. You would think with all of the endless $$$, that Facebook Live, Twitter Periscope, et al, would push live media to the limit of what’s possible TODAY. This is NOT the case. Facebook would like nothing better than to turn the millennials into old-fashioned television broadcasters still clinging to the one-to-many transmission hypnotizing an audience of passive couch potatoes.

Michael Borras aka Systaime

So we have a cause and a call to arms. Together with the mercurial French Trash artist Michaël Borras aka Systaime (who systemically disrupts and pulverizes the Net landscape with his sharply satirical tongue-in-cheek video animations and cut-ups), along with a crack team of noted media and performance artists, we have set out to create some highly productive disorder in order to reshuffle the broadcast space with some creative disturbances: #NeWWWorlDisorder, a 90 minute, collectively conceived, global culture jam + net performance transmitted via Facebook Live.

Election Night Remix 2016, Randall Packer

Now… how in the world are we possibly going to create any real disorder in Facebook, one of the artists subtly inquired. That’s the challenge, I responded, albeit with some trepidation, not having yet realized a socially broadcasted project with Facebook Live. So here’s the idea: you can’t change Facebook (and oh how we would like to undermine it’s god-like superiority over the earth), but you can reorder the larger-than-Facebook broadcast space, channeling the artists’ transmissions into a collective montage by re-routing and aggregating their broadcasts. While each of us activates our cell phones & laptops, streaming out on our OWN respective channels across the vast mediascape of our personal timelines, our fourteen independent streaming signals justly converge, surreptitiously, into an integrated Web interface: creating, we declare, the energy and entropy of supremely organized disorder.

Performance by Curt Cloninger

All of a sudden, there is live simultaneity in Facebook, a rejiggering of the system, a little uncontrolled madness. I can’t predict the precise results of our social broadcast experiment, but in the new world disorder gone amok amidst geo-political catastrophe on both sides of the Atlantic –We must take up arms and signal a call-to-action by engaging the power of the Temporary Autonomous Network Zone (TANZ) – it’s what we have to do.

For 90 minutes, it is the intent of the #NeWWWorlDisorder project to engage disorder with even more disorder and flux: generating a counter-offensive to the tyranny of hierarchical thinking, culture jamming the far too safe social media channels, activating a geo-mashup that confuses and abuses the status quo, while thoroughly caught up in the sheer pleasure of uncontrolled social broadcasting.