3. The Livestream as Portal

I have described projective images in a manner that takes no account of the actual circumstances of their production. The Constable painting is on par with the sports photograph, even though one was the product of laborious craftsmanship and probably took weeks or longer to fashion, while the other required no more human intervention than the pressing of the shutter release, while the apparatus did the rest. The focus of this small work has been on the effect on the viewer, and the underlying image of reality as laid out in 3+1 dimensions, there for the observing. Projective images, I suggested, have been instrumental in reinforcing this familiar image, and in creating in the viewer the impression that they have direct access to an absent material reality. The story may be traced from the development of linear perspective, but there have been many developoments in the meantime, and new innovations in our image ecology arise all the time.

There is a tale told, almost undoubtedly apocryphal, of the reaction of viewers to one of the first public projections of a moving image in a theatre in Paris in 1896. L'arrivé d'un train en gare de La Ciotat was one of the Lumière brother's first film pieces, filmed and projected by the same device. The 50 second silent piece shows the arrival of the train from a single fixed point, low down, such that the train looms dramatically as it arrives, and what starts out as a long shot, becomes a far more intimate observation of the passengers and others, providing a little drama in what would by today's standards be a rather tame affair.

The myth has it that the viewers, unaccustomed to the moving image, were thrilled, and/or terrified by the spectacle, such that some even ran from the projection. Despite the historical implausibility, the story resonates because we have some sense of the wonder that accompanies innovations in image-making technology. The first time we see a movie in 3-D, the first time we don virtual reality goggles, the first hologram we see, these all shock us before we learn to integrate them into the broader landscape of images. Such innovations are amusing, often compelling, and there is no end in sight as image-makers learn to ply their craft in previously unimaginable ways. Changes in subject matter also shock us first, before they become commonplace. That which is considered violent or obscene changes hugely over time, and indeed from culture to culture. As images change, so to does our relation to them and that which they depict. Indeed, one might say that the first time we are exposed to violent imagery, we see through it to the events depicted and we are affected, shocked, and disturbed. Repeated exposure leads to an indifference towards such images, but not, I suggest because we have become hard-hearted, but because the images have lost the power to transport us to the location of the events depicted. Future cinamatic techniques try to re-create the shock, and it works briefly, until it doesn't and pictures become that which they always were: mere representations.

There is a special role for the moving image in this story. Animated images aside, cinema represents an elaboration of the projective image, and developments in cinematography have served to incrementally amplify the power of such images in reinforcing the view of reality as simply there, simply observable. From the long tracking shot introduced in Citizen Kane, to the ever-increasing use of the editing cut, whereby the observation point abruptly changes, but nothing in the world depicted is affected, film viewers have been educated in learning to adopt a God's eye view of the world, seeing but not influencing events. It is hardly a wonder, then, that they should come to think of such observation as something separate from the events themselves. Just as an isometric view of an indifferent space comes to be the common-sense way of thinking about space, even though nobody ever encounters space in that fashion, so the absolute separation of observer from the observed is something we learn from images and films, incorporate into our way of understanding the world, to the point where the framing seduces us and becomes the reality we believe in, but never experience.

New forms of image are constantly invented, and we do not seem to be in any danger of running out of new ways to encounter the world through images. The enveloping visual world of virtual reality still has the power to shock, not because of what is seen, but because it seems to provide unmediated contact with, well, another, albeit fictional, reality. When we read fiction, we may be imaginatively transported, but we do not believe ourselves to be in contact with the worlds created. But inside the goggles, the tight coupling of what we see with our own movements create the illusion that we are inside the picture. At least for now. This is entertainment, and the images are obviously constructions.

There is a new kind of image, though, that has received far less press coverage, but that seems to me to be rather more effective at putting us in touch with distant reality. The image type I speak of is the live streaming video, something that was once the province of professional broadcasters, but that is suddenly created and consumed by everyday folk with nothing more magical than a smartphone. Facebook live and Periscope are the principal platforms as I speak, and that landscape will surely change rapidly in the coming months and years. The idea is simple. You point the camera in your phone at anything, and that broadcast is available to viewers around the world, with minimal lag. As the services are currently structured, most people doing this are viewed by their friends, but that will change, and it is already possible to sample livestreams from random strangers all over the world (Facebook has since removed the portal that allowed such sampling.). Webcams pre-date such livestreams by a few years, but they are static sources, and, I think, eclipsed by these new smartphone based images. (Other forms of livestreams, e.g. streams of TV broadcasts, or of game consoles exist, but I will restrict my attention to the livestream generated by a non-professional using a smartphone.)

This image, the livestream, seems to me to be the new portal to reality. Indeed, just as the projective image became commonplace, and thereby reinforced a specific materialist view of reality, so the livestream may have the potential to reinforce a different, but important, metaphysical view: that we all live in lives measured by one clock, sharing a single monistic unfolding of events. This is again a commonplace view, but one that receives no support from immediate experience. Let us not dwell on the metaphysics, but draw out four ways in which the livestream is markedly different from the photograph, the recorded film, or virtual reality.

The first and most obvious quality is liveness. This is a somewhat intangible property that is not all-or-nothing, but that is best understood by looking at clear cases. We have become familiar with live broadcasts from the old medium of television, e.g. with football matches or song competitions. These are broadcast as they happen, usually with a slight delay to allow editorial intervention in case of cursing or disaster. Even though some provisions are made for intervening, the unfolding spectacle has something of the real about it in that the outcome is unknown, and (almost) anything might conceivably happen. This indeterminacy serves to distinguish such images from any edited recording. Indeed, we feel something of the indeterminacy even when watching recordings of past live events.

The livestream enhances this. The point-to-point nature (my smartphone to your computer screen) ensures that no editorial intervention is possible. It is within the bounds of possibility that something unexpected, something catastrophic, something unthinkable, might happen. There have been very occasional murders and obscenities committed that were broadcast in a livestream, though one ought to point out that these are entirely atypical. This openness to the future is quite novel in images, and speaks of a direct connection to unfolding reality. Imagine, if you will, that you were watching a livestream and you saw a murder. You would be greatly affected, and we would say that you had "witnessed" the murder, which is not a term usable if you were shown a recorded video or photograph of the same event. The possibility of witnessing strengthens the view that a livestream (for now) manages to go beyond mere representation and instead functions as a portal.

A further characteristic of such images is the possibility for reciprocal interaction. When two or more people are genuinely co-present, occupying a shared space, they are reciprocally linked such that anything done by one influences the other, and vice versa. We are very familiar with this from the everyday act of being with one another. This is not entirely possible with a livestream, but it can be approached. Thus if you watch my livestream, you may click something that will be visible to me in the form of an icon drifting across the screen or similar. You may also send textual messages, which I can respond to, with minimal lag. This is not the same thing as bodily co-presence, but it comes a whole lot closer than any kind of image we have had before. It makes use of the almost-live nature of brief textual interactions so familiar to modern phone users. Possibilities for more physical forms of interaction are under development, and we can expect considerable research effort to be expended in enriching such interactions.

A third property of livestream images is the rich variety of ways one has of querying them. This property has been lauded before in arguing that when looking at a photograph, one actually "sees" the distal object thereof. This was a controversial, but important philosophical claim from the 1980's, before Photoshop, Walton, K. L. (1984). Transparent pictures: On the nature of photographic realism. Critical Inquiry, 11(2), 246-277. and it amounts to arguing that the venerable photograph is a portal. A sketch done by hand can be interrogated by the viewer in only a few ways. The opportunities for interrogating a photograph are vastly richer. The photograph may capture unintentional elements in the background, for example. Such elements are not included by virtue of any intention of the photographer, but they result from the quasi-mechanical nature of image capture. Likewise, important characteristics of a scene such as lighting, textures, and detail, are all available to the viewer though they may never have come to the attention of the photographer. For these reasons, photographs make much better sources of evidence than sketches. How much richer then are the affordances of a contemporary livestream?

A livestream trivially incorporates a projective image, as it is recorded with a camera. Unlike static photographs and most cinematic products, the point of view is an obvious and important element in interpreting the image. The viewer knows that this image comes from a handheld smartphone, oriented one way or another. The image may shake if it is hand held. The image may shift in an instant from that generated by the forward-facing camera to that using the rear-facing one, revealing thereby the face of the person streaming, if that was not already on display. What is more, the stream exists within a rich webpage on a social media platform, so the interested viewer can immediately access associated personal information about the streamer: their location, occupation, history, indeed any and all information that the streamer has chosen, or has inadvertantly, made public. Combined with such tools as Google Maps, and the wealth of content such users often provide, this allows the image to potentiate its "reality", its connection with the infinitely rich ground being observed from afar.

The final property of the new livestream image generated by the smartphone of a non-professional is perhaps the most far-reaching one. We live in a rich and complex world, and none of us has a very well developed sense of how things are everywhere. Even in the internet age, our awareness of far away places is limited to snippets, anecdotes, and news stories, all of which have been filtered by the machinations of mass media. If there is a civil war in a country, that is what we hear about. By sampling a livestream, however, our preconceptions are challenged. We may find a stream of a calm person decorating her fingernails in a country that we assumed was at war. We encounter the mundane, the domestic, and the social fabric of every day. We frequently find that the ethnicity and language of any given stream are not what we might expect. Live streaming is especially popular among diaspora populations, so many streams from Sweden, for example, will turn out to be in Arabic. Even more challenging is the fact that the person who is streaming has not been selected by any narrative framing device to be intelligible to the viewer. They have absolutely no reason to fall into the conventional stereotypes we use to make the world intelligible. We cannot expect to grasp or recognise the ethnicity, ideology, or culture of the person and scene viewed. We are used to having the unfamiliar packaged and made intelligible through categories. Even the most culture-sensitive, ethnographically skilled observer, in reporting, must categorise and describe what they are showing. But streams come from any old place that happens to have a smartphone, and smartphones are found in very many places indeed. While it is still easier to sample streams from the US or South East Asia than from the interior of Africa, even that is changing.

The rich potential of livestreams for encountering, observing, and even interacting with, people of singular constitution in unfamiliar places, doing the kind of thing they do there, without any further framing or pre-packaging has hardly been explored. The reader of this tract is enjoined to sample random streams from random places and to experience the challenge of being in contact with others in an entirely novel way. This is decidedly not TV, especially not the grossly misnamed "reality TV." This is life, filtered through the ubiquitous technology of the smartphone. It is also in its infancy, and the effects it may have are a matter still of conjecture.

But let us return to Veronica and her image taken directly from the face of Christ. This image, transferred causally, is the origin of an icon tradition within which the faithful stay in touch with the reality of the past. Icon painting is not photography, but the care with which the links are curated between image and original serves to nurture and preserve a tradition of rich contact for believers.

The projective image also serves to support and preserve a specific kind of belief, that of a merely material world, laid out within the isometric containers of space and time, in which events unfold whether or not they are observed. This is not actually reality, but it is the framing condition for many of our narratives. The very ubiquity of such images makes it hard to see.

But we are not done with the evolution of images (or texts). The livestream, as outlined above, represents a new way of connecting the present of a viewer with a distal reality, a way that goes further than any before in acting as a portal that allows direct contact with the remote scene. The underlying ideology is not one of the material distribution of objects though. It is one of shared time, allowing us to co-exist in a present with distant others. The unfiltered nature by which such images are transmitted offers a way of accessing others without the framing stories of editors, of journalists, of anthropologists, or of talking heads. This is not materialist physics and it is not entertainment. It is person to person contact of a direct sort.

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