What Facebook sees at 1129AM / Live Broadcasting: Real Life

Screenshot of video broadcast

Link here.

Summary of my experience:
Earlier, in deciding the placement of the camera, I placed it with careful curation: an area where exposure was limited, and I had complete control over the video frame contents. I anticipated that I would be having viewers, and curated the video contents to hint, rather than explicitly show, what I was doing in real time.

‘While webcams always appear to be casually and innocently positioned, “their field of vision is carefully considered, and behaviour within that field cannot help but anticipate the looming presence of the global viewer.” ‘
– Steve Dixon in “Webcams: The subversion of Surveillance” (2007)

To a certain extent, it was a constrained performance, but at the same time, the contents were not. It was a typical view of what I usually do, banging the keys as I dish out essays after essays. The lines between private and the public have been blurred, as they enter my private space, yet ineffectually through my constructed broadcast.

Another pertinent point which Dixon brought up was rather interesting, that the unrevealed (a la invisible) in fact brings up the visible.

‘Unrevealed offstage action is a standard theatrical narrative device… Similarly, the long periods of time watching empty rooms with no characters within the Jennicam set… presented an ever-shifting kaleidoscope of patterns where, like a Beckett play, like an Eliot stanza, people “come and go”.’
– Steve Dixon in “Webcams: The subversion of Surveillance” (2007)

Through my accidental disappearances in the video – despite it not being intentional nor very much prolonged – along with the restrictive video framing, brought up a second narrative: where did she go, what is she doing now – gone to the toilet or hiding from the camera?

Sources
[i] Dixon, S. (2007) “Webcams: The subversion of Surveillance” (pg. 443-455), Digital Performance, 2007