The Streamer is Online

[Paul]

I don’t know if anyone remembers this, but a few years ago a performance artist named Marina Abramović performed a piece at the MOMA called The Artist is Present in which she sat immobile while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. I recently saw a documentary about Abramović and it got me thinking about The Artist is Present and also some of the stuff I've done with ThingsOnMyHead and I decided I would like to try something inspired by her piece.

The idea is that I will be streaming myself sitting silently in our office live on Twitch and give anyone the opportunity to share my stream and have my full attention by broadcasting themselves in a similar situation. As with The Artist is Present, there will be no limit on how long each person can share the stream and there will be a queue so there is only one person sharing the stream at a time. Frankly I have no idea if this will work, both in the technical aspects and whether enough people will actually want/be able to participate. I am going to do a comparatively short 4 hour trial on September 6, 2015 at 1:00pm PDT (see it in your time zone). Hopefully giving a week and a half of advance notice will allow more people to figure out a streaming setup and participate.

I am calling the project The Streamer is Online

Click here for more information on how the project works and how to participate yourself

Click here for more information on why I am doing this and what I hope to accomplish

[AdmiralMemo]

This seems like an interesting experiment. I'm game to give it a shot.

Also, maybe make a TomH video promoting it, as that fanbase might be interested?

[Clypheous]

This sounds like a very interesting idea, I will be quite interested to see how this works. I'm a little unclear as to how the technical logistics work, but Paul's the expert on that so I'm sure he's got it figured out.

[farleyf]

Trust Paul to find something that's really out of this world. I'm curious about how this is going to work out as well

[Eric the Orange]

I don't quite understand what the interaction between the two people is. do they talk to each other or just sit in each others presents? Could I, for example, just sit down and eat my lunch, all while staring unblinkingly at the other person, and then get up and leave without saying anything?

[ritchards]

From what I can tell, it's about non verbal communication. You concentrate on each other, and end up relating a lot just by absorbing each others faces and expressions and such.

[Paul]

ritchards has the right idea. It isn't so much about "concentration", though, it's more about focus. It isn't supposed to be some kind of game where we try to communicate with each other using only facial expressions, the point is just to sit and look at another person in the face for an extended period of time, something that we rarely do in real life.

Combined with this is the idea of playing with taking the voyeurism inherent in watching a stranger play a video game on Twitch to its extreme. Streamers play all sorts of different games and configure their broadcast in different ways. For some, the actual game being played can seem like an afterthought down in the corner of the window with the majority of the video being their camera. With the Streamer is Online, I am taking this trend to its logical conclusion by not only removing the game window entirely, but not even doing anything. As the title says, the streamer will be online, but that is it.

As with ThingsOnMyHead, I fully expect lots of people to be confused as to what is going on and why (especially anyone who just stumbles across the stream), but that's fine. If nothing else, it is an interesting process for me and maybe some other people will find it interesting too.

[Omega Lairon]

Sounds like a fascinating idea, to the extent that over the past week I've been trying to decide if I could/should consider participating. Ultimately, since I don't have a ready to go Twitch streaming set-up, and obtaining one would be an admittedly trivial but sadly non-zero amount of work, it was probably best left to others.

Incidentally, what's going to be happening in regards to the Twitch chat during this stream? I mean, aside from the obvious "Paul will not be reading chat" aspect, is it basically just "business as usual" and/or "talk amongst yourselves"? I guess ideally, there wouldn't be much chat anyway if viewers get into the spirit of the event and use the opportunity to just sit and focus.

Just curious, really.

[AdmiralMemo]

That was... certainly an experience... Not what I expected, but more than I could've hoped for.

[Trisha Lynn]

I was in the chat for some of the beginning of this, and one thing I took away from it was that like the infamous "4 min. 33 sec. " piece by John Cage, the interesting artistry was not just in the two performers' faces but also in what we, the viewers, were saying about them. Until he told us, I had no idea that the first dude whose name I forget was reading chat and could "hear" what we were saying about him. Some comments were fine. Some were maybe a little judge-y. Same went for the next two dudes, especially the dude with the orange hair. One thing I thought of saying but didn't in the moment was a comment on how the background for Dude #2 almost made it look like he was wearing earrings.

I asked Dude #1 what he was thinking about, but if the rest of the Dudes can chime in: What was going through your head as you were doing this?


Trisha Lynn
...and I totally can understand why no ladies decided to participate...

[Laserbeaks Fury]

Do you plan to archive today's stream, or let it drift into the aether and only exist in the "moment" ?

[mtvcdm]

Do you plan to archive today's stream, or let it drift into the aether and only exist in the "moment" ?

Well, there is always LRRbot (VOD here), but I don't know if that's what you meant.

[Paul]

Hey everyone,

I definitely consider the first go at The Streamer is Online to be a success and I want to thank everyone who participated. I think I would like to do it again at some point, but it is clear that there are some technical issues that could be improved first. The 2 main things are

1. How to manage the queue — I was using the list of online channels returned from the twitch API searching for "streamerisonline" and sorting them by the time when the stream started or time when the title changed (whichever is later). Due to caching or something else, the results of this query seem to be unreliable, though, as people were changing order and being dropped from the queue seemingly at random. Does anyone have a better idea for how to manage the queue? I think the requirement that people be online and streaming to keep their place is an important part of the project, both philosophically and also because it ensures that people will be ready when their turn comes instead of waiting until the last minute to actually go online or forgetting that they signed up.

2. Limiting the time spent with each person — it wasn't necessarily bad that people chose to stay on the stream for a long time, I was very explicit that the time was up to them, but it was unexpected and I felt bad that more people who were waiting did not get to try it out. I am reluctant to put a hard cap on the time but it would be interesting if we could somehow replicate the social pressure to move on that existed with the original piece. Maybe it is as simple as having a suggested maximum length (like a suggested donation at a museum), but I am open to suggestions.

Let me know in this thread or via email if you have ideas for either of these issues or any other ideas to improve the stream.

[mtvcdm]

Honestly, I think you just did all you need to do right there as far as social pressure goes. I think that what happened was largely down to what happened when senstaku went first and remained silent for an hour. If you were permitted to speak yourself, you might have been able to do a quick course correction and remind people what the deal was, but as you weren't able to do that, subsequent streamers kind of took their cue from the 'exchange' with senstaku, shrugging their shoulders and going 'Welp, I guess that's how this works. I should stay silent too, and also for a long time.'

I think that given the fact that the concept was so unorthodox and the instruction so intentionally sparse, people didn't really know what to make of it, and were going to end up taking after whatever the first streaming partner did as what they were 'supposed' to do. As senstaku maintained a long silence, so did they. If he had engaged in a brief monologue, they would have as well. If he had or had not acknowledged the chat during his time, the others would have done so (or not) as well.

Social pressure still applied, in other words. It was merely applied in a different way than expected. And I think what you just said as far as what you were hoping for will inform what your partners do next time; after all, the basic relationship of a stream is that it's the streamer's house and the chat follows the rules of the house. Again, social pressure.

[ritchards]

This reminds me of the documentary Visitors, a lot of which is people just staring into the camera.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2936174/