Towards an aesthetic of the clouding video

This paper aims to examine the Brazilian mobile live streaming from street manifestations (2006-2013) to discuss part of these possibilities of affective memorable – or remarkable – “immaterial distribution of storage and means of retrieval”[1] as online audiovisual aesthetic representations.

Online databases and archives (memories’ shadows in the ‘public space’ of the collective minds) provide “us with our stock figures, our subliminal points of reference, our unspoken point of address”[2] and “serve as ready-made commentaries on our contemporary and political lives”[3]. Interactive practices in art, science and technology realities have been allied to database video content production, and its conceptual and aesthetic power uses can produce “engrams of a passionate experience [that] survive in the form of an hereditary patrimony printed in memory”[4].

These abundant audiovisual clouding live productions – that institutions have classified pejoratively (ideologically) as ‘amateurism’ – wouldn’t it be a symptom of a change of roles (against those who are authorized to speak whereas others are condemned to hear)? If “the cloud is not an object but an experience and its particles are the very building blocks of a molecular aesthetic in which we live and act”[1], then there are some receivers’ waves which are crafting the response forms to break the mainstream media monologue. In other words, beyond Aaron Koblin’s and Chris Milk’s (the Google Labs) database interactive video or the found footage, essay film, telematic or remix aesthetic discourses, isn’t it the case that the “new” audiovisual formats are not facing the complexity of clouding appropriation experiences? What about these chaotic-fuzzy grandchildren of TV and cinema, the enunciative subjectivities through intensive dataflow?

Therefore, towards the emergent clouding video aesthetics – with their immaterial and cognitive gestures through the live streaming political images and sounds as well –, how can we analyse these audiovisual online dialogues which manifest “the desire for immediacy”[5]!?

[1] TICTIIASC* CALL, 2014

[2] SAMUEL apud GINZBURG, 2014 [Portuguese-Brazilian Version]

[3] VESNA, 2007 [Accessed 24 January 2014]

[4] WARBURG apud GINZBURG, 2014 [Portuguese-Brazilian Version]

[5] BOLTER & GRUSIN, 2000 [1st Paperback Edition]

Milena Szafir is regarded as creator of the first live mobile webtv from streets via cellphones (2006-2009), one of the pioneers in the Brazilian live cinema [vj’ing] scene and received in 2011,  for the body of work, the “Sérgio Motta Art and Technology Award”. During the last fifteen years she has been drawing and teaching several media lesson plans, from open audiovisual workshops to graphic & motion design graduate courses and, as a Professor in the Federal University, in 2013 she wrote the initial lines to propose a transdisciplinary media lab in Brazil using obsolete hardwares [from Film-TV-Video realities] as literacy and teaching tools, beyond their necessary preservation. Her research issues are on the audiovisual apparatus [experimental practices and aesthetics], focusing low & high technologies, video editing-montage, online remix issues, surveillance situations, spectacle media and the sci-fi field.