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<div>(in line with the 25hr live streaming event of last Saturday,
here is the VOID Manifesto, the video streaming studio inside our
Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam /geert)<br>
<br>
Illustrated version here:</div>
<div>https://networkcultures.org/void/2024/02/28/the-void-teletext/<br
>
</div>
<div>T.V. MANIFESTO</div>
<div><br>
THE VOID <https://networkcultures.org/void> (T.V.) is a research
project on tactical video and an audiovisual publishing venue for
practice-based research at the Institute of Network Cultures, part of
the Amsterdam University of Applied Science.</div>
<div><br>
<b>THE VOID (T.V.)</b><br>
<br>
Making T.V. is mostly about organizing cables: getting a space (either
borrowed, booked, or squatted), setting up tripods, putting up green
screens, connecting monitors, lighting up a studio, and welcoming
collaborators. In many ways, all of these actions end up in physical
cable management but can also be seen as metaphorical cable management
of aesthetic and social feedback loops. We don't want to remain at a
metaphorical level, though. The hours of manual labor with technical
equipment that go into online video streaming overshadow those of
sitting in front of a screen reading, typing, and clicking. We, at
T.V., have nonetheless previously framed making T.V. as research
<https://networkcultures.org/void/2023/02/17/blurring-the-formats-<span
></span>a-report/>. As such, it would be hypocritical for us to
underestimate the importance of theoretical reflection to establish a
critical practice. And yet, doing T.V. asks for a set of skills that
often diverge from how traditional theoretical research is conceived.
Practice-based research requires you to leave the computer monitor
aside (although not for very long) and, in our case, spend the day
with cables in a basement-turned-into-studio.<br>
<br>
Researchers and theorists of the past have mostly used text as their
favored medium probably because they hardly developed a close
relationship with the tools and logic of technical and media creation.
For T.V., making T.V. means to develop a practical know-how that is
not opposed to theoretical knowledge, but rather one that complements
it and pushes it forward. Or, more radically, making T.V. shows
(streams?) that theory is always rooted in collective practices. In
our case, online audiovisual production.<br>
<br>
T.V. practices online video with the hope of doing it differently: it
is both a practice-based research project on hybrid audiovisual
assemblages around a streaming studio and a publication venue for
audiovisual practice-based research. T.V. focuses on the increasing
presence of video production in research and artistic practices. By
providing resources to critically work with this mediatic landscape as
well as sharing and supporting research practices that center a
critical engagement with media, T.V. expands the role of digital
audiovisual production practices as a research methodology.<br>
<br>
In the same way that practice-based research creates knowledge through
alternative modes of production (in our case, from the researcher's
computer screen to the green-screen-studio-feedback loop), it also
calls for expanding publication formats. T.V. aspires to create the
means and tools for practitioners not represented in the current
publishing industries. To put it concisely, T.V. expands publishing
for practice-based research. For T.V., producing, hosting,
distributing, and consuming media is not about illustrating previously
existing research or knowledge, but about doing things: working with
media is actively doing research.<br>
<br>
T.V. is a space and practice of critical media studies. It is
inscribed in a tradition that expands outlooks on the way we see,
read, and talk about online media. Yet, we strive to unbound knowledge
about media from the position of the interpreter or the commentator.
This is why we bring the ambitions of tactical media
<http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net/articles/3160> to the core of
critical media studies. Knowing about media is also about intervening
with media: using and creating media on our own terms - not solely
communicating about how media represent the world, but collectively
getting involved in a world constituted by distributed online media
production.</div>
<div><br>
We see video as an opportunity to come together and figure out how to
inhabit online spaces with vulnerability and solidarity. For T.V.,
video is then a hybrid event, an occasion to pollute online spaces
with offline encounters and, vice versa, to rearrange how we
physically exist together mainly through the tool of the studio. A
pop-up studio branching out into the offline (events, zines,
workshops) and online (a website, repository, publications, live
stream), producing occasions to share and plot common urgencies,
resources, and know-how. Using online video not only to show,
document, or witness, but also as a way to share practices and
politically engaged understandings for the production, archiving,
distribution, and interpretation of online content, we underline the
inherent hybrid togetherness of the online experience.<br>
<br>
We promote intimacy with technology that escapes big tech's
nightmarish fantasies of immersion, and intuitive constant
communication, but that is also not confined to the overly technical
hacker imaginaries pushing for universal coding literacy. We are
inspired by the culture emerging from platform content creation that,
while deeply neoliberal, has produced a distributed collective of
technical users. A dispersed collective that has developed diverse yet
specific aesthetic sensibilities and a profound understanding that the
digital has always been a physical (and cultural) gesture. To put it
differently, it is a collective for whom hours of scrolling,
binge-watching, and streaming on multiple (horizontal and vertical)
screens have made it self-evident that these are not merely devices to
be operated at will, but a hybrid environment to inhabit. A hybrid
environment in which distinctions between representation and
intervention collapse into feedback loops or recursive chains of
localized operations between software, green screens, microphones,
mixers, monitors, cameras, data, people, and (most importantly)
cables, establishing new ways of moving, sensing, communicating. Of
being together.<br>
<br>
By highlighting tacticality and technical practices, we recall the
political heritage of communities around early networked communities.
>From bak.ma <https://bak.ma/grid/created> to indymedia
<https://www.indymedia.nl/> and UKRAiNATV
<https://ukrainatv.streamart.studio/>, we bring back practices
and affordances of independent video making, TV, and radio to produce
new ways to inhabit a stagnating online media landscape. This heritage
is a reminder that before any technical system appears as such, it is
preceded by an array of unstable practices that are then stabilized
into commoditized standards. As social networks evolve into streaming
platforms, we want to latch onto this instability to reconsider the
possibilities of online media by looking at it as a hybrid and
precarious assemblage of legacy media tools, protocols, and practices.
If early online broadcasting initiatives were instances of
pre-standardization, T.V. seeks opportunities of post-standardization:
de- and re-stabilizing online video as computational artisanship in a
parasitic yet conflictual relation with platformized/industrial modes
of production.<br>
<br>
>From video podcasts to live streaming, we don't work with a
clear standard. We regard this as a strength: centering
experimentation and openness to collaboration as the overarching
attitudes to approach video work. For T.V., online video stops being
solely a digital medium, a final outcome towards which all activities
are directed, but the networks of open-ended relations and practices
around a precarious (and for that reason, very material) studio we
inhabit together.<br>
<br>
>From T.V., we make a call to all practitioners who want to share a
green screen. To those who inhabit video in its online and offline,
virtual and material, offshoots, we invite them to collaborate and
figure out together new ways to exist in hybridity. And, hopefully,
create a TV of the commons, a StreamArt cooperative, a distributed
organized network for audiovisual practice, and a politically engaged
federation of practitioners to reclaim our technological life in
common.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>T.V. Team</div>
<div> </div>
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