Counter-Streaming Serial Realities, or: Art as a ‘Bug’ of Mainstream Media
The ‘Netflixization’ of our sense of reality has continued to increase during the Corona pandemic. Many of us were consuming more series even than before while staying every evening at home, bonding with new heroes and anti-heroes of a reality that could be ours; or, at least, getting a chance to reach some thoughts away from the sofa towards what could happen next — after everything will have switched again to ‘normal’ like in ‘good old times’, however never again just like before. A future built from yesterdays gone mad.
But what does this mediatized kind of daily ‘practice of imagination’ actually mean for our ability to link the present with a future, with longings, expectations, and concerns for what is to come? How does it affect our ideas of growing — not least in a social sense — when we live cyclically from season to season, where “everything is very different in each case and yet somehow the same”, as Maren Lickhardt puts it in her essay about serial realities? (Lickhardt 2020, 72)
Whether we go on vacation in pre-programmed Wild West parks or hunt zombies in the future will also be decided by how much empathy we bring in our fantasies with others; whether we sail off haphazardly to discover new worlds or rather merely to gain land will be decided by our willingness to leave a piece of ourselves behind as well; whether mankind will race endlessly around the frozen globe in a huge train with plus minus a thousand wagons or will soon be derailed, depends on how we work and think together.
Most series produced for TV and online portals are characteristically based on a sophisticated interpretation of metadata in order to guarantee a continuity of (story) variations; artistic appropriations of such formats and motifs used by many popular series, on the other hand — and this is the direction in which this text will be heading to — have their strength precisely in disrupting the progress of plots, in modulating the duration of suspense curves and cliffhanger moments. They thus alter the density of narratives which affect our hopes and fears as viewers and, not least, are shaped by a perceived spectrum of passive and active modes of watching and ‘digesting’.
Resource or Echo Chamber?
Twitter is full of comparisons of the political events with popular series: “#Brexit is a bit like #TheWalkingDead. You think you’ve reached the end and then the same twist happens and they add another whole season.”[1] Alarmism and boredom tilt into each other as if they were looped up to infinity. Maren Lickhardt describes a “reset mode” of media perception, when political crises can hardly be perceived as “turning points and decision points” anymore because “it regularly turns out afterwards that they weren’t crises after all” (Lickhardt 2020, 67).
Waiting for political decisions that are endlessly revised and missed with each new attempt, again without consequence, has, in a sense, serial structure; and even climate change can be transformed as a ‘five minutes to midnight’ fact into a rhetoric that can be endlessly postponed and repeated, that is, serialized.” (Idb.) The showdown that forces us to action, as the ‘final finale’, is suspended, because it has to go on, because we still can go on — until it just can’t go on any more this way or any other way. (Which, in the logic of a TV series, means one — in this case: humanity itself — has to be written out of the next season.)[2] It’s all about survival, and every episode to itself.
Lickhardt’s essay seems to suggest something similar to Bernd Scherer stating in a conversation with Stefan Aue that in social discourse, “the dynamization of the present through memory and imagination” is often “replaced by a fossilization of the past and a fictionalization of the future” (Scherer/Aue 2021, 211). In the idling of itself, the here and now hardly seems to be able to become something that can be shaped, fought over, transformed. And it is the suffix here that matters: the space of possibility that cannot be found in an endless stream but needs intervals and interruptions to open up ist gates.
However, Scherer and Aue are not talking about our existence as aficionados in front of the laptop and TV screens in our homes, making them ‘so different, so appealing’ — but about the meaning of archives for our individual and especially collective imagination.
But — can’t the wide range of series and films on streaming portals salso be considered an archive? And if so, could Netflix then be an archive of imaginations? A resource for thinking about the future? Or rather a shimmering fossil of marketable fictions, patinated by our hopes and fears congealed over years of binge-watching? A commercial echo chamber more than an archive?
As a collection of data on the entertainment preferences of numerous viewers, streaming portals, like archives, obey the primacy of availability, of products and metadata, which gives production firms the power to exploit this information for ever more perfectly targeted formats and thus for their financial profit. In fact, the evaluation of user data even makes it possible to design products that do not yet exist but for which there will most likely be a sales market (Madrigal 2014). In this way, they create spaces of experience in which it is not least a matter of “having a say” in this or that peer group or online community Streaming portals could, to put it bluntly with an adaptation of Foucault, be described as a “set of rules” of what can be thought of as future in contemporary discourse, in certain groups; as a framework defining the conditions of possibility for knowledge and imaginations; as a temporary show depot for sometimes more, sometimes less inspiring visions and pop cultural references.
The ambiguous power of both series and archives lies in what remains unsaid. What remains unsaid and undisplayed has power and also gives power to those who administer the directory — by making inclusions and exclusions, but also in the potential for releasing imaginative and revolutionary interstices.
While more carefully curated platforms such as MUBI are becoming more and more popular, especially in the art world, offering a comparatively manageable number of rotatingly selected films, including many independent productions, the more mass-market streaming services remain influential. They’re telling in terms of the images that a society shaped by crises and consumption — as well as by the consumption of crises — is making of itself.
Similar to how archives represent a selective view of the world (‘as it is or was’), series, or rather portals that make them available, confront us with patterns, fragments, and singularities — even if these are sometimes less stereotypical and more internationally positioned than classic television. Good series reflect a speculative reality against the background of the present and invite us to reflect on how close or how far we already are from the friendly utopias and dystopias next door. They rendere the big social issues, questions about ethics and moral, about lies and truth, as consumable as touchable. (Bad series sometimes do as well, if more involuntarily.) Whether streaming platforms promote a diversification or a normalization of what’s on offer is hotly debated in the process. The streaming audience, at any rate, has little tolerance for flat plots, as one can see, for example, in ARD One’s (a German TV station’s) talk show SERiös (SERious), which is reminiscent of a pop version of “Das Literarische Quartett” (“The Literary Quartet”, a German TV show featuring presentations and discussions between writers and literary critics since 1988).
How do we manage to “dream something beautiful” instead of just being “highly motivated and committed”?
Artists also use the format of the series — or the sitcom — for video works and installations, often to address or travesty their own social role and work situation.
In Britta Thie’s Translantics, the artist and her colleagues almost play themselves in real life as creative freelancers navigating a world riddled with startup competition. Stefan Panhans’ miniseries Hostel transforms the precarious situation of creative workers struggling in part-time jobs into chamber-play-like scenes between the bunk beds of a hostel room: How does one live together with oneself and one’s own ever-changing faces? How do you manage to “dream something beautiful” instead of just being “highly motivated and committed”? At documenta fifteen in Kassel, the Boloho collective is showing the sitcom BOLOHOPE in a reconstructed Cantonese café at Huebner Areal, dedicated to updating the classic, highly affectively charged family model to new forms of living and working together.
The presentation of these artistic series varies between online format (Thie), a fitness landscape circled off in the exhibition space in an expressively uncomfortable way (Panhans), and a comprehensively designed restaurant environment with integrated flatscreens (Boloho). Via our postures while sitting in front of the screens, at the desk, on the sofa, on exercise balls or at canteen tables, different forms of (self-)reflection of lifestyles are thus made possible, and obsolete comforts and stressors that have been endured for too long can be questioned.
These tragicomic episodic formats are contrasted by series of semi-fictional sci-fi and political genres with a larger narrative arc. Both genres share, in their decidedly artistic treatment, the examination of a threshold state — namely between a present characterized by very specific constraints, conventions, and requirements, and a future in which all these conditions either come to a head or are overcome to new models of life whose outcome and development remain open. Oftentimes, such artistic projects share their approach with speculative design fictions, such as Dunne & Raby’s United Micro Kingdoms (2013).
While also sitcoms are highly political at their core, and even more speaking of those invented by artists, especially the latter sci-fi and political series bear the potential to reveal ideological attitudes in media productions that seem ‘merely entertaining’ at first glance. Through artistic interventions and re-interpretations, we can thus shift our gaze away from the ‘actual plot’ to the (ideological) framework, which tells us no less about how we want to see ourselves and others and where society is heading.
Art as a ‘Bug’ of Mainstream Media
In order to jointly shape the present and the future, there needs to be an exchange about viewing habits and regimes. “The Arabian Street Artists”, which is an ironic pseudonym for Heba Y. Amin, Caram Kapp and Don Karl, show that watching Netflix or Amazon Prime is not just about ‘good’ or ‘bad’ entertainment. Amin, Kapp and Karl were hired in 2015 to design the Berlin film set of the U.S. series Homeland with ‘authentic’ Arabic graffiti tags. Obviously, the stage designers who they worked for didn’t care about what exactly was written on the ruins of the Syrian city, stylized as a picture of misery which had been cobbled together in a rather clichéd and culturally disinterested manner anyway. So, under the motto Homeland Is Not A Series, the artist group smuggled their own opinions on the entertainment production — which sees itself as a political narration — into the series in Arabic letters which remained at first undetected by many Western Europeans as well as the producers themselves: slogans such as “Homeland is a Joke and it didn’t make us laugh” or “1,001 Calamities” get to the heart of the moral destitution of the spirit in Homeland’s script and stage set.
“Subversion needs Research” is how the artists comment on the series makers’ statement that by telling this story in that particular way, they want to initiate discussions. And perhaps series, in addition to responsible research on their own, also need artists and art projects. Art as an (almost forensic) reality check for the mainstream media that introduces some kind of “bug”: an apparent “error” turning out to be the tipping moment of the series in which the plot recedes and becomes the starting point for reflections and discussions about media realities.
While “The Arabian Street Artists” intervened in the set of a popular series, the DIS collective founded their own streaming platform in 2018. DIS.art is dedicated to intellectual artistic edutainment making films on topics such as motherhood, blackness, queer ecology or the financial market available online: “The future of learning is much more important than the future of education. […] We enlist leading artists and thinkers to expand the reach of key conversations bubbling up through contemporary art, culture, activism, philosophy, and technology. Every video proposes something — a solution, a question — a way to think about our shifting reality.”[3] The discovery of new worlds, new technologies, new coalitions are considered in their blurring of utopian and dystopian imaginations and set in relation to what we have already established as a habit.
Will Benedict and Steffen Jørgensen’s series The Restaurant, for example, is set in a skyscraper in a post-civilization landscape. Disrupted by YouTube tutorials, horror elements, and cooking show rhetoric, it demonstrates how to make sausages or tomatoe ketchup. Haunting voiceovers review our human diet since the Stone Age and provoke speculation about what’s next in culinary and nutrition terms. The “Public Service Announcement” series, on the other hand, produced by the DIS collective themselves, resorts to the format of governmental info-broadcast; however, it addresses its audience as a self-responsible, mature collective called upon to fight for its agency against monopolies and class distinctions. The activist spillover from the art world into society of these irony-soaked impulses remains as a potential with question marks.
A somewhat more melancholy view can be found in the work by Wagehe Raufi. Similar to the projects already described above, the artist deals with the question of how much potential for change can actually be trusted in the hitherto available world designs of popular media. In Raufi’s video installations atmospheres are characterized by doubt and nostalgia.
In hidden architect — moths as mess (2020), the artist takes up collective visions of the future from popular sci-fi classics such as Andrei Tarkowski’s Solaris (1972) or Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Even though this is more about motion pictures than series in the strict sense, the video shows itself as a spatial collection of references to popular cinematic cultural assets, as a kind of database and ‘portal’. Via photogrammetry, film stills have been transformed into virtually walkable ‘stage sets.’ These are joined together to form a spatial tube through which we are guided as if through an organic tract. With the eyes of a moth, whose emulated flight we can empathize with, we‘re floating disembodied through ruinous sceneries. The software has transformed the films from our collective memory into shredded volumes. The moth, a nightmare to every archivist, navigates a course of black holes that cover the image fragments, sometimes like a vitreous opacity, sometimes like a net. One thinks of photo albums with pitted corners, but is trapped in the hypnotic maelstrom of the digital image collection. And this collection shows itself to be damaged, vulnerable, and already under attack.
The fragility of future utopias — in the aesthetics of the media from a time that’s already past — emerges, reminiscent of the coupling of a “fossilization of the past” and “fictionalization of the future” in Aue and Scherer cited at the beginning. The digital architecture of spatialized surfaces suggests that the stories are not ‘survivable’ on their own, but need our intervention, our imagination, to function as a background for stories and events being actualized in our everyday.
From Cliffhanger to Reality Lapse
The moth is the main protagonist of an anecdote about the (allegedly) first “computer bug” in history, told about the team of the “Mark II” computer operated during World War II. The insect got stuck in one of the relays and caused a computing chaos in which there were only zeros, no ones. No distinctions were possible at this point in the system — until the moth was finally discovered, removed, and archived in the logbook.
Even if the literal moth may not be a welcome guest in the archive, in a figurative sense every archive is full of “bugs”: interspersed with disruptive factors that tackle the switching points of the coding of reality, make distinctions temporarily difficult or even impossible, and show their dependence on various factors which turn out to be kicking alive.
The series, as an archive of consumer needs and visions of the future alike, is also full of ‘bugs’ — inconsistencies, stereotyping, anachronisms. It’s a similar story with so-called cinema blockbusters, which fill up the halls and coffers in a more or less visionary way. What is special about the series, however, is its continuability, which also includes the possibility of cancellation, for example, if the producers do not get enough viewers or if the viewers’ interest is diminished or diverted.
The cliffhanger can be seen as a counterpart, an antagonist, and at the same time as a team player of the ‘bug’. A cliffhanger invites the viewers to ‘stay tuned’ and ‘continue browsing’. It thus foreshadows the continuation, or: ongoing-ness of the series. Nevertheless, as a predetermined breaking point of (seemingly) shared popular narratives, it can also reflexively direct our view back to ‘what has happened so far’. The cliffhanger — as a creative medium of communication, as we’re trying to imagine it here — is an attempt to stimulate discussions. Going (in the best case) beyond mere effect, it shows itself fragile, instead of peforming for a selfie-sh ephemeral eternity in the orcus of social media.
Ideally, it would then be an invitation to search for the ‘bugs’ of (a) (his-)story and thus, comparable to the intervention by “The Arabian Street Artists”, to create a situation and context that functions as a “reality lapse” (“Realitätsraffer” in German, as Knut Ebeling calls archives) between the fragments and ruins of one reality — of many — and stimulates comparison with other media and perspectives.
A ‘bug’, a metaphorical ‘moth’ in a program, a story, or an archive, does not simply want itself to be fixed. It challenges us to question the goals and modes of an operation: Is it a bug or is it a feature? Is a gap in the archive or in a plot something to be quickly filled? — Or is it rather a sensitive space in between where the detail reconfigures itself in relation to the whole? The plot gap indicates where you can touch the story: either in the sense of a commercial instrumentalization of narratives, catering to existing viewing habits; or as an opportunity to add and recombine images and interpretations. As media, archives fail if they separate us in favor of one modality of the real from another. The same could be said for customized offers of popular streaming services as well as artistic (digital) projects: they disappoint if they merely pretend to widen our bubbles of worldview. Only if they allow these bubbles to stretch till they burst, different ‘aggregate states’ or belongings of reality can permanently change. And we are getting able to take a closer look at the specific structure of the space we find ourselves in — apparently only as viewers — and start together to reshape it as an environment that is not simply ‘served’ to us or something we subscribed for.
This essay is a revised and slightly extended version of an article which appeared in at first German as “Portale in die Zukunft? Im Stream der serialen Wirklichkeiten” in Kunstforum International 280 (2022): Zukunftsressource Archiv. Kunst als Medium von Erinnerung und Imagination (translated by the author).
Bibliography
Lickhardt, Maren (2020), “Leben in der Zeit der Serialität”, in: Merkur 852 (2020), pp. 66–72.
Scherer, Bernd/Aue, Stefan (2021), “Das ganze Leben. Archive und Wirklichkeit”, in: Griesser-Stermscheg, Martine/Sternfeld, Nora/Ziaja, Luisa (eds.), Sich mit Sammlungen anlegen. Gemeinsame Dinge und alternative Archive, Vienna, pp. 207–218.
Madrigal, Alexis C. (2014), “How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood”, in: The Atlantic, 2 Jan. 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/hownetflix-reverse-engineered-hollywood/282679/ (9 Aug. 2018).
All citations translated by the author.
[1] @MXPichl in Twitter, 19 Oct. 2019, quoted from Lickhardt (2020), p. 67.
[2] This happened, for example, to Kevin Spacey, whose persona and personality risked to collapse into one when he was accused of sexual harassment, which seemed ‘conclusive’ because of the scupelessness of his role as a politician in House of Cards. The realities seem to mutually confirm and intensify each other.
[3]see https://www.dis.art