the Meta Ways
Here I’ll draw out some thoughts from our work that may seem fragmented on the page but consist of a larger deep thinking about what attention is and how it can be manipulated, detached and commodified. Can we, with the ontological promise of performance as “representation without reproduction” (Peggy Phelan’s words) create ways out of this destructive relationship between life and capitalism?
I’m not sure if by using the master’s tools in the master’s house we can come any closer to an answer to that question but that is what we did: we tried using two pairs of Meta Ray Bans we’d gotten our hands on, proposing scores for a bustling mall. The Meta Ray Bans are a collaboration between the eyeglass company Ray Ban which began as developers of sun glasses for US Air Force pilots in the 30’s, and the multinational information technology conglomerate Meta Platforms formerly known at TheFacebook. The collaboration consist of a pair of sunglasses with thick frames with among other “smart” features like temple-tip speakers, voice assistance to make calls, send texts, control features and search web. The future of social media is calling and it wants us to put former military technology on our faces to make life so much easier by enabling us to talk to our sunglasses. Irony dripping from every pore.
The function me and Nea focused on was the two ultra wide 12-megapixel camera lenses mounted in the outer corner of the glasses that according to the sales pitch “produces bold images and videos” that enable us to “share your adventure in real time with the hands-free livestreaming feature. See community comments in your lens preview, or have AI read them aloud so you can experience the moment without interruption.” Having an AI read you the comment section to your performance out loud as it is happening? Does not osunds like an experience of being in the moment to me whatsoever but it does have odd performative qualities that I can’t help but wanting to inhabit. If this is the face of the future of social relations, we need to know how it works in order to get to the core of it and stick at least a needle in its cold heart.
What situations did the glasses propose? What kinds of choreographies, narratives and methods did they introduce just by being put to use by two curious artists?
😎We walked around the mall giving each other instructions to do simultaneous tasks: find something saft, describe it, describe what it sounds like in your mind. Find a mirror, find something shiny in a store and put it in the wrong place. We projected the two live streams from our glasses side by side in the store front while being out on our excursions.
😎We explored how we can convey character through the point of view stream. Can you see on the stream that I am a detective now? That I am an alien looking for gold? That I am a dog?
😎We make a narcissistic score calling on the figure from greek mythology falling in love with his own reflection in the water. We make a simple mirror exercise with the glasses on, seated in front of each other but with a screen lied flat on the table between us. On the screen are, layered with an image of water to invoke the greek mirror, the streams from both our glasses. A strange doubling of our gazes occur. The delay is maybe eight seconds from what I see to seeing what I just saw being projected on the screen, layered with seeing myself as seen by Nea. And our hands touching the screen, touching each others’ projected hands. Layer upon layer upon layer. Nostalgia for “what we assumed was the immediate.” Who wrote that? Forgot to note that down.
😎We tried using each other as avatars, sending each other out on missions, controlling left and right, talk to that stranger. Make a friend.
😎We drew maps of our findings. We used large rolls of paper on the tables and walls in the space to record reflections on the tests we made but also asking participants and passers by to respond to questions arising from the material. What is live streaming to you today? What qualities do you wish it had? What is a live meeting? What question would you like to ask a developer of live streaming technology? Will I get punched in the face for wearing strange blinking glasses? This bare frame of a commercial space, never used for retails but also never used for anything else either, slowly was given life with thoughts. “a mall is a blood stream and you artists are the white blood cells” the director of the mall had told me earlier when he came to inspect the non profit activity in the strange corner of his premises. The metaphor was sticky and uncomfortable. Do I want to be an immune system to the market? No, I want to be a virus! Or just reject your metaphor completely. But still I chose to be here and that means working with that artificial meatiness of the body of the mall.
😎 We lost control. We couldn’t close the door behind us, couldn’t turn off the lights. Only pull up and down the shutter in the morning and in the evening. We were seen as a pop up event. The stream from the glasses looked like video from school shootings. Our gestures were too many things at the same time. I’m walking around wearing sunglasses indoors. The shop owners in Agnes Varda’s Daguerréotypes came to my mind every time we pulled up and down the shutter, mimicking the tempo of the other workers: cleaners, McDonald’s cooks and cashiers at the bathroom experts’ opening, lunch rush and after hours. What Varda’s film captures so well is this social texture that holds a larger society’s image in its small gestures.
😎 We got distracted. It is a world of distraction that we chose to use for our choreographies of attention. I felt the fragmentation of the space reflected in the scattered attention but that our tests were drawing attention to the drawing of attention.
😎We moved the camera so close to our eyes. We talked about gaze as cinematography. When the camera is actually right in front of the eye, cinematography is not just the framing of the audience’s view but it is at the same time by actual gaze. Almost. I can still subvert that by looking in one direction with my glasses and throwing a glance somewhere else, trying to have that movement of my eye balls stay undetected by the audience watching the live stream. If I keep my neck still and the cameras pointed in one direction I can still see something else than what is being live streamed. I take a longer perspective for a moment and see the glacier-like choreography of the camera moving closer and closer to the eye during the last century. I don’t want it to be closer. Or can the total embodiment of live streamed media remove the detachment I feel? Make it zero by proving it was there all along? I shudder thinking about removing the distinction between camera and I. But what is the meaningful difference between them? Technology is constantly drawing our attention back ot the world because it is the world. The camera moves closer to the eye because it is a way of looking that is making us see how we are looking.
😎We got lost in the meta narrative. The word “meta”. How it infiltrates the narratives about the company and our lives. The cynicism with which we say it but still: we say “meta”, making the company and its products rise above and become just that.
😎We traced our own attention with the glasses. Focus and awareness come to mind. Judgement. And how I believe those things are skills that can be shaped and strengthened by excercises in thinking. What does the fast food of attention do to our focal health?
😎 We went out of the mall. One day I am leaving Nea alone in the mall, taking the train to go work in Denmark and I take a pair of glasses with me. I call Nea with them and we hang out for a while. Slow TV of Zealand consists of rain drops on train window, layering hands virtually touching and the guy sleeping in front of me not knowing he might be just now projected on to a wall in a mall in Malmö. The ethics of that and my role in asking those ethical questions. I’m just sitting there with my new glasses. What do I know?
😎We became consumers anyway. Liveness as commodity is real. Consuming our own gaze in strange feedback loops. Are we resisting the mall by these interactions or just creating a new layer of commodification on top of it? Does this small gesture of resistance, of critique of every day life, do anything at all? The impossibility of it. Maybe we can resist the narrative of the mall with how we focus our attention on it.? The quality of our focus, the art of our gaze and the careful metafiction aimed at shifting the story in another direction.
Keep swimming. Keep computing.