This is an interesting website I just found while reading news about NYC today. (https://www.earthcam.com/usa/newyork/timessquare/?cam=tsrobo1).
It presents at the center live streaming views with audio collected from multiple sites around Times Square through its webcams, EarthCam. The most popular video has accrued more than 58 million views so far. The uncanny watching experience reminds me of the Slow TV genre. The most famous case features mountain sceneries of a train journey from a fixed perspective in Norway, and other examples I can recall include a series of slow videos produced by RTHK. For example, there is one 14-min episode featuring night bird-views of Hong Kong with news scrolling at the bottom of the screen. The slowness of this genre used to be associated with a kind of anti-speed spirit and even anti-capitalist connotation. I was wondering how, at this moment, the plague and the disastrous context might have added other layers of meaning to the live footage as well as audience’s watching experiences.
This is fascinating - I am here in NY currently and was in Manhattan most recently this Sunday to drop food off at my grandmother's apartment building; I have never seen the city so empty, it's incredibly eerie. Certainly there are layers of meaning added to live footage in addition to the nature of public surveillance during the pandemic changing things so much. What do we "see" when public locations necessitating forms of visibility due to their statuses as centers for capital are rid of humans? The ads in Times Square continue to play on loop throughout.
ReplyDeleteOther examples of "Slow TV" this reminds me of are the popular Jackson Hole Live Cam (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EiC9bvVGnk), which is now emptier than ever. Coded here is the the surge of COVID-19 cases in popular ski towns such as Jackson Hole and Sun Valley, the vector of class and movement to "second homes" obvious in the spread of the pandemic. Additionally, how are we to revisit Andy Warhol's eight hour long "Empire" in our moment of crisis, keeping well in mind the fact that atop the Empire State Building is a TV transmitter?
Here is "Empire," for those interested - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuSIOK5Jj8g
ReplyDeleteThanks for bringing up the topic of slow TV. I went on to watch the Norwegian production you mentioned for a while. There is one thing which intrigues me about such kind of slow-TV programs, in that it greatly challenges the distinction made by McLuhan between hot and cool media: It is very high resolution but requires active participation for the completion of the understanding process. McLuhan’s distinction has been challenged in many ways in today’s context but slow TV has something distinct and vital to contribute. One crucial factor is the dimension of time: slow TV prompts viewers to watch events at the rate of actual experience. Rather than selective tension and drama, slow TV simply presents the event as it happens in real time, which is commonly thought to be slow. However, slowness matches the plague and disastrous context we are currently in. The increased pace of our daily life has been interrupted; we are now experiencing the passage of time in a different way (for example, the concept of leaving for work and all of its collateral meanings cease to make sense at this moment), which continue to result in the slowing down of our perception of time. “Time discipline” still exists but it is clear that its coercive power upon individuals is weakening at this particular moment. We, not as strictly controlled by capitalist time as we were two weeks ago, are likely to perceive and cope with slowness differently, as our understanding of time is also undergoing gradual change.
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