Twitch's place in contemporary online culture is constantly evolving and diverse in the content it hosts. Predicated on the norms of public live production and broadcast at the scale of individuals or small groups, Twitch finds itself populated with a class of entertainers referred to as streamers, with whom primarily young audiences develop parasocial relationships. This distinguishes Twitch from YouTube, where its primary function for people creating videos to upload, tends to be focused on content that is curated and edited. Both YouTube and Twitch are providing ‘content’ — with all its contained connotations; of being made to be consumed and to occupy time, an umbrella term that takes artforms and strains them into a grey sludge that can be wedged into free time and instant amusement/entertainment.

While Twitch's dominant subject matter is videogames being played by streamers and people watching those streams[1], it also contains within its strata political commentary, 'react' content to other videos online, and IRL streams[2] and even day-trading streams and art streams[3].

Twitch also possesses the uncanny appeal of the swarm in the relationship the chat audience forms parasocially with the streamer. The messages sent in the live chat, the audience’s method of communicating with a streamer[4], is often — in the case of popular streamers in particular — a frantic stream of text and emotes interested not so much in communicating with each other (though it is possible, and done, in smaller streams) but rather at providing a streamer with a gestalt of a crowd, akin to a hivemind that the streamer can dive into or withdraw from. This contrast with other forms of broadcast, most notably on television, makes for an interesting venue for education[5], as well as a venue for live debuts of video/film with a social space — but these are thoughts for another time.

This 2021 installation is a foray into doing work that runs counter to the parasocial experience by denying the identity and creative persona of the artist to be another aspect of the work to be consumed. The status of the streamer, as someone whose work is deemed valuable if it is popular, finds itself described by Camus [6] as such:

“The greatest renown today consists of being admired or hated without having been read. Any artist who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday kill the true artist in him.”

The installation shows a piece of free-writing over several hours. It is not ascribed to an identifiable person, and very much shows a slow and stuttered writing process with moderate bursts of production. It is not edited or curated to be entertaining. There are various Spotify QR codes shown on screen, to show the audiences what the writer is listening to as they work, and even bursts of music at times[7].

The text written, a short story titled ‘Between Glass’, is currently awaiting publication and therefore cannot be published here in its final form.

1. And the dominant culture, more often than not, seems to be the subculture of ‘gamers’ and ‘gaming’, with people initiated in its sub-dialect also being familiar with Twitch’s own subsubdialect, with terms such as ‘pog’ or ‘KekW’ often referring to Twitch’s specific, self-referential emotes.

2. Referring to livestreaming 'in real-life’, generally outside of the streamer's home and in public.

3. More often than not, streams showing people drawing or modeling on traditional and digital media alike.

4. There are ‘donos’, the colloquialism for ‘donations’ that streamers can use to allow text-to-speech (TTS) audio to play after donating a nominal amount. These can be turned off.

5. Or miseducation, regardless, the value of being able to essentially run a symposium to the public at any point is fertile ground for ‘education’, all caveats included. The format itself is not dissimilar to Zoom/Teams/Collaborate Ultra/etc w/r/t speaker(s) fielding questions to an open/moderated chat — Twitch just forces it to be a broadcast, that is: for public consumption, rather than private rooms with links and password protection. This allows advertising to happen on Twitch, as it is a part of Amazon’s business, as most social media websites tend to be.

6. As found in the Justin O’Brien translation of ‘Create Dangerously’ published by PENGUIN BOOKS; a speech delivered by Camus at the University of Uppsala in Sweden in December 1957.

7. Which is a problem, as both Twitch and YouTube (on which the document of the video has been uploaded) have copyright protection policies in place that can mute audio and force the removal of videos. Further installations would instead remain silent, or use white noise, for the audience while still supplying the QR codes for the curious. There’s an argument for not showing the music being listened to by the writer for the sake of further inoculating against developing parasocial relationships but at the same time sharing music is an opportunity for a distanced social link. After all, art is public and social, as is language, and the opposite of ‘parasocial’ isn’t ‘antisocial’, but ‘not-parasocial’.