hi, is this thing on?
This past sunday was the showing of NO-THING, a 24-hour livestream featuring somewhere around ~40 artists on a custom platform that I helped to develop over the last couple of months.
I wasn’t planning to stream, but it was mentioned off-hand the day before and the theme was to do “nothing” ….. how hard could that be :D
streaming
I think this was my first time actually livestreaming! It was nice to do it in a small, curated space next to lots of other Very Nice People. The theme made everything low-pressure and I got comfortable enough to put my face on screen eventually (instead of just my scanner.)
There were a bunch of anonymous visitors over the day, and also lots of streamers visiting each others’ rooms. It was common to see a streamer having a 1:1 conversation with a single viewer, or to be sharing a dance, crossword puzzle, or their plants with two other people on the internet. I was reminded that some people are very good at speaking to an empty room.
As many people mentioned, it reminded them of the old internet! “what AOL chat rooms were meant to become.”
nothing
My favorite part about any project is getting to spread joy amongst others, so I’m glad it was received well! Both streamers and visitors gave positive energy, and it was lovely seeing what everyone else brought to the table for the day.
People took the idea of nothing in a lot of different directions, and there were a lot of existential questions about what exactly makes something nothing (or nothing something?)
There were livestreams of billboards, TV advertisements, digital waiting rooms, server logs, people just napping/knitting/hangin’ out in their room, a verbal book reading, a slow silent book reading, a reply all email chain reading, and a man staring at the camera for 24 hours (um, was this real? did he eat? is he ok?)
I scanned an object every hour or so and shared it with my viewers. I included my breakfast, lunch, and a couple of teabags.
now
Recordings of the streams are looping online at thing.tube, and at Nguyen Wahed in the East Village thru Jan 2.
A livestream was also installed for the day-of at Nguyen Wahed facing the outdoor window, and we received a good number of street visitors. It was nice to interact with them live! We improved the latency of the system from 8-10 seconds down to under a second or two for this performance, which makes for shorter feedback loops and better conversation :)
next
The original, postponed event — a 3-month exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image — will be starting in April 2025. NO-THING was a good stress-test of the new system, which we moved from Mux RTMPS to Stream WebRTC (direct browser-to-browser streaming.)
There were some last-minute gotchas during the event around recordings and HLS broadcasts, and some improvements we can make towards video quality and consistency. It’s been a long time since I worked with video pipelines, and the technology has progressed a lot in the last few years :)
It’s a project with a lot of character, and I like coming back to it whenever there’s a need and some space to make an improvement. Let’s see where this goes..
references
some public worky worky
is-this-thing-on
soft-networks • Updated Dec 30, 2024
Migrate Stream admin functionality into main admin panel
Use HLS streams for homepage
Support long-term recordings storage
Improve presence performance
Set preferred video codec to VP9 to improve video quality and consistency