With my proposed and promised “hybrid ethnographic documentary fiction” video project tracing routes of nodes floating through virtual private networks, through lurking, indulging, surveilling, participating, and disengaging, to tell their stories about love and war, while thinking about reinventing the video-making/audiovisual protocol, I’m iterating the project into one that’s setting up a protocol for multi-node real-time video capturing, streaming, and making—connection as material, protocol as aesthetics. I’d like to create a video work not only about but also with the building of its own protocol: in this case, it is to make videos in the protocol of a virtual private network as feelings, experiences, and art. Eventually, my work and research for Summer of Protocol’24 this time is also to think about making art with protocols that’s always already and among the discussions of technological advancement and protocol entrepreneurship.
(and I’d also make a reference here to Timber’s brilliant notes “Crosspost from The Protocolist” weaving together the dialectics on protocols, which starts by introducing “protocol entrepreneurship” discussed by Venkatesh Rao.
As you can probably tell from the site and the code, for now I’m actually borrowing from WebRTC with WebSocket protocol (gratefully using the open-source p5LiveMedia library contributed by Shawn Van Every and others with p5.js) for the video stream with a written-in text-to-speech narration (using its web API with p5.js’s Speech library) only to set up a metaphorical and speculative experiment for the fictional and fantasized reality of the virtual private network, all above as the protocol itself. It means that anyone (only two addresses, or two webcam users on their browsers for now) will be able to access the protocol via the link (a publicly accessible link for now, might add layers of encryption later on) to interact with the multi-node video protocol to experience the space that’s between nodes and between cameras, while making their own image and sound. This is no longer a video with beginning and end nor a loop, but potentially an on-going video work as long as the protocol lasts—all can produce, all can stream at the same time.
As a metaphorical and speculative experiment for now, this project came about as a prototype to reflect on the theoretical journey throughout my research so far…, including combing through the questions I have raised above about working with an “always already” environment as well as pondering on how to find tactics of resistance that’s from within the protocol, inspired by the concepts and references that I will list down below as well as the two weekly PILL meetings on pilling others and on punk. The next step would be to get to more technical aspects to build a better and more suitable protocol for the concept and aesthetics.
/* on the methods and aesthetics */
This is where our worlds meet: regardless of geopolitical boundaries or nodal discrepancies, the process of speculative protocolization creates a space where all nodes and addresses can come and meet, creating multiple encrypted and obscured identities in this temporary virtual private network. Temporary encounters.
And of course, how we meet virtually is through videos: camera has been projecting our visions and perspectives; live cameras capture the proofs of our existence. The projection space is a protocolized space, for it does not hold on to any nodes but points to a direction, multiple directions and surfaces. Deep gazing.
Other than what the live cameras capture, I also wrote in the code to play a few pre-loaded videos with set timer (since I came from the tradition of “time-based” mediums). These videos were either photographed by myself or generated by Runway Gen-2 from text. The written-in narration and video effects roll out with linear time, as if voices and images of the protocol coming from the “machine system,” constructing the structure and pace of the narrative. The narration doesn’t tell a full story but raising prompt-like questions, as if interrogating or caring for those who do smuggle undersea or immigrate in secrecy through tunnels. It is to build the backbones and establish a protocolized world that’s “always-already” like this, running in the background till we forget, which we’re not getting out or opting out from.
Videos are set to multiply on each other’s pixels with p5.js’s “blending” mode as means of obfuscation: by detecting the brightness and darkness of each pixel to end up appearing either very bright or in reversed color—all in a soft pale blue, pink, and green tone, very soft. Therefore, the visual experience would look like this: you will only see more what the other camera captures if you cover the camera on your end; you will only see more video effects if both cameras are covered. It is to invite both cameras to spend time in the “in-between” space, to see images and hear the noise between pixels. For this experiment, I’d like to turn towards and be with the space that’s “in-between-node,” which could also connect with the “edge” for Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, and the “paranode” for Ulises Ali Mejias.
“The points are called ‘nodes’ or vertices, and the lines are called ‘edges.’” written and co-authored by Alexander R. Galloway with Eugene Thacker, when discussing mathematical methods and graph theory to map out the relationship between “nodes” and “edges” in the book The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, “First is the question of agency. The division between nodes and edges implies that while nodes refer to objects, locations, or space, the definition of edges refers to actions effected by nodes…. Second is what might be called the ‘diachronic blindness’ of graph theory. Paradoxically, the geometrical basis (or bias) of the division between ‘nodes’ and ‘edges’ actually works against an understanding of networks as sets of relations existing in time.”
“To the extent that nodocentrism becomes the dominant model for organizing and assembling the social, only the paranodal can suggest alternatives that exist beyond the exclusivity of nodes. … The paranodal is what forces nodes to react and rearrange themselves according to possibilities that before only existed virtually, causing the network to expand in new directions or even cease to exist,” Ulises Ali Mejias leads us to pay attention to the negative space between the nodes from the chapter “The Outside of Networks as a Method for Acting in the World,” in his Off the Network.
I believe in looking at the nodes and edges as a whole to understand more about how else the network and the protocol can become and to reflect on possible controls happening in the protocol in real-time. These are also the spaces that will allow slow-time for going back and forth, for stumbling and ruminating, for including and excluding. Such “in-between-node” spaces are also the public spaces, though masked and hidden, for opportunities to be close by each other, to be attentive of each other, to accompany, to understand, to desire, to eroticize, to meander, to oscillate, to float in…
Last point - since I provided a “screen-recording video” as a demo for this “real-time video protocol,” I became the performer for the protocol. I have also been pondering on how the act of performance is to trace out as many possible ways of living and being within a protocol. In this project of the virtual private network, performing in front of and behind cameras is to change into alternative identities and demonstrate possibilities to be both here and there at the same time, to squat the “in-between-node” spaces.
This project seemingly is about using the Virtual Private Network to resist limitations of the firewall and geo-blocks only for some, but it looks towards a broader question and experiment for creating space between any nodes and addresses to challenge, resist existing control and exclusion within protocols. I take the virtual private network as the speculative and always-already reality as well as take benefit of continuing “misusing” it (as VPN was created initially for business companies to make secure internal communications) to rely on and live with the nuanced alternatives it could provide for living both on the inside and on the outside of nodal networks, communities, and protocols.
Both moving-images and the possibility of virtual private network attempt at moving virtually in illusion and uncanniness. Ulises Ali Mejias also writes about the illusion, virtuality of the mediated reality that’s at a distance while the physical and digital worlds are “interwoven and interdependent.” Here’s to “parallel subjectivity,” “The outcome of this experiencing of parallel subjectivity is not that we are able to read each other’s minds. It is simply the realization that one is experiencing a fellow human being (which is, I suppose, what the Turing test seeks to replicate).” (Ulises Ali Mejias)
By continuing generating new spaces between nodes, it is to generate virtual possibilities to be both inside and outside of a protocol—would we then be able to find more breaths of fresh air?
…and I will leave the rest to testing with the work itself.
// would like to further work on:
- to explore multiple nodes and edges for multi-identity multiplying…
- Galloway & Thacker talk about viruses being the counterprotocol, as they keep multiplying and repeating themselves to disrupt the network
- to add the layer of encryption to enter the site, or to add end-to-end encryption for the video streams
// concepts and references I have been chewing with:
- the “always-already” described by Rey Chow
- protocol as an ambivalence and paradoxical space for multiplicities to exist at the same time
- “edge” for A.R. Galloway & Eugene Thacker
- counterprotocol resistance and virus being “the exploit” from Galloway & Thacker
- “paranode” for Ulises Ali Mejias
- “parallel subjectivity” for Ulises Ali Mejias