"Life-Edit (A Companion to Streaming and Solitude)" is a text by Costanza Candeloro commissioned by Fondazione Prada. Focused on the individual and collective experience of streaming, this native content accompanies the film project "Perfect Failures" conceived by MUBI and Fondazione Prada and available on the online platform in select countries from April 5, 2020. Every week an illustrated chapter of the text will be published on Fondazione Prada’s website and on the Notebook.
Above: Ophthalmic test with keratometer: by measuring the curvature of the anterior surface of the cornea, the extent and axis of astigmatism can be assessed. Courtesy Valery Skurydin / Alamy Stock Photo
Playlist Syndromes, in the decades preceding today’s stable stream, have long been designed by users within peer-to-peer communities, immaterial groups predating visual cults by means of isolation.
According to a more or less pervasive rationale, the do ut des of upload and download, precise invitations and permanence policies, hosting, feed-quality control and private trackers’ video repositories are not the point of owning—in archived form—a vast majority of human-run video production. The temporal visual ownership of titles has seen spikes of commercial movies, random footage and the excessive extemporary production of generalized .mov based visual cultures.
The long wave of this phenomenon has irrigated our adolescence, providing an indispensable video library to our palace of memories: the pirate torrent and the illegal stream were representing the interlocutors in the construction of our generation’s identity, while cinema and television programming was going around in circles.
The pipes of the industry had been updated to new rules and regulated paths, intersecting source and consumer. The wide speed-spectrum of private video consumption has been given life by personal data, a wolf-like figure that goes by the name of data hoarding: two million gigabytes of unhinged (unsorted) videos, produced by cam-users and uploaded to Amazon servers by an indexed single-user archive, where the accumulated running time now reaches centuries of stored visual content.
A mass dispatched and aimed at soloist satisfaction.1
Above: Ophthalmic test with keratometer: by measuring the curvature of the anterior surface of the cornea, the extent and axis of astigmatism can be assessed. Courtesy Volf Elena / Alamy Stock Photo
Above: Server room. Courtesy Mint Images Limited / Alamy Stock Photo
1. Every evening you come home worn out from a mess of events, travels, relationships, images—none of which you can identify as an accomplished experience. Divided and scattered, the nature of your knowledge finds perfect correspondence in the various aspects of everyday life. The logical relationships between the events of your life seem to be replaced by random combinations. You do not need any cure for insomnia, just a decent partner.