"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: Still from the animation movie Ghost in the Shell (1995) by Mamoru Oshii. Courtesy Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.
“If you do not like the way you live, my suggestion is to change yourself, otherwise simply close off your ears, eyes and mouth, and live alone.” [Motoko Kusanagi arresting a criminal.]
—Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Kōan Kyūka SECTION-9, Season 1, Episode 1, October 1, 2002, Kenhji Kamiyama.
Generalist streaming depletes genetic diversity according to an alleged logic of demand. An ideal fishing pond where an apparent heterogeneity is a sale offer made by the same species, camouflaged in a well-known formula of choice. A visual dining option that would bore even the average consumer planning a comfortable #nepenthe&chill evening.
The heightened possibility of choice does not match a general freedom, it consolidates a figure that has come to be defined as a generic spectator, a human-like being fed by a progressive decrease in the presence and circulation of visual materials that is not as click-friendly and binge-watchable as the perfect machinery of admissible movies. The build-up of sections singularly dedicated to independent, award-winning, worthy arthouse content channeled a made-up elective relationship with unrestful users, without the necessary provision of hard-access content and any air-space for confrontation. A turn that is building a canon that is just as much given by movie-materials as by their assumed presence, and that does not manage to construct any resolution.
What used to be congregational—as in a collective yet dispersed community of independent spectators, getting together as a form of new development, assuming diverse universes, alternate ending and hardcore critique—is now dead and has been rebuilt in a new format of participation, coded in the platform.1
Above: Bryant Park Film Festival, New York City. Courtesy Steve Tulley / Alamy Stock Photo.
Above: TV remote controls on sell in Yangon, Myanmar. Courtesy Aliaksandr Mazurkevich / Alamy Stock Photo.
1. Right after dinner, I read in front of you, the movements coagulate with the rattling of the train that crosses the flyover. The corridor window frames the seasons, a mirror that helps to endure. These hours should be time for you to devote to home-management activities. The film is depleting as you move from one room to another. Still with difficulty, yet another day is about to end.