"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: Frontispiece of the book Le Voyage dans les Yeux by Georges Rodenbach, Paul Ollendorff Éditeur, Paris, 1893. Courtesy Archives et Musée de la Littérature, Bruxelles
Streaming is the default and generic act of watching a movie on a digital device, a clean act. This text introduces several conditions that are parallel to the act of streaming, providing a fragmentary overview of watching and playlist syndromes involved when somebody engages with movies in the 3rd millennium.
Streaming is the least passive format of viewership, a personal, emo-driven subjective edit; performed over keyboards and running times (pause / keep watching / watch it again), it has changed the status and politics of vision.
Streaming is generally understood to involve laptops, movies, images, infrastructures and the Internet. Some of the pictures that illustrate this text tell us about the parallel development of reading monitors and the microfilm process. From single queries to large networks, monitor accumulation and archiving systems (i.e., the screen-aided literary process), a set of images is used to trace the main and core models by which streaming is a collective dream and ultimately a literary phenomenon.
A visual companion to the fragmentary origin of streaming symptoms.
Above: 16mm microfilm of photographic documents. Courtesy durk gardenier / Alamy Foto Stock
Above: Espionage activity: projection of telegraphic dispatches on microfilm during the Siege of Paris, 1870–1871, etching. Courtesy INTERFOTO / Alamy Foto Stock