the Reality Televiewer
2021
excerpt from a speculative new media project born of many pandemic winter hours spent watching reality tv with housemates, escaping into a constructed reality and considering our own non-televised constructed reality.
this piece was conceived and written in reference to Johanna Drucker’s SPECLAB: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, 2009. “...knowledge forms are never stable or self-identical but always situated within conditions of use. knowledge, then, is necessarily partial, subjective, and situated.” (xiv)
Enter the Reality Televiewer, an augmented reality app and quantum intervention that allows users to see how their lives might be conveyed to an audience to convert aspects of the human condition to maximum view-based revenue. How can the drama, or non-drama, of your life be monetized? The Reality Televiewer allows us to “[imagine] what [we] do not know” (25).
Users can Cut & Paste previous clips to remove context, expand or contract narrative temporality and spatiality, or change narrative progress by inviting the Kuleshov effect (“the tendency of audiences to invent a narrative connection between any two images in sequence”). Users can Narrate to allow subjects to view, analyze, justify, etc. their own past realities as interview participants after the fact. They can Intensify, which introduces music, cliffhangers, or an inflammatory lack of context. They can Irrationalize, which intentionally disrupts a conventional/generic interpretation of intention in favor of a fringe or irrational perception. Potential other features include Recap, which allows users to preface a conversation or interaction by re-hashing a selection of prior interpersonal interactions with a varying degree of relevance to the conversation at hand, and Foreshadow, which teases future potentialities based on an oft-repeated visual kernel. Finally, users can Calculate Revenue, which allows them to better understand which scenarios or interventions in reality are most popular to TV audiences and most cost-effective for reality television producers.
“If norms, means, and averages govern [real life], then sleights, swerves, and deviation have their way in the [reality TV] game” (26). One point of the Reality Televiewer is to highlight the lack of necessary connection between plot and narrative in everyday life. Reality is a production of outside factors – in reality TV, it is also literally a product. The Reality Televiewer gives everyday TV watchers firsthand experience in how knowledge/“reality” (vis-à-vis luxury yacht crews, people from Newcastle or Essex or the Jersey Shore, naked people left to fend for themselves in the woods, British bakers, glass blowers, etc., etc., etc.) is created, rather than displayed, for our consumption.