Real Time

Surfing the Internet is the labor of assembling Planet Earth; scrolling fingertips aggregate code, sourced across colossal distances into our browser windows via intercontinental strands of glass. In this global economy of code assembly, our experience of surfing as a geographically distributed form of labor is obscured by the aesthetics of real time: whereby the enormous distances between fingertips and content are »massaged« into invisibility by the aesthetics of the interface.

»Real Time« is a live-streamed digital video that examines the geopolitics of the throbber. Colloquially referred to as a buffering icon, the throbber is that ubiquitous cycling GIF intervening between the motions of our bodies while surfing and a distant server's delivery of content. The throbber is a rupture in the global economy of content assembly. It is the last shadow of the geographic scale of the Internet, the momentary interruption of the vastness of Planet Earth itself into the otherwise smooth flow of real-time online experiences.

The underlying code comprising this video piece has been distributed across fifteen servers located on five continents. Each screening is the live re-assembly of this content. The subtle fluctuations in resolution offer a momentary portrait of the uneven assembly of Planet Earth. Every screening is a unique index of the disparate nature of real time.