Ironically, you need to watch old-fashioned traditional television to experience the continuous, quasi-infinite flow of the broadcast transmission. Turn on your tv, and it comes pouring out, non-stop, uninterrupted, a constant flow of information & disinformation, along with the jolted hypnotic repetitions of ads, graphics, pundits, sitcoms, reality tv, and station identifications all merged and fused into a continuously telecasted media-on-tap.
But there is something seductively reassuring, immersive, and mesmerizing about the absolute syncronicity of live broadcast television, which enables viewers to congregate around the shared, simultaneous, audio-visual experience. Everyone is watching the Same Thing at the Same Time.
So let’s imagine non-stop, net-tv (not video-on-demand!): always on, never ceasing, and continuously streamed. In building on the concept of the shared, synchronous flow of the live transmission from broadcast television, Internet viewers, on the other hand, are potentially socially-aggregated, collectively-engaged, and telematically-connected in the simultaneity of the Internet streaming broadcast.
Now imagine the continuous flow of net-tv as the longest single program imaginable: a broadcast of uninterrupted – or constantly interrupted depending on how you look at it – artist-driven appropriation, capture, manipulation, and malfunctioning audio-visual media. In this program, there is no beginning, middle nor end, no breaks, no pause, only the unceasing 24/7 transmission in the ever-present present of the here and now. It just keeps on going, going, going… such that no one knows where or why or what comes next: a long durational aleatoric composition of flow, abstraction, repetition and flux.