chapter
03 THE VOID
THE VOID is a research project on tactical video and an audiovisual publishing venue for practice-based research at the Institute of Network Cultures. This article was written specifically for this publication by Jordi Viader Guerrero, researcher and member of THE VOID.
THE VOID: Hybrid Events as Expanded Publishing
By Jordi Viader Guerrero
We started THE VOID in early 2022 when the Netherlands was still under partial lockdowns. social mediaA time when we were subjected to an acceleration and intensification of the ongoing platformization of social relations. Closed off in our private spaces, we collectively reached out to the cameras and screens attached to our devices for years already to do all sorts of things online: teaching, learning, chatting, drinking, partying, gaming, or simply hanging out. It is interesting to see this moment in retrospect as an intensification rather than the so-called “revolution” of social media and the smartphone from a decade earlier.social mediaThe visible banners of this moment were not shiny and new hardware and software that would upend all social relations as we know them. Instead, they were the admittedly boring and serious Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and Jitsi that didn't promise us a new world but simply to continue with our everyday and boring lives and be able to see each other while avoiding physical proximity.
By the time the lockdowns were enforced, we had already been putting ourselves in front of cameras to upload images to the internet for years (selfie stick fever had come and gone), but they managed to rearrange so many different social contexts, from academic and cultural to business and entrainment, as this specific screen-camera-networked infrastructure setup. Suddenly, the platformized internet was not a place where we would deliberately post stuff on (like Luther on the church’s door or an influencer on Instagram’s algorithmic feed) but a collection of channels where we had to stream our lives away just to participate in society.
Three years later, while we might not be confined to our homes anymore, alternative publishing practicesvideo streaming practices have successfully infiltrated academic and artistic research publishing. This mostly happens in unassuming ways –yet another online speaker series, another webinar, a publication launch, a lecture performance, or just a regular internal meeting– hybrid setups have become an expected, although downplayed, element of the publishing workflow. traditional publishing practicesOn one hand, this entails the repurposing of devices and practices of video production, once relegated to the highly professionalized industries of film and TV, later amateurishly adopted by video game streaming, video blogging, and video essay online niches, for the broader culture and educational sector.conditions of workOn the other hand, creates the expectation for both "creative", "immaterial" workers and traditional publishers to become a new sort of (un)professional AV technicians and producers.
This uncomfortable expectations shift is more often than not manifested in the seemingly compulsory yet awkward troubleshooting minutes preambling cultural and academic events (how come the projector never works?),digital objectsour over-reliance on big tech's software and hosting solutions (the other virus was Microsoft Teams), and the unappealing look and sound, to say the least, of hybrid events as aesthetic products (so much money was poured in the pre-2008 EU and elsewhere for building astonishing white cubes to end up “housing” culture on the Zoom interface).
Moreover, the video-fication of academic and artistic research has effectively multiplied the moments of contact with the public while simultaneously decreasing their finality and their stakes. Making and publishing a video does not necessarily culminate a process, but every part of the process, no matter how inconsequential, is now potentially subject to becoming video and, therefore, public. social mediaA gesture that, let's not forget, is that of early post-internet artists on YouTube (think Petra Cortright) as well as vloggers, video game streamers on Twitch (our unsung inspiration), sex cammers, religious mass broadcasting, and, of course, reality TV. Online video is everywhere yet remains invisible as a transparent, privatized infrastructure-as-a-service we see through, rather than a technical medium we work with to develop and publish our research practice.
A great deal of the research we do at THE VOIDconditions of workis about embracing our newfound roles as AV technicians. This has allowed us to learn that working with “content”, with “ideas” or “theories” entails working with moving images–at the very least with images of ourselves or of a guest speaking, but most probably also with memes, all sort of internet found footage, software interfaces, and produced video content such as video essays or performances. Crucially, working with images also means working with hardware: with cables, monitors, cameras, video switchers, green screens, routers, lights, cloud storage, mixers, and a long etc. If moving the conversation away from content towards publishing is an acknowledgment of the material and social conditions of the production and distribution of the former, what alternative publishing practicesTHE VOID is then trying to advocate for is an expansion of the tools and social dynamics of print and online publishing to include those of video production.
The practices and tools we utilize to engage with video production have gradually changed in the past three years. The first episodes of THE VOID are video podcasts where the speakers are overlaid on top of a keyed background, mostly showing content addressed during the conversation, along with popping visuals. A useful format for long-form conversations that was already prevalent on YouTube and has become increasingly important on the current political media landscape. At the time, our interest was simply to produce a video analogue of the mostly written content on our research blog (INC) by adding visual depth and interest to podcast production. An INC TV that would produce outcomes somewhere in between video podcasts and video essays.
However, after our participation in the Internet Cafe Exhibition organized by the Salwa Foundation in July 2023, we started to shift our focus towards streaming hybrid events. This event marked the realization of several key aspects that would determine our practice going forward. To begin with, it became clear to us that figuring out how to make the green screen studio setup mobile and adaptable to different spaces was a fundamental part of what we are doing. The studio was not a backdrop to take for granted, but something akin to an installation piece. alternative publishing practicesThe equipment –cameras, monitors, switcher, mixer, cables–but also ourselves, were not to be hidden but part of this installation at the center of a live event.
![THE VOID at Internet Cafe organized by Salwa][image1]![THE VOID at Internet Cafe organized by Salwa][image2]
Liveness was also a fundamental shift: the video podcast workflow followed the clear production division between pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution[[annoation: It’s interesting to think about how podcasts were originally Apple’s solution to the iPod’s lack of AM/FM receiver. A device that conceived audio as question of storage and compression rather than one of broadcasting and reception changed the production and distribution practices of spoken publications and, therefore, the way they engage with their audiences. | author:]]. Video and network technologies, that is,toolscameras, video editing software, and online distribution platforms, were deployed to create a boundary between a production moment, which could be controlled and curated, and a distribution one to an unseen and mostly anonymous audience. The video camera, a recording device, was used to unbind performance from reception to produce a standardized finished product: a publication. To put it differently, the camera, or more broadly, the video-making apparatus, was used as a technique to avoid liveness or the temporal coincidence between performance and reception. This also implies that the studio, the space of shooting, is fixed and most probably closed off to external influence. So, when THE VOID went live, it entailed a reconsideration of the studio, but also cameras, cables, and mixers. Broadly speaking, it triggered a rearrangement of our production workflows and our relationship to our audience.
Notably, editing and distribution collapsed onto a single production moment: we don’t have to edit/process the camera’s output and then upload it to a server anymore, but the camera, like those integrated in our many portable devices, is always already connected to the internet streaming whatever images come out from it. Tsustainability of workflowshis not only reduces overall production time, but embeds post-production –cutting and assembling footage as well as keying the green screen– into the live performance. This requires our live events to be conceived and organized in such a way as to create the type of multi-layered images we were producing for the podcast-like episodes. These are thus comprised of different short presentations, music or art performances, dialogues, or screenings, in which the activities of searching for, selecting, and displaying online images on the green screen become central. What our guests are prompted to do is to use the tools and visual language of desktop web-surfing and gameplay commentary streaming in front of a live audience, producing a hybrid outcome, both a performance and a video.
At the hardware level, going live de-centers the camera as a recording device, in favor of the video switcher (a toolsBlackmagic ATEM Mini Pro/Extreme) as a compositional one. With this device, it is possible to live edit, that is, to select and switch images, or a combination of images, to display both to the in-person and online audience. A shift that is reflected in our operational diagrams and that fundamentally reframes our practice less as the capturing of footage and more as the visual reorganizing and live publishing of existing research, where the camera is just another source of visual input at the same level as the laptop.
![Operational diagram of the latest VOID setup][image3]
This change became evident to us only recently when producing two live video essays with Donatella Della Ratta and Lesia Kulchynska for Aksioma’s Tactics & Practice Conference in February 2025. While we had been hosting live events already for a year and a half, the workflow for these two productions was focused on tightly collaborating with the researchers before the event to search, select, and think through the connections between their theoretical positions and specific online images. Both Lesia and Donatella had published texts with INC before on online visual cultures and warfare, the production of these video essays was then an opportunity to expand on their written work through a process of visual research and produce an equally visual outcome. Although, in contrast to a regular video essay, this outcome is meant to be performed in front of a live audience, which requires the development of visual narrative techniques with computer interfaces that can be reproduced live, but also enables the production of a curated moment of collective reception similar to a film screening or a theater play.
![Lesia Kulchynska’s live video essay at Aksioma’s Tactics and Practice conference “Are you a Software Update?”][image4]
On another note, digital objectsgoing through the visual research process made us keenly aware of the contexts of circulation (closed Telegram channels, YouTube and Twitch feeds, questionable institutional websites, etc.) in which these images operate. These contexts are publishing practices not that different from ours, congregating communities around visual distribution and, relevantly, inducing behaviors and expectations with political implications. Producing visual outcomes from visual research is therefore not an innocent act of distant observation, but a politicstactical recirculation of visual production. To put it differently, it is the re-embedding of images implicated in operations of violence into cultural production.
The simultaneous production of an online video and a live event brings to the forefront the issue of space: public events cannot be held at small, windowless studios. In a city like Amsterdam, where real estate is a luxury we can barely afford, we can only produce events in either borrowed spaces, such as the Amsterdam University of Applied Science’s student recording studio, or cheaply rented ones, like the Ventilator Cinema in the formerly squatted, self-managed social center OT301. Once again, this requires a mobile setup adaptable to the circumstances of each space and the energy and labor time to build and unbuild a fairly complex technical arrangement, but it has the benefit of allowing us to harness a space’s community, networks, and facilities.
![THE VOID at Expanded Publishing Fest in January 2024 in OT301’s Ventilator Cinema][image5]
For example, in the context of this book’s research project, .expub, we produced three events at the Ventilator Cinema, a small-sized screening room with a capacity of about 50 people in what used to be the Netherlands Film Academy. This space not only allows us to produce mid-sized events, but it is an interesting case of repurposing old cinematic infrastructure for new media practices. Additionally, OT301 is a formerly squatted social center with a well-known history and community in the Amsterdam alternative scene. This summoning power, plus the simultaneous organizing of micro-book fairs in the bar next to the screening room, and club nights in a large area downstairs once the stream was over, were fundamental for the events’ attendance success. Experiencing the screening room packed to the brim also gives these events a sense of purpose: communityproducing and publishing audiovisual research is a way of partaking and reshaping an already existing communitywith cultural and political objectives. We had similar experiences during our collaborations with Nero Editions and Aksioma while producing events addressed to Rome’s and Ljubljana’s alternative scenes.
![THE VOID at Exit Reality event in Rome organized by Nero Editions.][image6]
Perhaps what is suggested by the expansion of publishing practices, to include online video production and distribution, is to start considering often behind-the-scenes engagements with media as opportunities for community making and engagement. In short, making public the production process. But if we take this mantra seriously, it creates several unresolved challenges for THE VOID. The most relevant for us at the moment is that of online hosting and distribution infrastructure. We have slowly migrated from Twitch to PeerTube as toolsour primary streaming platform, mostly thanks to our collaboration with UKRAiNA TV, a member of the StreamArt Network (SAN) we are also part of, and who had an instance running on university servers. SAN communityis a collective strategy to distribute know-how, labor, and infrastructure,hopefully to be able to sustain these sorts of streaming/video publishing practices in the long term and position them as an alternative governance and ownership logic for online publishing, opposed to that of corporate social media.
Even though we recently started experimenting on our own PeerTube instance, yet, we still rely on Vimeo and SoundCloud when it comes to long-term audio and video archiving. So, taking note from feminist self-hosting and sustainable computation initiatives, if we also consider hosting and digital sustainability of workflowsinfrastructures in general a moment of community organizing rather than merely commoditized services, we need to reflect on the sustainability of our practice at our current scales. Scale is understood in two senses: the number of people our events can reach at a distance and the technical infrastructure needed to do that, as well as the scale in terms of the amount of information (bytes and pixels) to be stored somewhere and managed by someone. Online video is second only to AI when it comes to informational intensity. So, to have a minimum of control over the infrastructure to store so much information, we either need to start questioning video as our main medium or collaborate with trusted partners who already have the hardware and expertise to host this kind of production. Most probably, we should do both. That is, we need to think tactically and critically about our tools (radio is never out of the question) and our content. What we stream, what we store, and what we publish are strictly connected to our infrastructural dependencies. Therefore, it is crucial to consider these dependencies in the same way we consider our audiences, namely as a form of community organizing.