Center for Curatorial Studies and Hessel Museum
42.0202897°, -73.9143773°

UTC-4

Streaming since 09.21.2020 00:00:00
Live for 4904431 Seconds

● Itlaunches.today is an online project developed by the second year students at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. This web-based platform hosts a series of essays, interviews, and commissioned works that grew out of discussions around technologies of remote transmission such as radio and other forms of broadcast. Essays and interviews explore experimental sound production, relationships between cable networks and streaming technologies, collaborative solidarity practices, and decentralized mobile networks. The commissioned works include a sound work and accompanying essay on the history of the jingle as well as a recorded live-broadcast performance reframing the five senses into experiences suited to remote communication.

The design of ● Itlaunches.today was developed around the idea of “liveness” as it translates between different technological mediums, borrowing visual codes from common live-stream platforms. Simulating a broadcast in real time, the site presents one project “live” each day. The site rotates through the entire roster of projects over the course of a week, and each one can be accessed at any point through the archive. The passage of time in each live stream is measured in Unix time 4904431, typically used in operating systems to show the temporal distance from a single point—which in this case is the launch of the site. Accruing in units of single seconds, it is designed to be read by another operating system, and is difficult to compute from the human perspective of relational time. In addition to the ticking timecode, the site also emphasizes paused moments through the appearance of dots that accrue over the course of elongated inaction.

Last Updated 11.16.20