Catriona Jeffries

Serving simultaneously as a stage of presentation and a playback assemblage, Judy Radul’s Live Lecture Streaming Podium: I am Not a Cat frames and distorts live lectures to highlight the non-neutrality of technology.

Building on the theory surrounding cinema as a viewing machine, Radul’s practice insists that spatial organization and materiality are modes of framing. Following this thread, Live Lecture Streaming Podium was inspired by pre-pandemic online presentations, in which one might encounter lectures with highly sophisticated content that are restricted or otherwise altered by the format of their unacknowledged digital framework.

Whether it’s faulty network connections, external noises interfering with audio inputs, or other technical issues, Live Lecture Streaming Podium aims to pay homage to the distinctive qualities that come along with our use of technology for the dissemination of information. While the work is a fully functioning stage with a lectern, tracking cameras, a microphone, and screens for sharing graphic elements, this lecture podium also enters chance happenings into the live lecture/stream. These ‘impurities’ include but are not limited to voice and face filters, background images, and mechatronic activity in the form of a moving curtain; these effects aim to feed the spirit of improvisation that comes alongside the stage presented and encourage viewers to see these disruptions as a form of support for serious enquiry and presentation.

Through Live Lecture Streaming Podium: I am Not a Cat, Radul creates a system that does not pretend to be neutral ‘communication’, exploring these new modes of visual display as techniques that respond to and inform cultural hierarchies, focusing on technologies overlooked as ‘support.’ In its denaturalization (aesthetically and comedically) of knowledge, the work seeks to remind both the live and online viewer that not only is the content within these presentations subjective but that the framework that their technological formats reside in contains a subjectivity that inherently mutates and remolds the information they convey as well.