The “stream” is literally nowhere but, nonetheless, it is experienced as real. This shift is exemplified by Virtual Zoom backgrounds in which we inhabit ideal, but not actual, spaces each in a self-selected isolation chamber, one box in an array of talking boxes as great or small as the available bandwidth can supply. In 1980 Paul Virilio predicted that “vision of light moving on a screen would have replaced all personal movement.” 4 Forty years later, interfaces have become our new reality: the virtual as the “real but not actual, ideal but not abstract” 5 takes over. With half of the global population in lockdown, 2 concerns about surveillance capitalism 3 in the age of streaming have been momentarily pushed to one side.

If shooting 1 characterized the past decade of internet culture, from selfies to Instagram, streaming has emerged as the protagonist of 2020s quarantine culture: a moment characterized not by the drive “to save the moment for later” but instead by spatially dislocated but “live” connections (as inflected by network latencies).

Hypercam enacts a gesture of visual resistance to the squared-off talking heads that we have all become it converts the interface flatland into a multidimensional space of play. Once a bounded practice, a backup for otherwise face-to-face encounters, video conferencing became the normative mode of interaction for work meetings, friendships, education, love relationships and family gatherings on both the local and global scales. During the first months of 2020, human relationships turned virtual.

Hypercam 1