Currensee is a speculative microeconomy for environmentally and socially contested spaces. It imagines that access to other perspectives can be valued and micro-licensed. It also takes into consideration the microvalues of ecological labour like carbon and oxygen production of forests and ties them to a system broader social value exchange. In the contested post-truth climate of deep fakes, authenticated cameras can allow users access to a more objective form of reality. For example, in this platform a user could navigate a point cloud model of an endangered environment or a socially contested event, to either stream the real-time authenticated camera at high resolution or micro license a particular camera perspective to broadcast in their external current. We propose that this type of micro-licensing of cameras can feed value back into the environments or streamers, further aiding or complicating the quest for multiple perspective authentication of objective truth.
In the context of attention economies, Currensee shows that streaming live content from specific sites can produce direct values for them. In the same way that an actors 3D scanned hands or voice can be microlicensed now, we imagine one could license a specific live camera view. One example we see currently on social media is co-branded virtue signaling; social media platforms allow users to construct a performance of their digital identities based on causes they support, communicating values about their own goodness. How can such social construction of identity as a performance of ethical behaviours and commitment be capitalised in a livestream platform? As livestreams become wearable, their content can be embodied by users in digital spaces. This may lead to a future in which green screens would be worn as virtue signifiers, allowing anyone to embody and stream their personalized content. So look out for that key green!
Attention Economy
Current takes into consideration the influence of digital content within a broader cultural economy. This new economy does encompass transactions of big sums of money, but rather a fluctuating exchange where each attention gaze is treated as a micro investment that exchanged in a decentralised network. These exchanges of content result in micorvalues affirmed by viewer engagement, attention length and propagation via sharing. Within a cinematic context, the resolution and framing of this content collapses long cuts with short cuts, mundane with significant moments. What kind of micro values does the attention on these immersive moving images bring back to the objects and events they represent?
