UltraSaiyanJedi is streaming Tactical Arena: Apocalypse, March 11th (Twitch is like the fun side of the military-industrial-surveillance complex)

Mao

Massacre, 2020

“UltraSaiyanJedi is streaming…” is a short comic book story that takes place in a video game streaming platform. The streamer hides their identity behind a screen name and an animated avatar, while offering personal trivia to the audience. The narrative connects the social experience in streaming platforms such as Twitch and the real time broadcast of the gamer’s in-game performance, with the precarization of the entertainment industry, as expressed in the financial relationships established between streamer, audience and platform. In this way, the work positions digital presence and the ongoing monetization and uberization of play time as constitutive elements of a posthuman experience, here understood as the palpable results of a quotidian experience overdetermined by technology. The video game characters, which vary between the cyborg, the humanoid and the outright nonhuman, imagine possibilities for a modular and customizable body, radically different from conventional bodily experience, reinforcing the presence of a posthuman subjectivity.