Livestreaming experiments with The Hmm

How this livestream platform collaboration came to be

At the end of May 2020, after the first few months of the pandemic, and the increase of endless video streaming sessions for many people—whether for work or to keep in touch with loved ones—the first livestream event was held by The Hmm and Hackers & Designers.

The collaboration between The Hmm and H&D was originally planned as part of the BodyBuilding exhibition, where we wanted to do a bus tour from Amsterdam to Enschede, with presentations from eight artists, designers, and researchers taking place on the bus itself. This could not happen due to the pandemic, so instead of The Hmm being hosted on the bus, we decided to host The Hmm on the H&D livestream. For this event, we built our own livestream. The reason for this was two-fold: to figure out if there was a non-extractivist way to set up a videostream (eg. not relying on Zoom, Skype, Google Hangout, etc), as well as further re-adjusting the ways in which to make visible the BodyBuilding exhibition at Tetem, which had to be shut down early because of the pandemic restrictions.

As mentioned, for the occasion, H&D built up a custom video streaming website, leveraging existing infrastructure (MUX.com) but gaining more control on the overall video stream design and live chat. This initial ad-hoc prototype got refined more over the course of 2020 and was used for many other events since then, both by H&D and The Hmm. The code for the live stream, as well as information about how it was made, was made freely available on our H&D Github (https://github.com/hackersanddesigners/the-hmm-livestream) and we created a specific license for its use.