GSD Platform 10: Live Feed

Jon Lott & John May

Platform 10: Live Feed is the latest installment of Platform, Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s annual compendium of select student work, events, lectures, and exhibitions.
Platform 10: Live Feed confronts a central paradox: the “live feeds” of our lives are exponentially more mediated than the analog forms of documentation they are so quickly replacing and erasing. This fact, in combination with the rapid manipulability endemic to all electronic media, now presents us, its users, with radically new conditions of knowledge and imagination. Under these conditions, real-time platforms for meaningful self-expression and fictionalization are inextricably tied to the novel consequences—political, ethical, epistemological—of a world in which distortion, simulation, and manipulation are often indistinguishable from their opposite.
Platform 10: Live Feed is a document of images presented in reverse chronological order from July 2017 to August 2016. Pulled from a crowd-sourced database of 117,518 available files, this “live feed” of the institution samples images from students, faculty, and staff alike, revealing the fluidity between the place, production, and people of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.