Mrs Luva‑Luva

// Haiku Head 2025. Blender, Substance Painter, Three.js, MediaPipe, ARKit, live stream from YouTube under oil and paint, code. A painted 3D head floats over a 24 hour live stream of Skid Row, Los Angeles. The paint is the noise: colour as distraction, surface as obstruction. The head tracks your cursor but is unable to look at the people behind it. Click to generate haikus about what it doesn't see.

‘Turn a different corner and we never would have met’
George Michael, A Different Corner, 1986

I love this song, partly for the casual drop of the quantum Many Worlds multiverse theory of reality. Every potential action, turning a different corner, creates a new branching universe. In this one, at this time, I’ve walked into Coopers Townhouse, into the live streaming of their reality, and a man with a deep tan who’s giving off serious Elvis energy is belting out this stone cold classic, pitch perfect. They’re not his words or the tune he wrote, but it’s his voice, and in that voice I believe he’s a man who truly understands the fear of being made vulnerable through love, though it may well be that he was simply born with great pipes and knows how to use them. The line of authenticity is blurring. I’m here because I’m intrigued by the pub my YouTube algorithm suggested I might like to watch. It was right. I liked watching people singing and boozing from 11 to 11, seven days a week, without a care in the world, and at just before 15:30 on a Friday I’m joining them.

‘Take me back in time, maybe I can forget’

I order a drink and take a seat. I don’t realise at the time but I’ve bumped into someone next to me and she and her husband look a bit annoyed, my focus is elsewhere. It’s only watching the footage back afterwards that I clock it. It’s strangely intriguing. I feel like I’ve learnt something about myself, a certain lack of spatial awareness I’d heard about but never observed from the outside. None of the 392 people watching online notice either. They’re discussing George Michael and Ghost. A stream of semi coherent running commentary, sometimes interacting with each other, sometimes not, but clearly sharing a knowledge of the various characters that inhabit Coopers.

There’s something beautifully hedonistic about a group of characters inhabiting a pub all day, every day, caught in boozy song, laughter, and shared experience around the clock. To be part of it is, in some ways, stepping back to a time and place I never really knew. It’s also very culturally specific to Liverpool, which is a highly sociable place. I get the sense a lot of the online contingent are there to observe this, to sit inside something that feels more coherent than the world outside.

‘I would promise you all of my life’

There are counters on the wall showing TikTok, Insta and YouTube follower numbers. Aside from that it’s not obvious anywhere that we’re being piped out across the world. No one in the pub shows any awareness of it either. Somewhere within the gradual normalisation of surveillance packaged as entertainment, of endless streams of reality as content, I’ve developed the ability to shut it out, which surprises me.

I’m someone for whom privacy feels really important. I definitely verge on cagey with people I don’t know, something to do with the risk of sharing parts of yourself only for them to be picked up, interpreted, and reframed by others. There’s probably a mentally healthy place somewhere between being buttoned up and spewing out a continual stream of images of your life to strangers.

Anyway, the thought of being watched by hundreds of invisible eyes creeps me out, but there’s also something about being part of a group rather than an individual that makes it feel strangely comfortable.

‘Little by little you’ve brought me to my knees’

How did the boundaries between public and private get so blurred? It perhaps began, or at least became visible, in 1996 with the “godmother” of the live stream, a 19 year old student, Jennifer Ringley. Using an early Logitech QuickCam, she wrote a script to capture a single frame every few minutes and upload it to her site, updating the page so viewers always saw her latest image. Through this, Jennicam, an early iteration of the live stream was conceived.

She describes it as a technical challenge, mainly to show her mates, but it started to become something else, an experiment in visibility, surveillance, and everyday life as material. Over time she became acclimatised to being watched and left the camera on permanently, setting herself a rule to conduct her life as if it didn’t exist. A couple of years after that her site was generating millions of views and she began charging people to watch. Then in 2002 she stopped entirely and went dark, before the rise of MySpace and everything that followed.

However immune you imagine yourself to be to invisible eyes, it’s hard to believe that kind of exposure doesn’t build up somehow. Privacy is a human right, and yet people keep finding ways to trade it away for money, attention, visibility, connection. To strip someone of privacy has long been a way of asserting power over them. George Michael knew something about that long before social media turned exposure into a norm. While celebrities welcomed the chance to regain some autonomy over their own image, the general public increasingly embraced the chance to become visible in the same way. Then came the Kardashian era, where exposure itself hardened into fat wads of cash.

I guess that’s the question I have about the social landscape Coopers exists in. Meta glasses are already here. You can be filmed through someone’s lenses without even knowing it. We are becoming continuous streams of tradable data, and our recorded faces stare back at us while we do the shopping. Have we passed the point where privacy feels like something we are entitled to and becomes something we opt out of?

‘And if all that there is is this fear of being used
I should go back to being lonely and confused’

Later in the evening a woman gives me her necklace. I’m taken aback. I don’t know why she’s done this and I feel profoundly uncomfortable at this act of puzzling generosity from a total stranger. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a southerner and I just don’t understand it. My friend Rhonda handles it much better, has a dance with her, and the woman gives her a ring.

Outside of being part of a live feed, the whole experience of Coopers Townhouse is not so different from any good pub, the unpredictability of people and the sense of fun. Part of that is the music, watching people take the stage to entertain, stepping into something that isn’t quite theirs but becomes shared, a kind of commons of emotional connection while they inhabit the song. Increasingly I feel that surviving what is coming, whether AI or climate, depends on being part of a group, on looking after each other.

Perhaps the ubiquitous, slightly lonely gym selfie, a byproduct of surveillance culture, will fade, and pissed karaoke will take its place. I hope so.

‘I’d say love was a magical thing
I’d say love would keep us from pain
Had I been there
Had I been there’

// Silk Scarves — Luvaland