There is going to be little demand for NASA's Space Station Webcam because it only really operates during the wee hours of the morning and its pretty grainy. In order for this to work you have to be able to provide people with a live view from space that is actually live and available when they want it, so they can put it up places and always expect it to show them a changing view of space - so they can allow it to be a part of the atmosphere of a room.

People don't appreciate the power of ambient television. Television as atmosphere - as background. Thats the reason they ruined MTV. They found that people paid more attention if they had shows on instead of videos. If people paid more attention they made more money. So they made shows, and in doing so they destroyed one of the more interesting parts of the world I grew up in, a TV channel that was kind of like a radio station. You could leave it playing. It just presented interesting pop culture all the time. If you wanted to, you could pay attention for a few minutes, maybe see something interesting. Then you could go back to doing something else and let it fall into the background, and it didn't disturb you. You could half listen to it, just like people half listen to the radio while driving or doing other things. You could multitask it.

You can't really do that with a normal television show. You loose track of things; you can't follow the plot unless you devote your attention to it. And radio stations aren't always as interesting as MTV was. There is a lot of depth to a video - a lot to process. MTV in some respects epitomized what Brian Eno talks about with his music.

I like [Ambient Music] as an ambiguous term. It gives me a certain latitude.

It has two major meanings. One is the idea of music that allows you any listening position in relation to it. This has widely been misinterpreted by the press (in their infinite unsubtlety) as background music. I mean music that can be background or foreground or anywhere, which is rather a different idea.

Most music chooses its own position in terms of your listening to it. Muzak wants to be back there. Punk wants to be up front. Classical wants to be another place. I wanted to make something you could slip in and out of. You could pay attention or you could choose not to be distracted by it if you wanted to do something while it was on. I can’t read with a pop record playing, or with most classical records. They’re not intended to leave that part of the mind free – my mind, anyway. Ambient music allows many different types of attention.

The other meaning is... creating an ambience, a sense of place that complements and alters your environment. Both meanings are contained in the word ambient.

Digital picture frames are good examples of ambient television. It ought to be easy to subscribe to an RSS feed in flckr and have the pictures display on your big flatscreen television in your living room. Generally speaking, it isn't. The technology is available. Its so easy to put these things together. But no one has packaged it properly.

Doing so would change the nature of people's relationship with television.

Thats what a web cam in space has the opportunity to do - that any webcam could do if the resolutions where high enough and it was easy to view them on a TV.

As they currently exist, web cams are pretty boring. You're not going to spend a lot of time watching a web cam, even in space, because its sort of like staring out of a window, and the things outside of windows aren't usually exciting enough to hold your attention for long periods of time.

But people still like to have windows in their home - not because they stare out them all the time, but because its nice to be able to glance out of them from time to time. People hang art in their home, not because they want to look at that art all the time, but because it sets the tone for a room, and because there are moments where you do just want to stare at that favorite painting of yours and meditate.

If you could run any webcam on a TV, or view any work of art, you could just leave that webcam or work of art up all the time. It would be there when you wanted to see it and you could ignore it when you had something else to do. You could glance at it for a moment whenever you wanted. You could sit down and study it without a lot of effort.

It would expand your relationship with your TV, your relationship with your home, your relationship with your art, and your relationship with the world, and its so easy to do.

RE: NASA - NASA TV - Space Station Webcam - Television as Atmosphere