Living Inside the Movie - the art of streaming
A few weeks ago, artist Alex Apostolidis of iWant2BeOnTV contacted me while doing research into livestreaming and the possibility of creating a sustainable, grassroots public-access television network connecting streaming communities across Canada.
Alex wanted to interview me about the history of NOMADlife.tv and some of our early experiments with livestreaming.
What followed became something considerably broader.
I wanted to live inside the movie.
The conversation begins about as far back as I can remember.
When I was very young, my grandfather showed me old musicals, Singin’ in the Rain in particular. There are scenes in that film where we move through a movie studio and see different films being made simultaneously: actors performing, sets everywhere, music happening, cameras moving through it all.
As a child, I misunderstood what I was seeing. I somehow thought that making movies worked like that, that the movie was already happening all around you, and all you really had to do was capture it.
I wanted to live inside the movie.
It did not take me long to realize how much of my life would be spent trying to make that childhood misunderstanding true.
The Endless Movie
By the time I was studying film at NYU in the late 1990s, I already knew that I didn’t want to spend my life competing with other filmmakers for permission to make films.
The internet was emerging, cameras were becoming smaller and more accessible, and suddenly there was the possibility of creating something outside the traditional structures of cinema and television.
I began imagining an endless movie, something I could keep feeding throughout my life.
I didn’t know exactly what that meant, and in many ways, I’m still finding out.
That pursuit led through the early days of filmmaking on the web, to the creation of Moment Factory, and eventually to NOMAD, a building in Montreal that became a studio, a gathering place, a laboratory and, increasingly, a world of its own.
From there came NOMADlive.tv and years of experiments in livestreaming: carrying cameras and computers through festivals, broadcasting from different places simultaneously and trying to understand what happened when the camera stopped merely recording an experience and became part of the experience itself.
Then came ALL WE HAVE IS NOW, an experiment in which the audience physically entered the film and the boundaries between actors, spectators, fiction and reality began to disappear.
And eventually, NOMADslow.tv.
A window rather than a movie
NOMADslow.tv isn’t really live television.
And yet, strangely, it may be the closest I’ve come to what I was looking for all along.
The films are as long as they care to be. Landscapes, trains, cities, oceans, shadows and music are allowed to exist without constantly being cut into something else.
My sincerest intention for NOMADslow.tv is to create a window to heaven on Earth.
We live surrounded by screens constantly reminding us of everything that is frightening, urgent, violent and broken. I became interested in the possibility that one of those screens could simply remain open onto the vast and sometimes intimate beauty of our world.
Who has time to watch a 24-hour movie? Probably no one.
But everyone has time to look through a window.
You create the sandbox
One of the things I hear myself returning to throughout this conversation is an idea that has become increasingly important in the way I work:
You create the sandbox, and then things happen.
I’ve become less interested in controlling every element of a film and more interested in creating the conditions in which something authentic can occur.
It informs the way I film landscapes. It informs the work I’m currently doing with Parks Canada. And perhaps most clearly, it informs ANTENNAE, our monthly full-moon gathering, and musical ensemble at NOMAD.
There is no audience at ANTENNAE. Everyone in the room is a participant.
Musicians improvise. Images move across the screen. Shadows enter the image. A camera captures what happens. Nobody, myself included, knows exactly what the film will become until we make it together.
Better things happen than anything I could have imagined on my own.
Living inside the movie
Listening back to this conversation with Alex, I realized how consistently I’ve been pursuing the same idea throughout my life.
The technology has changed enormously. Film became video. Video became live. And live became a window. And somewhere along the way, I discovered that the technology itself wasn’t really the point.
It was the state of being live.
Being present. Creating a structure strong enough that you can become free inside it. Allowing reality into the work.
I didn’t always know where this was leading, but I always knew that what I was chasing, that endless movie.
Today, between NOMADslow.tv and ANTENNAE, I feel that the endless movie I imagined all those years ago is no longer only an idea.
It’s alive, and perhaps that’s why this conversation feels worth sharing.
For most of my life, the challenge was figuring out how to make this thing exist.
The challenge now is something different:
How do I bring it out into the world?
Maybe this conversation is part of that.
.j.
Jason Rodi in conversation with Alex Apostolidis / iWant2BeOnTVRecorded August 2026
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