Everything on YouTube is Video Art...Nah: September 10, 2009
NOTES: Origins & Context | See Also
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Origins of this content
During the Fall of 2009, I wrote a series of blogs about video art on YouTube. I had been asked to write an essay about this question by Ming-Yuen Ma and Erika Suderberg, the editors of Resolution 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces, a large collection of contemporary essays on video art. With their permission, I conceived of the "essay" in advance, to be composed of these blogs and printed with paltry frame-grabs of YouTube videos, as a way to point to my growing discomfort about writing and publishing about YouTube on paper.
Contextualization
Video art ( "video work made by artists from an aesthetic, political or personal point of view") has been a developing use of the medium since its commercial availability in the late 1960s."
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi "is chiefly renowned as the architect of the notion of flow in creativity; people enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction." Media flow research has traditionally understood television as a one-way uninterrupted stream of programming, rather than discrete programs. The flow delivers ads by way of shows.
My term, "NicheTube," refers to the significant numbers of videos on YouTube that are hard to see or find due to its search system based upon rankings. "Page Ranking is an approach to ordering search results in a meaningful way. The technology determines a web page's importance depending on how many other pages link to it, and on how "important" those pages are considered. This is then used in conjunction with a keyword entered by the user to conduct a search for the 'most relevant' results." If a video is about an obscure, radical, strange, private, or "unimportant" topic, it will sit idle and largely unseen in NicheTube.
Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi "is chiefly renowned as the architect of the notion of flow in creativity; people enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction." Media flow research has traditionally understood television as a one-way uninterrupted stream of programming, rather than discrete programs. The flow delivers ads by way of shows.
My term, "NicheTube," refers to the significant numbers of videos on YouTube that are hard to see or find due to its search system based upon rankings. "Page Ranking is an approach to ordering search results in a meaningful way. The technology determines a web page's importance depending on how many other pages link to it, and on how "important" those pages are considered. This is then used in conjunction with a keyword entered by the user to conduct a search for the 'most relevant' results." If a video is about an obscure, radical, strange, private, or "unimportant" topic, it will sit idle and largely unseen in NicheTube.
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More videos related to the content of this page
Again, I am moved to respond to Virginia Heffernan's intelligent analyses of YouTube. She made some provocative claims about YouTube and the Avant-Garde this weekend in the New York Times--"it's a place for art"--"scooping" me in the process, at least in regards to the claim by which I am starting a paper about Video Art on YouTube (to be published in the scholarly anthology, Resolutions 3), currently in draft form. There I make the claim: "Let's imagine that everything on YouTube is Video Art."
In my paper, I decide that while all the people-made stuff (a sub-set distinguished from the corporate made product that dominates the site) COULD be considered art in the sense that it has been carefully crafted and then consciously distributed with the intention of the public communication of self expression, I don't want to consider the clearly unconsidered work on YouTube to be "Art." In its self-aware isolation (I made this in my room, or my backyard with my wrestling buddies), it doesn't consciously connect to other bodies or theories of video, or to other artists; it doesn't show enough care. I suppose there could be a "scene" of butt-catchers, as Heffernan suggests, but towards what project, with what beliefs? You need a shared vocabulary, agenda, history, and set of goals to make an "art scene."
Of course, as I often suggest, art video can be found on YouTube (like every other marginal form or desire) sitting precariously on the edge of NicheTube, and I believe that Heffernan is right to characterize Manhattan Bridge Piers in this way. However, I remain unconvinced (even as I'd like to dream) that this presents the possibilities of a vernacular: most of what people are making can not be so easily traced back to the aesthetic or poetic preoccupations of art or alternative culture, in fact, quite the opposite.
Heffernan begins with the beginning and suggests that the first YouTube video, sets a "standard" for YouTube: "visually surprising, narratively opaque, forthrightly poetic." However, I find that most of the videos on YouTube are neither surprising nor poetic, falling as they so easily do into the quickly consolidating vernaculars of either "good" corporate production or "bad" people-made videos (a case I made earlier in regard to her euphoric read of Susan Boyle). While DIY video may provide us with the lovely surprises she goes on to convincingly detail in what she introduces as the haul-fail genres (linked, I think, to what my students and I have called flow videos), these are all, generically, quite similar spectacles of the outrageous talent and behaviors of regular people to be mocked, adored or both. Of course, dominant television is already dominated by reality media that mocks and "rewards" the "talent" and aspirations of regular people. I'd suggest that pro media looks more and more like the (worst) of people made media (the subject of my last post).
In my paper, I decide that while all the people-made stuff (a sub-set distinguished from the corporate made product that dominates the site) COULD be considered art in the sense that it has been carefully crafted and then consciously distributed with the intention of the public communication of self expression, I don't want to consider the clearly unconsidered work on YouTube to be "Art." In its self-aware isolation (I made this in my room, or my backyard with my wrestling buddies), it doesn't consciously connect to other bodies or theories of video, or to other artists; it doesn't show enough care. I suppose there could be a "scene" of butt-catchers, as Heffernan suggests, but towards what project, with what beliefs? You need a shared vocabulary, agenda, history, and set of goals to make an "art scene."
Of course, as I often suggest, art video can be found on YouTube (like every other marginal form or desire) sitting precariously on the edge of NicheTube, and I believe that Heffernan is right to characterize Manhattan Bridge Piers in this way. However, I remain unconvinced (even as I'd like to dream) that this presents the possibilities of a vernacular: most of what people are making can not be so easily traced back to the aesthetic or poetic preoccupations of art or alternative culture, in fact, quite the opposite.
Heffernan begins with the beginning and suggests that the first YouTube video, sets a "standard" for YouTube: "visually surprising, narratively opaque, forthrightly poetic." However, I find that most of the videos on YouTube are neither surprising nor poetic, falling as they so easily do into the quickly consolidating vernaculars of either "good" corporate production or "bad" people-made videos (a case I made earlier in regard to her euphoric read of Susan Boyle). While DIY video may provide us with the lovely surprises she goes on to convincingly detail in what she introduces as the haul-fail genres (linked, I think, to what my students and I have called flow videos), these are all, generically, quite similar spectacles of the outrageous talent and behaviors of regular people to be mocked, adored or both. Of course, dominant television is already dominated by reality media that mocks and "rewards" the "talent" and aspirations of regular people. I'd suggest that pro media looks more and more like the (worst) of people made media (the subject of my last post).