Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

328 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art329I like to consider the aesthetics in Man With A Movie Camera: The Global Remake as thatwhich is not articulated visually. It exists in the open spaces on the right, in the space betweenthe original and the remake. It exists in the absence of uploads from parts of the worldthat are unrepresented and in the reasons for those absences. It exists in imagining a future,in spaces that trigger the imagination of the user and the spectator. Those spaces remainnegotiable. They are the battleground of economics and of the imagination, they make visiblethe cultural context within which the work is being created - a public space open to all whohave access.The remake is the whole: it includes the left and right windows, the absence of an imageon the right, the shifting configurations of those windows caused by uploads and the lack ofthem. Even the framing device - the black around the windows - is in a constant state of flux.The stream is unstable, changing on a daily basis. Continuity is replaced by conflict, meaningis constructed through the simultaneity of the two windows on the screen. It’s a messy affair.Thus the aesthetics escape evaluation through authorship, through stylistic vocabulariesnormally associated with a specific discipline be it film, video or the database. What is heretoday will be different tomorrow. To appreciate the work must mean to appreciate change,instability. Maybe the aesthetics can be defined as what’s left to be learned.ReferencesBishop, Claire. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October 110 (Fall 2004): 51-80.Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, France: Lespresses du réel, 2002.Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.Lewitt, Sol. ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’, in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds) Theories and Documentsof Contemporary Art, Berkeley and Los Angeles California: University of California Press,1996, pp. 822-827.Michelson, Annette (ed.) Kino-Eye The Writings of Dziga Vertov, Berkeley and Los Angeles: Universityof California Press, 1984._____. ‘Film and The Radical Aspiration’, in Gregory Battcock (ed.) The New American Cinema: ACritical Anthology, New York: Dutton, 1967, pp. 83-102.New York City is the ultimate experiment in international living - I’m reminded of it every timeI ride the subway. The car is a container carrying people of every rank and ethnicity jostlingagainst each other as the car moves along at a clip. Teens talking in their idioms across theaisle to friends they can’t see, people singing alta voce to the tunes on their devices. It’s anuncomfortable but synchronized experience similar to the stream of Man With A Movie Camera:The Global Remake - a temporal coexistence of images and styles from daily life. Or asVertov would say ‘the decoding of life as it is’.