Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

332 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond Youtubeonline video art333participation. Do you relate to these strategies of technical investigation, and to video as aform of social practice, in your work?CD: Comparisons between media are often made around a whole range of issues, from theanxieties and fears during their establishment in society (such as the predominantly negativeinfluence on children of video games, television, graphic novels or even books), to the celebrationof a medium’s influence on a better future, to the announcements of their so calleddeaths or exits from daily use in society.To apply this comparison to an artist’s research of a medium is a simple step.For this artist’s research, first, the technical possibilities of the medium are often explored,and art is made to exhibit these capabilities. These works tend to catch the attention of thegeneral public more often in the beginning establishment of a medium. Why this works in thisway exactly I have never understood. It seems like the medium is still suffering from a lack oforiginal medium specific content, and needs to attract attention by showcasing its capabilities.These conclusions are difficult to draw between the internet as a medium and older mediasuch as painting. But the comparisons can be made between the birth of the film camera, theinfluence of photography on contemporary western image language, and very recently, videoart. But then the internet contains several developing social media, like mail and text drivenmedia, so it is hard to compare it to a single older medium, especially since it is so dynamic.The second step would be to find the boundaries of the technical capabilities, whether it’shuman/user-related or medium-related.The third step of this medium research would be to view the young medium on a metaphysicallevel: not only what is the use of the medium, but also how is it being used, and whatis the meaning of this usage? After this, the medium’s content could escape the process asdescribed above and it should be able to be used with more authentic or medium specificcontent. An example to understand it would be the film-maker Andrej Tarkowski. As the formaland technical possibilities of the cinema movie had been researched in the 1920’s, hefound an ‘adult’ medium to work with knowing a lot of the medium implications and playingwith it in more detail. He used the medium specific qualities to enhance the content and tellan authentic story disconnected from the medium itself. Let’s say that for now in relation tointernet: the medium is more interesting than most of its content.My ‘YouTube as a Subject’ work can be seen as a reference to Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the mediumis the message’, although I thought of the work more as purely formal in the sense thatthe form was the content. You could say that if the form is the medium, then form becamethe message. But, I think this series of my work was not about the implications of the socialweb or of mass social online video hosting, it was not dealing with the hotness or the coldnessof the medium as McLuhan would describe it. It was more about the specificity of onecorporation existing within the medium. YouTube itself is not a medium. To have the workexist outside of YouTube was important to me. To collect my videos and contextualize themoutside of YouTube (on an html page with embedded videos) meant it was about the player,Ben Coonley’s responses to ‘YouTube as a Subject’,courtesy of the artist.and not so much about the social part ofthe website, to separate it more from ‘theMedium is the Message’ idea.CG: When you posted ‘YouTube Disco’(from the series ‘YouTube as a Subject’)on YouTube, Ilovetoeatmicedotcom aliasBen Coonley responded with the video‘Free Spin’ which shows another elementof the YouTube interface: the revolvingdots that appear while a video is loading,with the voice of the host from the gameshow Wheel of Fortune and the clappingaudience playing as audio. This videocreates a dialogue with yours, and it isonly one of seven video responses to yourmeta YouTube works. On your YouTubechannel one can find these works togetherwith enthusiastic, curious and doubtfulcomments. Making new videos as responses and commenting are ways in which usersinteract with the video content. How do you understand the meaning of ‘to participate’ in thecontext of the YouTube platform?CD: How would it have been for Duchamp if his comment on the Mona Lisa would have beenhanging directly next to the original painting in the Louvre? Would he have made a bettercomment? Would people have beaten him to it? Could you have made a better version?Could the works have functioned separated from each other?The authenticity and authorship of the original seems to be less clear when a response orother version of the original starts to coexist, but the general impact of the shared idea becomeslarger. The online tradition of linking back to the origin of the idea (the original postor video) is of course an important one, but sometimes the response is more valuable thanthe original. I am happy that because of this, what I see as the distorted value of singularauthenticity is changing. On the YouTube platform, how people understand video responsesand whether videos are seen as part of the general idea or the ripples on a pond created byan idea, actually depends on the site’s structure. At the moment, mid-2010 after the latestYouTube re-design, it seems harder to find the specific video responses people have postedto another video, which is sad, but it is still possible, and I think the possibility to openlyparticipate is very valuable.CG: Deleuze and Guattari say that ‘production is at once desiring-production and socialproduction’. 1 This social-desiring-production is part of the user-generated content of the 21st1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Continuum:London, 2004, p.325.