Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube

76 Video Vortex Reader II Moving Images Beyond YoutubeImages on the Move77a public discussion forum – its distribution completely beyond the maker’s control. At thisstage of the process, the term ‘author’ is a complete misnomer; the original creator suddenlyoccupies the position of yet another spectator. Within this process, the role of transmitters isso important that they assume a vague position of authority over the works. This authority ismore easily perceived if we refer to the Low Resolution Film Festival in 2005, a time whenthe title of ‘internet video-maker’ was such a dubious one that I have been obliged to place itin quotation marks. The creator of a given video is sometimes inadvertent, but almost neveracknowledged: the only reference to the origin of the work is to the channel through whichit became public – often, popular indexing directories such as BoingBoing, 15 Fark, 16 or theBrazilian Kibeloco. 17 In this context, the legitimacy of audiovisual material depends on thedensity of its casting, which is peered rather than broad. Digital networks follow a very peculiarlogic of popular authentication. Even the Google algorithm, which functions as an onlineNorth, is driven by it: a website gains search relevance the more it is linked by others.As this mechanism collides with those of established channels, ‘internet celebrities’ appearwithin the pages of important New York newspapers. A classic collision is that of WilliamHung, a rejected contestant of television show American Idol. In 2004, the video of his failedaudition appeared online, was viewed by millions of viewers, and made him more famousthan he would have had he won the show. 18 Afterwards, Hung returned triumphantly totraditional media, received a recording deal and released three albums. Ironically, his successwas provoked by the same images that the producers of American Idol had employedto dishonour him. Extracted from its original context, the video became a mechanism thattransformed the failed singer into a celebrity. There is no doubt that the same sequence ofimages had become a different thing.The Low Resolution Film Festival attempted to apply this dynamics of authentication to thecinematographic milieu. According to the festival’s regulations, it was not necessary to be theauthor of a video to send it to the competition: it sufficed to take responsibility for it – a termthat possesses a significant degree of uncertainty. If more than one person sent the samevideo, it instantly became a collective work. What was being judged were not individual creations,but different ways of exploring the internet.Regimes of Active VisualityIn the years that followed the Low Resolution Film Festival, the increase of bandwidth, thecreation of lighter video codecs such as Adobe Flash Video, and the growing popularizationof services such as YouTube, 19 Google Video 20 and Vimeo 21 have begun to crystallize onlineaudiovisual practices into an almost regular circuit. As the internet is turned into a widespreadmedium for audiovisual works, the definition of internet video as a process that describes itsown informational distribution still holds true. The online work and its author seem to beincreasingly fixed within standard channels of distribution. In a platform such as YouTube, allvideos are linked to the user who publishes them, and this user is in turn is linked to otherusers, either as contacts or subscribers. Therefore, the main location of these works is inthe user’s page, which can be classified by a distinctive status such as director. The systemcreates logs of activity, and any dispute over originality can be resolved by referring to parameterssuch as the date of upload or the number of views. The platform, then, results in acertain degree of stabilization of identities.As it accumulates metadata such as tags, comments and replies – in other words, as itbecomes intertwined with the platform’s own informational structure – a video is furtherlocalized. This can be extended to diegetic references to the platform’s interface (resultingin meta-linguistic works such Dave dancing at my bday party); 22 as well as to the creativeemployment of its video database (for example, in the mashup project ThruYou); 23 its usercommunity (as in the lonelygirl15 web series); 24 or interactive possibilities (as in the infamousInteractive Card Trick). 25 In all of these cases, the video becomes inextricable from itsoriginal location, as any displacement would disrupt the work’s particular significance andbehaviour. The experience of lonelygirl15, for example, could never be conveyed without theillusion of intimacy created by the closeness to its user-character. In the same way, it wouldbe pointless to download Interactive Card Trick, a work that resorts to YouTube’s in-videohyperlink possibilities, and watch it in a conventional media player software – or, worse yet,in a Film Festival. The only effective way to propagate such videos is as a direct, online linkto their URL. Therefore, it is effectively impossible to remove the videos from their originalcontext, as they carry their context with them.Embedding the videos in another webpage does not isolate them from a platform such asYouTube – quite the contrary. The image is overlaid by the site’s watermark, advertisements,and links to other videos in its database. It is as if, through the embedded video, the wholeof YouTube infiltrates a separate webpage. In this way, the invasive platform reinforces itsauthority over the works; an implicit form of control that is made explicit by its capacity to banuser accounts, take videos offline and block the access of certain countries. Could it be thatthe fixed characteristics of these platforms constitute the specificity of the medium, a kind ofsubgenre of internet videos? Or have the platforms as a whole attained the status of concretetechnical objects, from which the awareness and value of individual pieces of work can nolonger be detached? 26 One could presume that either hypothesis indicates the evolution ofonline media away from an unstable visuality into a new form of spectatorship. However, earlymodes of engagement with internet video were equally medium specific. The regime of dis-15. BoingBoing, http://www.boingboing.net.16. Fark, http://www.fark.com.17. Kibeloco http://kibeloco.com.br.18. ‘William Hung She Bangs’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcc8dTqflh8.19. YouTube, http://www.youtube.com.20. Google Video, http://video.google.com.21. Vimeo, http://www.vimeo.com.22. ‘Dave dancing at my bday party’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVm_HJ_ax8o.23. Thru-you, http://thru-you.com.24. LonelyGirl15, http://www.lg15.com.25. ‘Interactive Card Trick’, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbEei0I3kMQ.26. Gilbert Simondon [1958], On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, trans. N Mellamphy,London: University of Western Ontario, 1980.