The YouTube Thing (2)
protoPLAY in collaboration with videoclub
The YouTube Thing is a curated screening of videos from YouTube of touching, angering, curious, visceral and ever-so voyeuristic pieces, taken from the mass contemporary ‘archive’ of YouTube.
Each month, over 3 billion videos are watched on YouTube. That’s the same number as there are base-pairs in the human genome. If 3 billion is a large enough number of simple combinations for the emergence of the most complicated thing in the known universe – us – then what can we imagine might emerge from the simple combining of videos on YouTube by watching one after the other? Are we experiencing the emergence of the unconscious collective brain of YT and everyone that uses it?
We have approached You Tube as a gigantic reservoir for images and information, and the selection process as a linguistic act. Each video forming a sentence fragment or paragraph, with each having its own meaning, but also interestingly belonging to a chain of signifier and signified, eventually creating a new entity.
Through the collaborative process of making this project, our discussions led us over much territory, conceiving possible ways of relating ‘scenes’, linking together common aspects of one video to another, whilst attempting to convey an overall theme or themes.
Questions of reality and fantasy emerged, as well ideas of scale – from the micro to the macro – the invisible to the inconceivable – the cellular to the galactic – extremes which are fantastical and part of ‘reality’ at the same time. Within this, realities or questions of truth became apparent – events that occur as acts of nature or unstaged actions (CCTV, documentary filming), compared to individuals who have created staged ‘truths’ (such as vlogs), contrasted with and commented upon one another.