Seeking a YouTube lost
This is Rhizome Today for Wednesday, November 19, 2014.
Rhizome Today is an experiment in ephemeral blogging: a series of posts that are written hastily in response to current events, and taken offline within a day or so. The latest post can always be found at http://www.rhizome.org/today.
I wish that I still used YouTube like I did a few years ago. I would spend a lot of time on the site watching tutorials and general YouTube weirdness. Now it seems much of the content there is very VEVO. Revisiting channels I used to follow, many have adopted cute transitions with graphics, and maybe even have their own product lines?
I rarely click video clips on social media channels, and when they play automatically I scroll down really fast so I don't have to watch them; I didn't ask to see these, but it's within the terms of use. Earlier this week, Snapchat introduced their snapcash feature and updated theirs—I actually read it this time and it was everything I expected but mostly just felt like so much baggage.
I miss click-wandering without being paranoid about the value of my metadata, and in trying to rekindle that process I've listed below three compilations of YouTube videos that renew my faith in the potential of endlessly browsing related and unrelated streams of variously amateur content.
A selection of runway videos by Matthew Linde on Sang Bleu. Watching these videos made me remember that the early 2000s wasn't just pretty much like 2014, or maybe it made me realize that any video shot in a slightly lower resolution leads one to think it took place in the early 2000s. These videos traverse the highly flexible terrain of the runway responding to or being emblematic of a certain cultural moment or attitude, playing with awkward elements of staging and performance.
Hannah Black's essay Value, Measure, Love on The New Inquiry. This doesn't have videos in it, but the essay incorporates and extrapolates on the experience of looking at related videos and how they come to be related to each other. The recognizable frame of the grey bar, the time stamp, the view counts, etc., become embedded in the total quantification of the moment being represented, on YouTube, in love, and of course, under capitalism.
Hito Steyerl on the conference video, posted to the CSS Bard Red Hook Journal in 2012. Not much has changed about the general format and aesthetics of the conference/panel/lecture video, regardless of video resolution or quality. How can we access events that produce dialogue that holds less provenance or is less rigid than can be translated into an audiobook, that is more accessible than an essay, and that can't promise a speaker fluent in the performative aspect of public speaking?