In a very short excerpt from a video interview to be found on YouTube, Paul Virilio recently explained that he has noted that the optically correct is becoming increasingly important on the Internet. The platform offering the scarcely one-minute snatch of Virilio himself is an example precisely what he means. Is he referring to the legal statutes of the largest video database? All the rights in the video are assigned to whoever runs the website as soon as a video is made public there. The line of argument put forward on the »transmission«¹ network’s website makes sense, for it explains that the legal situation concerning proprietary rights on YouTube argues against publishing videos there. YouTube can re-sell or censor users’ clips, as well as monitoring their tracks in the digital universe. In discussion at meetings regularly organised by »transmission«, operators of alternative video platforms curse YouTube as »corporate digital vacuum cleaners«.

Wynne Greenwood describes her decision to put her new music video »Big Candy«² online temporarily on YouTube under the gallery’s name as »opening some spaces for myself.« She does not always want to be directly contactable via her artistic work and views her gallery as a firewall. Originally the video, which she recorded amongst the sculptures in her exhibition at the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects Gallery, was planned to be part of her »music world«. However, she then came to the conclusion that the clip would be the perfect finishing touch for her installation. Now a limited edition of the video is being sold by the gallery. »I usually insist that videos should be accessible to everyone. However in my practice now I’ve reached a point where it is more empowering for me to make access more complicated. I can choose what I do for free and what I produce in order, hopefully, to be able to pay the rent.« »Big Candy« can be viewed on YouTube until the end of the exhibition. Greenwood even identifies potential for an online gallery here, even if her video clip is only on temporary display and is just one single artistic work that does not fill the digital non-space. Furthermore, the video is also online on her MySpace-Website; she always thinks of art and music in conjunction, one production overlaps with the other. You wonder: will users put her video clip online over and over again in the future? Can art videos also be so popular that viewers believe it is important for them to exist online? When Tom Cruise talked about being a scientologist, there were enough attentive users to ensure the clip was put online over and over again, even if the sect wasn’t happy about it. Otherwise videos only end up offline, as in this case of unwanted PR, when there is copyright litigation.

Artist Tom Sherman predicts in his essay »Vernacular Video«³, copied from blog to blog a year ago, that »recombinatory work will become more and more common. Sampling and the repetitive structures of pop music will seek to keep up with the repeated deconstruction of pop culture.« However, in this description Sherman is actually more than anything providing an apposite definition of the logic underlying the creation of artistic video clips on the Internet – videos of everyday life are often put online unedited, the authors of the videos talk straight into the camera. In contrast, artists’ videos proceed according to precisely the technique described here; they recombine the material of the anonymous masses. For example Oliver Laric: he took excerpts selected from the immense quantity of amateur raps to a hit by American musician 50 Cent, and edited them together into a sequence including the original volume and atmosphere of the YouTube clips. This then gave rise to a kind of master video clip, »50 50«⁴. At the same time, Laric’s sampled video puts forward an analysis of what typical YouTube material offers. Do artists use the structure and footage of YouTube to investigate the platform? Do they provide the visual pendant to sociological observation? In Sherman’s opinion the challenge facing video artists, or indeed, to put it in equally uncompromising terms, the only chance for these artists is to ensure their aesthetic awareness and skills make them stand out from the amateur masses. »Artists must pick up on the everyday forms of videos, but move beyond this. Artists must identify, categorise and order the various strata of everyday videos by using an appropriate video language to interact with the world effectively and with a certain elegance.«

What does it mean then when video artist Stéphane Querrec takes the aesthetics and text of amateur confessions and condenses these to form a new rehearsed script? In contrast with Laric’s work, here a host of different voices merge into one universal voice, changing surprisingly as if you were zapping through YouTube with melancholy, hysterical and surprisingly witty monologues. The super-monologue, which is spoken by a non-professional actress with Querrec prompting, is strikingly pertinent and yet also drives you crazy.

The advertising world appropriates the typical rhetoric of amateur video and plays with the strategic mechanisms to guarantee attention for its clips online. It almost seems to want to produce a theory of consumer habits. How can an individual video stand out from the administered crowd? Artist Bernd Krauss, who primarily makes conceptual analogue works, tries out the possibilities of this medium.⁵ In just a few months he recorded more than 400 video clips, often at most a minute long – laconic visual jokes, everyday finds. Just like any old amateur video maker, he simply points his camera at it all. In the choice of title he tries to break through the non-hierarchical structures of the online setting. He felt the film title »Lost in Translation« would attract attention, even if it meant users would end up watching his video unintentionally.

All the craziness of online videos accumulates in the »YouTube-o-thèque« of artist Johan Grimonprez and curator Christine Léouzon: the pieces range from the high production values of commercial advertising clips to recordings of TV programmes and even scenes of everyday horror recorded by chance. However after just a few minutes it grows boring for they only show the programme offline. The charm of Internet videos fades rapidly if you cannot make a choice yourself, start a new search.

Videos can also form a corrective to the mainstream media for general audiences. You can find clips relating to many topical keywords on the Internet– loosely based on the »Ceci n’est pas une pipe« model. In this sense, online videos could comment on media reporting, that is to say, on the public image conveyed by traditional broadcasters. Taking the initial reactions of some artists as a starting point, it nevertheless remains difficult to say how much importance this could assume in future generally.

As both Baudrillard and Heidegger put it: if society is moving to an extreme of technological saturation, then secrecy is generated once again, for the technological can once more become magical, and the users feel dizzy, experience a certain dazed state, a sensation they must be accustomed to from zapping through television programmes.

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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