Medi(t)ations: On the Spaces of PerpiTube

It has been more than six months since we held the Symposium, a daylong, physical gathering on October 21, 2011 at Pitzer College. The Symposium constituted one of our first attempts to collectively reflect on PerpiTube.

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Artist Dont Rhine, the women of Prototypes and other Symposium participants

From its inception, PerpiTube always took YouTube as a point of reference and a site for intervention, and YouTube is where the project now primarily exists.

But PerpiTube was also instigated because Ciara Ennis generously offered us access to an art gallery at Pitzer College for the creation of an exhibition. This physical site, with all of its characteristics, possibilities and limitations, in concert with the institutional and creative relationships between Alex, Ciara and myself, gave rise to PerpiTube.

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PerpiTube gallery documentation


Conceptually, the project was framed by Alex’s research on and about YouTube. But we were also driven by an ongoing interest in how to activate environments and leverage the resources of institutions without becoming institutionalized.

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P. Hebert, “Without Becoming Institutionalized,” vinyl on glass, 2010, as installed at CIIS in San Francisco, CA

What kinds of activities, and perhaps even communities might be possible in an art gallery, for instance, as compared to a coffee shop, classroom, civic square or a coalition for social change? Alternatively, what happens if an art gallery opens itself to be informed by these spaces and the kinds of participation they engender? How might galleries be more committed to critical conviviality, purposeful pedagogy and delightful discovery, strategic spirit and debate, a redistribution of resources?

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PerpiTube gallery documentation

If art is as much about experience as object, then how and why we medi(t)ate together might be as important as what we make and watch.

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PerpiTube gallery documentation of participants viewing Carole Ann Klonarides’ “Little Deaths”

The subtitle of PerpiTube always risked foregrounding the media aspect over the physical gallery – “Repurposing Social Media Spaces.” Yet for me this subtitle also assumed that art galleries had themselves long ago become a kind of social media space. The subtitle was also intended to suggest that social media shapes (enables? sullies?) all kinds of other spaces in our daily worlds. When I use Skype to interview for teaching jobs in New York or Hawaii, to strategize with AIDS activists in South Africa and London, or to savor the smiles and streaming tears of loved ones, what spaces are we creating together?

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PerpiTube gallery documentation

PerpiTube’s greatest promise was not only to organize and utter against the distopian erasures of cyber space; it was instead to more richly query the mediated possibilities of the shared social. How do we utilize media to construct space, and thereby coalesce, conflate, misconstrue, accrete and constitute meaning?

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Limited edition pencils available to PerpiTube participants for intervening in gallery and as takeaways

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PerpiTube gallery documentation

Is PerpiTube a show (implying both exhibition and performance)? A programmed if potentially lively channel existing in an online social media space? A project (part praxis, playground, possibility)? A community? An exchange? Or simply an ex-change, a chaotic has been now collapsed under its own provisional and provincial fragility?

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PerpiTube gallery documentation

PerpiTube aimed to repurpose not only through its content and digital delivery. It also sought to bring bodies (beings) together in a gallery through an artwork in ways these bodies might not have experienced otherwise. That the project continues to live indefinitely on YouTube is part of its ambition and part of social media’s possibility. But that PerpiTube needed the gallery to instigate this process is not incidental.

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PerpiTube gallery documentation

Numerous contributors to PerpiTube utilized social media and YouTube for the first time. Others engaged as creators in an art gallery for the first time. Still others placed their work in explicit conversation with new kinds of audiences for the first time.

The women of Prototypes spoke eloquently and incisively about the ironies of not being able to engage PerpiTube from their substance abuse recovery residency facility due to limitations on their Internet access. Social media may be ever present but it is not unrestricted. Incarceration and its alternatives create complex notions of the outside and the inside, our purpose and our purview.

And yet the work that the women of Prototypes made together with artist Dont Rhine was (is) available to some of their family members and friends. The gallery may have been the site of initiating their participation, but it was merely the beginning. Social media made their insights accessible to their loved ones in new ways across time and space.

One participant both pushed and focused the Symposium dialogue when she spoke about her nephew’s experience with the show. He had recently called her to say that he’d seen her speak and make art through the piece on YouTube, and that this helped him to understand her resilience anew.

Her presence – in the gallery on August 16, 2011, in the Prototypes program throughout summer and fall, in the Symposium on October 21, 2011, and indefinitely on YouTube and in her family –  embodies the possibilities of the praxis we share together.

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PerpiTube gallery documentation

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Remotes available during PerpiTube Symposium presentations

– Pato Hebert

2012
05/07
CATEGORY
Art Show
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YouTube is Dead. Long Live New YouTube: TL;DR Version

Replace the word “football” with “YouTube.” Also replace  the words “air-conditioning and plumbing” to “content and accessibility”

2011
12/18
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
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YouTube is Dead. Long Live New YouTube.

About a month ago, a friend and I had a heated discussion about YouTube. The discussion was about the possibility of “YouTube failure.” And by that, I mean the failure of YouTube as website. Not in the metaphorical sense, but literally “What would happen if YouTube failed?” What if the severs were erased? The screens went black. All data was lost. What would happen if then next time you tried to go to the website you were instead taken (a la Liam Neeson’s Daughter) to a website page that reads: “Server Error 500”?

Where is my "Justin Bieber" vid!

But my friend and mine’s discussion was not about the global chaos, riots, or occupy movements that might ensue when the world was unable to get its “Haul” video fix. No, instead our argument was based around my friend’s belief that it would only take a day for a next “YouTubian” website to emerge to take-up YouTube’s fallen crown (which I assume is mainly made-up of adorable kittens and racist comments). I disagreed with this assertion. I think that it would only take eight hours for a new “YouTube” to emerge*. This assertion might come as a surprise to some; others might think that it is not bold enough. Either way, the point of the discussion was that, while YouTube isn’t too big to fail, the idea of YouTube is.

This argument makes it seem like YouTube isn’t important. That is not at all what I am claiming. YouTube is extremely important. And while it is true that viral videos permeate so much of the online experience that they can’t die, it is of the utmost importance to understand “the way” in which this content is presented to us. The medium is not the message; the way we let the medium shape the content is the message. YouTube is important because it has shaped the way in which we think about internet videos. It has dictated the rise and fall of success in the medium since it’s birth. It would be impossible to speculate as to how the landscape of media would be changed if perhaps a more intuitive, educational, or personable website was in control of the majority of entertainment web videos. Hypotheticals aside, it is now paramount that media theorist hold a critical eye to the way in which we, as a population, interact with the primary source of video content (that isn’t porn) on the web.

In the time that I worked on PerpiTube, my harshest critique of YouTube was often it’s sophomoric architecture, however in the 6 months since I started YouTube has done a complete overhaul of it’s site. Now, instead of looking like Myspace circa 2003, it looks like Myspace circa 2008. Yet, I can’t help but notice that “we” collectively feel like it is an improvement. The truth is, YouTube isn’t ever going to be an easy, intuitive, or even cool site to spend time in. The content of the videos on the site are all of those things, yes, but that is besides the point. YouTube doesn’t need to be any of those things because it is functional. And much like mid-size sedan, it doesn’t need to be much more than functional. It will never escape its foundation of crappy architecture and childish organization because in doing so it would give up functionality.

"I'm cool now, right guys?"

This critique isn’t cynicism. I love YouTube. I love spending time in YouTube. I love it probably more than the average person does or should, but I also push myself to do what I believe was a big part of the PerpiTube experience; think critically about what the space I occupy on the internet says about the information I view there. I am always aware of the paradigm of YouTube and how it influences the videos I view on it. The prejudices and biases I have based around this then lead themselves to critical examination. This in turn leads to intelligent discussion of larger metaphysical concepts like “What is ‘art’, ‘comedy’, and ‘celebrity.’”  I may be relentless of my critique of YouTube, but I do it out of love. I want to see media scholars discussing YouTube. I want to see YouTube taught in classrooms. I want to see YouTube change the way writers of television and film think. I want to… Oh look, a cat video…

- James

* My personal theory is that if YouTube died right now, Vimeo would simply create a new site that was essentially the same thing, relegating the old Vimeo to be called Vimeo+ or something of the sort, and it would take them all of eight hours to get the new site up and running.

2011
12/18
CATEGORY
Chaos
Connection
Control
Depth
Distraction
Education
Entertainment
Isolation
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PerpiTube Review, Artillery Mag

“THE CHAOTIC DIVERSITY of ‘PerpiTube’ is perhaps best encapsulated by the contribution of Sue Bell Yank, whose video, An Icarian Fall, explores seemingly contradictory images of Los Angeles as seen from a distance in a panoramic view, which belies the complexity of the city below, and the fragmented, street level discontinuity. Together they produce a rich, if also overwhelming experience. In her mediation of these paradoxical portrayals, Yank refers to Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” and economist Jeffrey Goldstein’s theory of emergence. Calling the totalizing vision encapsulated by the panoramic view a fiction, De Certeau contended that the Icarian fall into chaos is necessary to comprehend the intricacy of the city. In presenting Goldstein’s idea of emergence, defined as “the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems,” Yank suggests a resolution to the antipodes of totality and fracture…”

see the rest at Christopher Michno, Artillery Mag

2011
11/03
CATEGORY
Chaos
Video Art
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Afterthoughts Symposium

On Friday we spent a fruitful day discussing some of the ideas raised by, work made for, and communities engaged within PerpiTube. The day’s structure moved us from a panel about curating on/about YouTube, to artists talks about making work for this show (and its varied gallery and YouTube iterations), to small group discussions that looked closely at a few of the (many) videos in the show, to a closing conversation about the lived and practical effects of moving voice via YouTube to communities (like former prisoners and recovering drug addicts, and others deemed marginal or unauthorized) who were once outside media discourse but always part of this show, and now can (more) easily access these tools and their audiences.

Given that they day was so packed with intelligent, complex, and competing dialogue, this post does not serve as a recap, but rather a highlight of four concepts that stuck with me.

  • Quality and authorization: How does the white box bestow authority, and how does YouTube erase it? How are the qualities we might want from “art video” in a gallery related to what we need from YouTube videos? In this, the comments of some of the female participants from Prototypes seem quite critical: the stature of Pitzer, and the assumed prominence of PerpiTube, contributed to a perception of quality or authority, validity, and purpose connected to their participation that would have otherwise been deemed inconsequential (perhaps to themselves and certainly to perceived outsiders). In other words, if many of our participants had been able to speak on YouTube on their own, outside the frame of the show, would anyone have listened or cared or does the connection to Pitzer and the other artists raise the value (if not the quality) of the work?
  • Reception and production: In what ways are the consumption of YouTube videos productive or purposeful? In what ways are making videos unproductive? What happens in a room, with an audience, within a rarified discourse that can not happen when watching work alone on YouTube? How does private contemplation, close viewing, and individual control better and build our perception? Ineffectual and unstudied making (like most of what we see on YouTube) is not in itself a higher form of media interaction than careful reception, but how does one build a studied and purposeful reception?
  • Montage and re-contextualization: Is a YouTube practice best-suited by self-referentiality and appropriation? What is lost as we move move media objects willy-nilly? Is the (best) work of a YouTube artist to provide context and meaning (or purpose) to other YouTube video through the act of montage or through the practices of curation, discussion or framing?
  • YouTube literacy: Given that our show is about and now on YouTube (and no longer in a gallery), and questions YouTube’s possible uses for expression and interaction, how much sophistication do we demand of our viewers about YouTube’s architecture? Our show is viewed through playlists (the only way to organize things on YouTube unless one has larger institutional privileges), but many of our viewers are not familiar with playlists (or channels) given that their only experience with YouTube is to watch one video at a time. Furthermore, YouTube literacy improves the quality of work and reception, and the possibility for connection. What does it mean to smack a traditional “art video” into the YouTube space, and what makes a work best-suited for YouTube (humor, summary, self-reflexivity, montage, etc)?

Soon, the videos that recorded this day will be added to the unruly chaos that is already the YouTube show. If you’re interested, I hope you’ll take some time on your own to watch the conversation as it unfolded, and decide how you can purposefully engage.

2011
10/25
CATEGORY
Uncategorized
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Our own little “Freakish, Popular, Gothic Alphabet”

Lisa Nakamura’s “YouTube: A Gothic Alphabet” is the last official video for the PerpiTube gallery show (new videos can enter the YouTube site in perpetuity, of course). It serves as an uncanny ending, providing us as it does with a vocabulary to look back at, and make use of, the huge volume of work made over the eight weeks of the live show (32 artist’s videos, even more gallery documentation videos, and then multiple response videos, as well).

While the invited artists were asked to make work under four thematic rubrics quoted from my video-book, Learning from YouTube–Chaos/Control, Distraction/Depth, Isolation/Connection, Entertainment/Education–it often fell upon the curators, within this blog, to draw connections across what consistently presented (by design!) as a diverse, eclectic, and ever-growing body of video work. It was hard not to become somewhat overwhelmed by the quantity and diversity of the huge body of purposeful work produced for the show, thereby mirroring (by design) the onslaught of YouTube. Thus, Nakamura’s charge to educators–to use YouTube to draw in our students to the lessons that matter most to us by writing with it as a popular, entertaining computational device delivered for our personal exploitation–comes as a relief! We will make of it what we will. Each one, teach one:

And so, this last week, Janie Geiser’s work was nothing if not gothic:

Dr. Strangelove listed a litany of non-realities and Favianna Rodriguez compiled her own compendium of Dream Acts. We saw artists, scholars and activists using YouTube to teach what mattered most.

2011
09/02
CATEGORY
Education
Entertainment
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Some responses

One of the goals of PerpiTube has been to try to think about and model purposeful response, as well as artful and intelligent production, on YouTube. Here’s a few examples of responses made during the first week of our last theme, Entertainment/Education. They raise for me several thoughts about interaction online:

1) If your audience is composed of professors and artists, purposeful conversation is easy: they’ve already been trained to talk this way about art and culture. But what if your audience is YouTube?

2) If your interlocutor is your Dad (or son, as was the case for Kiffen Madden-Lunsford), its easier to force participation and interaction, but what if you have no familiar ties to inspire commitment?

3) In this response to Natalie Bookchin’s “Mass Ornament,” three members of the curatorial team make use of all they’ve learned about the most effective forms for interaction on YouTube by making something short, funny, and allegorical. How do we include ideas about form in our play for expanded online participation?

4) Shawn Sobers decided to comment on own “Fifteen Autobiographical Moments in PerpiTubeity” (or perhaps lead the conversation about his own video given that he was not in the gallery). If artists are effective commentators on their own work, how do we feel about art that sits on a platform where access to the artist is almost impossible, by definition?

5) Our intrepid intern, James Shickich, has made an art form of its own of documenting PerpiTube videos that played this summer to an empty gallery. Sue Bell Yank’s video, “An Icarian Fall,” is about the complexity and beauty of socially mediated aggregation, but what if no one sees the work, and thus no aggregation begins, lost as it so often will be, in YouTube’s chaotic sea of dischord (or the gallery’s exclusionary perameters).

 

2011
08/30
CATEGORY
Education
Entertainment
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Pleasure Loud n Clear

Kara Keeling and Thenmozhi Soundararajan are the first to address my video-book outright with their delightful contribution to PerpiTube, “In Pursuit of Parenthetical Pleasure.” In the video-book I write: “If presented with paltry, ludicrous, distracting uses of a medium as its norm, we must model its life-affirming, idea-stimulating, community-enabling applications.” Soundararajan responds that as was true for Third Cinema in the past, this contemporary team of Third World Majoritists chose to “work with the content and people that are there.”

And so, Keeling and Soundararajan and X as well, model away: sifting through the chaos of YouTube to find sustaining, ennobling, intellectual and political affirmations, which they easily whip into control through an “updated Third Cinema” remix aesthetic: “YouTube is a places where LBGT people of color have a space.”

Meanwhile, Dont Rhine and Susan Hebert take a quieter, steadier tack, controlling the environment of production (as opposed to reception) by carefully staging their scenes with a pared down, rigorous, structured visual and aural aesthetic (perhaps too quickly unseen or losable in the sea of YouTube).

While the first group of artists search YouTube for the pleasures that bubble below in NicheTube, Rhine and Hebert look to the world to see both the hidden treasures of daily experience, and often unrecorded sentiment, as well as traces of governmental mechanical devices that litter our landscape. They attend to that which is left unnoticed amidst the blares of mainstream culture, corporate advertising, and governmental surveillance, that is, unless we control our gaze and ears upon it. This section on Chaos/Control ends with the combing of YouTube and our lived world for pleasures that are easily lost but with (aesthetic) effort become apparent.

2011
08/22
CATEGORY
Chaos
Control
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Mental and other Colonialisms

The four videos that were presented during the first week of PerpiTube’s section on Chaos/Control share an interest in naming, or sometimes performing, some of the forces that hinder full human autonomy and dignity. For instance, in “Long Story Short,” Natalie Bookchin’s subjects attest to shared histories of homelessness. Other videos in the section represent other disenabling, controlling forces—domestic abuse, drug addiction, racism, or (mental) colonialism, a term from Max King Cap—that instigate a chaotic and damaging misdirection of human energy and potential away from health, history, and power.

Each of the four videos in turn also consider the possibilities for resurrection, revolution, analysis or redress which can only become available once subjugation is named and seen. Invited gallery viewers from Prototypes were moved by the hope, inspiration, and surviving and surpassing of the victimhood of everyday life  that was also central to Bookchin’s video. They will be making their own responses to this and other issues raised in the show this week in collaboration with sound artist Dont Rhine.

Gabrielle Foreman speaks to her work at “gathering and gaining access to Black women’s past,” a form of redress that can place take in the classroom, in the gallery, and by extension in the streets. And just so, Fran Ilich pictures a (small, domestic) revolution in his video art, but not the grand one that had been anticipated at the Biennial of the Mexican revolution, despite it being foretold, or at least anticipated. He asks gallery viewers if art making itself is a form of controlling or refiguring colonialism, even if it sits alone in a gallery or awash in the chaotic sea of YouTube:

2011
08/16
CATEGORY
Chaos
Control
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Making it Better in Here

PerpiTube’s second section, Isolation/Connection, has ended with an uplifting set of provocations from Jutta Treviranus, Director of the Inclusive Design Research Center:

Jutta, and Judy Drummond the day before, both ask whether we can have a “do-over” by looking back at our gross failures at human connection—rooted in fears of difference and the violence and isolation this breeds, which has been an ongoing theme of this section—and pro-actively build a better future for all humans.

“In the digital reality, things can take a form best for each individual,” explains Treviranus. While it is certainly true that experiences of Native people, and the many others oppressed by imperialist violence have occurred in the “Solid World,” Treviranus asks us to consider how the stretchiness of digital space creates the room we have always needed for inclusion and justice. The tension between what happens in and between physical and digital realities is a core interest of the show: by making it better in here, do we see ripples out there?

2011
08/08
CATEGORY
Connection
Isolation
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