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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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?
Limited edition pencils available to PerpiTube participants for intervening in gallery and as takeaways
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?
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.
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.
PerpiTube gallery documentation
Remotes available during PerpiTube Symposium presentations
– Pato Hebert




















