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.