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).