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.