THE MEDIUM IS THE MEDIUM

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YouTube/the medium is the medium is an exhibition that tells the story of video, spectatorship, and platform as they once were and as they are now, and the YouTube video is the locus of this narrative. Since its founding in 2005, YouTube solved video’s problem of distribution, granting anyone with Internet access a platform to share content; as such, the website turned video into networked data, to be used and consumed at the user’s will. Uploaded to the site by content creators or content ‘crooks’, these productions navigate within particular frameworks -- the terms of use, comments, tags, suggested videos, and ads -- that serve to charge our viewing. Looking at 24 video works ranging from 1966 to 2013 as hosted on site, YouTube/the medium is the medium ultimately attempts to locate YouTube’s place as medium, and the ways in which videos themselves call attention to its agendas and forms.

 

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The beginnings of video are packed in a mythology of democracy. The commercial availability and relative affordability of the consumer Portapack technology in the mid-1960s made way for the bourgeoning of a medium in opposition to formal production and distribution channels. This technological innovation in the hardware of the moving image put a means of production into the hands of the spectator, charging his or her role within the media landscape and bringing to question the hegemony of the television and network broadcast.

 

In his Prison Notebooks, 1929-35, Antonio Gramsci speaks of hegemony as a form of social control levied by an authoritative power onto a complicit party. That is, those who are controlled within a hegemonic system consent to their own imposed subjugation. Under the hegemony of television, the audience complies through barriers of access. Indeed, one of the works in this exhibition, Television Delivers People, 1973, outlines how television audiences pay for the privilege of being sold to advertisers. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 1988, runs with this notion of consent and extrapolates it to the medium itself: the content creators of television consent -- through biased coverage, self-censorship, etc -- to mobilize the political and economic agendas of greater hegemonic forces.

 

Video allowed viewers to enter (and critique) this conversation. Solving this problem of production, however, was met with a problem of distribution. Largely mired in the gatekeeping of formal distribution structures -- museum or gallery exhibitions, rare television specials, and sponsored tapes -- much of this work was kept from reaching broader audiences. Not until YouTube would distribution meet the democracy of production.

 

Founded in 2005, YouTube emerged as the first website built specifically for users to host, share, and freely manage their videos online. Since then, YouTube has become a cultural force; the third-most visited website on the Internet, with over 100 hours of video uploaded every minute. Reaching more US adults ages 18 to 34 than any cable network, YouTube’s dominance positions it as a competitor to television.

 

Despite its appeal to tailored viewing, curious parallels emerge between broadcast television and YouTube today. We can perhaps call this a hegemony of YouTube -- the means through which the website frames our spectatorship -- propelled by the same systems that dictate television’s ‘manufacturing of consent’. Following in Herman and Chomsky’s model of media cooperation, YouTube willfully enforces the agendas of its corporate sponsors. Ads are perhaps the most superficial way of spotting this sort of influence, but YouTube’s own overzealous copyright enforcement on behalf of those sponsors most poignantly illustrates this notion of consent. Acting on behalf of media giants such as Electronic Arts, Sony, and EMI, YouTube will remove or ‘mute’ videos featuring copyrighted content; at times, YouTube will act despite the wishes of these companies. And false flags are frequently raised; ‘fair use’ or public domain content is commonly taken down in this type of policing.

 

This hegemony of YouTube is something with which users are complicit in the Gramscian sense; to participate within the website, they must abide by the terms of use. However, there are widespread practices where users work within the system to circumvent it. One of the videos in this exhibition, . by Jesse Darling, 2012, borrows one of the popular forms users commonly employ to bypass copyright detection: re-recording content from computer or television screens with camera phones. To this end, copyrighted music is frequently pitched up or down to avoid detection, and videos are tilted, zoomed, or flipped. Users will frequently ‘game’ YouTube by using clickbait, or sensationalized thumbnails and titles that entice viewers to click and increase pageviews. These practices can be seen to function under an informal and expanded hegemony of the site, mediated by user participation. New, ‘counter-productive’ material -- in the form of piracy, comments, tags, video responses, and even monetization -- dictates many instances of production.

 

Together, these formal and informal systems of meaning impose new ways of looking, sharing, and producing particular to YouTube -- even retroactively imbuing non-reactionary work with these influences. This is the arena the exhibition aims to explore: the language of YouTube and the ways in which it has grown as a medium in light of, or despite, mass media and user participation.

 

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This exhibition is imagined as a YouTube playlist unraveling, video by video, in a logic that weaves between historic and contemporary examples, helping us draw parallels between production and spectating conditions both past and present. Through comparison, YouTube outlines its translation or expansion of media’s status quo.

 

For the purposes of this investigation, the division between ‘historic’ and ‘contemporary’ coincides with four social phenomena that together define a radical shift between 1998 and 2001: the popular rise of digital imaging, the post-internet turn, the birth of Web 2.0, and the coming of age of the first wave of digital natives. These events altered the way we create, access, share, and see images, both moving and not, defined by our relationship to the Internet and digital technologies. As such, the dividing line in this exhibition between then and now is averaged to the year 2000. The video medium is itself young, but the technological apparatus to which it is beholden is one of rapid and constant change.

 

And medium is important to the work as the 24 videos reflexively call attention to their medium. Three treatments emerge in both historic and contemporary capacities: technical virtuosity, appropriated media, and adopted genres. ‘Technical virtuosity’ refers to the exploration (or exploitation) of the medium’s inherent qualities and limits, taking the form of skips, cuts, transitions, overlays, blue and green screen technologies, and manipulated ‘signals’ that grant the work a re-mixed quality; Jake Patterson’s Datamosh, 2011, and Phil Morton’s Colorful Colorado, 1974, stand out as examples of this image interference. ‘Appropriated media’ calls attention to the movement of image references within culture, with artists transforming Pop icons and genres into new, disrupted (or disruptive) contexts. Nam June Paik’s Beatles Electroniques, 1966-69, and Michaël Borras’ Rihanna Stay Feat Mikky Ekko/Datamosh Glitch 8 Bit Cover, 2013, deconstruct pop stars amidst performance, aberrating the manufactured and controlled public image of stardom. And the theme of ‘adopted genres’ contends with the popular forms of YouTube -- cat videos, supercuts, video blogs, and tutorials, among other types -- that have been emulated as artistic practice. Hennessy Youngman’s ART THOUGHTZ series, 2011-13, takes the form of popular video blogs; in monologues, he performs a Hip Hop persona that teaches irreverent art criticism to general YouTube audiences. And the Duvet Brothers’ Fuh-fuh, 1984, predates YouTube by over two decades, but as an example of ‘Scratch’ video featuring fast cuts and quick repetitions, it retroactively rhymes with the supercut genre so popular on the site. All of the curated videos fall into at least one of these three categories, teasing out rhizomatic links to ideas surrounding image saturation, popular culture, and our relationships with mass (and networked) media.

 

Accompanying this curated playlist is a collaborative, user-generated playlist to which visitors can contribute any video on the YouTube website. This collaborative list is meant to dialogue with the curated selection, reminding us of YouTube’s multivalent and multi-user nature; how these art videos exist outside of the common frameworks of art when viewed within the website.

 

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Due to the networked nature of YouTube and its wide global reach, it is important that the exhibition have a strong web presence. Both curated and collaborative playlists are publicly available on YouTube, and all exhibition materials feature in a comprehensive website that visitors can access remotely: http://themediumisthemedium.wix.com/youtube.

 

A physical exhibition within institutional space is additionally important to the exhibition in legitimizing YouTube’s place as medium; however, localizing the exhibition site to any one location would be inappropriate to the content and medium. The exhibition can take place in any gallery setting, given that basic exhibition parameters are met. Like YouTube itself, the exhibition’s installation can be said to be ‘virtual’ in its ability to exist anywhere.

 

Ideally, the physical exhibition would unfold across two gallery spaces, each framing divergent participation and viewing practices. The first gallery would nod toward the institutional and traditional (or passive) consumption of media, referencing the viewing of film in theaters, broadcast television in the home, and moving image work within the museum setting. The curated playlist would be projected onto a wall, progressing continuously in the order dictated in its curation. Sharing the space with this projection would be six small televisions atop pedestals grouped tightly in the center of the room. Functioning sculpturally, these televisions would force audience circulation (and interaction) as the cluster of visitors around them would obstruct the projected videos; a micro act of social control disrupting the uninterrupted viewing of the work. Three of the six televisions would play the collaborative playlist staggered to begin at different points. The remaining televisions would be fed from computers in the neighboring gallery, showing exactly what takes place on those screens. This gallery would impose content upon the complicit viewer; she would be subjected to the determined program of video with no say in its organization. The only agency granted at this stage would be whether or not to participate.

 

The second gallery would be defined by the experience of networked space mediated by user interactions. This gallery would provide the tools to allow the visitor the choice of what to watch, revisit, read, or ignore. Interactive, semi-enclosed viewing stations equipped with benches and responsive televisions would invite an intimate and slower discovery of the exhibition. Computers on standing desks would welcome shorter viewing for those seeking a quicker experience. The interactive displays in this room would grant visitors access only to the exhibition website and the whole of YouTube, where they will be able to learn about the work in the exhibition, watch the curated or collaborative playlists at their discretion, contribute to the collaborative playlist, or explore YouTube in whatever capacity they see fit. As mentioned briefly in the previous paragraph, feeds from these screens would be relayed to three of the televisions in the first gallery, making the visitor herself the authoritative, hegemonic force that dictates the experience of viewers in the first room.

 

Together, the two galleries outline the conditions of spectatorship before and after the social shifts surrounding our new interactions with and within the Internet. Each of these spaces would have one panel explaining the general theme of the room, but deeper interpretation of the works and exhibition -- including essays and labels -- would only be available on the website.

 

The exhibition itself functions on various levels, reflected in the language and organization of its interpretive materials: the in-gallery text panels and the online exhibition labels would feature simplified concepts and more direct language for a general audience, while the essays available on the website would target a more informed visitor. Because of YouTube’s wide reach it is important to reflect that breadth of audience in the exhibition, while making the case for YouTube within the institution.

 

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In 2010, the Guggenheim’s ultimately failed inquiry into YouTube as cultural stage -- the one-time YouTube Play ‘biennial’ -- did much to hurt a serious dialog concerning formal and informal production on YouTube. The biennial’s general lack of rigor was its structural downfall, but more pointedly was its hesitation to truly explore the range of production on the website. Critic Roberta Smith said it best when she lamented the “pointless professionalism” of the 25 chosen works; they were technically slick but conceptually watered-down versions of art world video. The Guggenheim’s fear of institutionalizing the do-it-yourself charm and populist verve of YouTube productions -- both within and outside the aegis of ‘art’ -- skirted the point of investigating YouTube at all. In many ways, this exhibition attempts to fill the gaps for which the Guggenheim failed to account, providing a more considered approach to the YouTube video and a serious inquiry of its place within society, as medium, and as art.

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