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  ABOUT: YouTube/the medium is the medium  

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In 1969, Boston television station WGBH-TV aired a thirty-minute special where six artists presented original works that illuminated the technical possibilities of video. The special, titled The Medium is the Medium, was one of the first but rare occasions where video work of this capacity—that explored and exploited the limits of the medium itself—was broadcast widely for a television audience. The four works that aired during this special were in many ways critical of television’s coercive platform, confronting television’s manipulation of spectators’ desires through advertising, sponsored programming, and the often socially isolating effects of viewership. One of the artists in the special, Nam June Paik, highlighted the power of television’s suggestion and control. His video included an instructional narration that directed the audience to close and open their eyes. The piece concluded with one final command, or plea, to the viewer: “Turn off your television set.”

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YouTube/the medium is the medium takes its name from this broadcast. The exhibition explores the new terrains of video defined by the proliferation of the Internet, digital cameras, and emergent viewer behaviors in this networked setting. Founded in 2005, YouTube was the first widespread platform built for users to freely upload, share, and manage videos on the Internet; the site served as the first democratic means for distributing moving image works outside of more formal broadcast channels. In the intervening years, YouTube has achieved a cultural dominance not unlike that of television, and the exhibition explores the spaces where the website exercises this authority today.

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The exhibition, organized as a YouTube playlist, features twenty-four videos created between 1966 to 2013 that have been previously uploaded to the site. The frame of the website is important to understanding YouTube’s role in shaping the audience’s viewing, and all of the videos are exhibited in their ‘minimized’ form, showing accompanying ads, titles, tags, views, likes and dislikes, comments, and suggested videos. Following in the same thematic approach as the 1969 special, the selected works in this exhibition each call attention to their medium—be it video, television, or YouTube—where comparisons can be drawn between the historic and contemporary examples to locate where YouTube imposes influence and where it falls away. In the end, should we be as critical of YouTube as the artists in The Medium is the Medium were of television?

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