[future shock] “oops”

How does this video make you feel, at a bodily/emotional level? One early answer, courtesy of El Fortunio:

‘watching it did feel like a camera tumbling through some gigantic blob of human experience’

He’s right; it does; and I think there’s something interesting (and potentially fubar-laden) going on here. Some strange combination of Vernacular Video, Network Realism, and Remix Culture.

For vernacular video, here’s Tom Sherman:

‘Video in 2006 is not the exclusive medium of technicians or specialists or journalists or artists — it is the peoples’ medium. The potential of video as a decentralized communications tool for the masses has been realized, and the twenty-first century will be remembered as the video age. Surveillance and countersurveillance aside, video is the vernacular form of the era — it is the common and everyday way that people communicate. Video is the way people place themselves at events and describe what happened. In existential terms, video has become everyperson’s POV (point of view). It is an instrument for framing existence and identity.’

– Tom Sherman, ‘Vernacular Video‘, excerpted from The Nine Lives of Video Art

For remix culture, Wikipedia:

‘Remix culture is a term based on Lawrence Lessig‘s Remix book to describe a society which allows and encourages derivative works. Such a culture would be, by default, permissive of efforts to improve upon, change, integrate, or otherwise remix the work of copyright holders. Lessig presents this as a desirable ideal and argues, among other things, that the health, progress, and wealth creation of a culture is fundamentally tied to this participatory remix process.’

And for network realism (as of yesterday-ish), James Bridle:

‘Network Realism is writing that is of and about the network. It’s realism because it’s so close to our present reality. A realism that posits an increasingly 1:1 relationship between Fiction and the World. A realtime link. And it’s networked because it lives in a place that’s that’s enabled by, and only recently made possible by, our technological connectedness.’

– James Bridle, ‘Network Realism: William Gibson and new forms of Fiction‘, 25/10/2010

Taking those quotes together, what do we get? To end with; an excerpt from the blurb/statement accompanying “oops”, care of its creator, Chris Beckman:

‘Somewhere between a home-video mixtape and a postmodern travelogue, “oops”—a ten-minute art video composed entirely of appropriated YouTube videos, seamlessly stitched together via a motif of camera drops—serves both as transportative adventure and metaphorical elucidation of YouTube itself (i.e. endless related videos), exemplifying the Internet’s infinite repository of “throwaway” social documentation. (…) This abstractly voyeuristic portrayal of an ever-filming generation (who won’t let the transcendence of being in A Moment inhibit their document-everything impulse) presages a future where every instant of our existence, from the mundane to the sublime, is preserved and catalogued for all to see.’

– Chris Beckman, “oops” (2009)