TRANSFORMATIVE PROCESSES

In an initial continuation of my elaboration on the Present project, I looked to further contemplate Hito Steyerl’s thinking on the transformative processes applied to an image that create a ‘poor image’ (Steyerl, 2009). At the start of this process, I opted to use the then number one ‘Trending’ video on YouTube as a tool for further, literal expressions of the influence of the platform of on the content it hosts. Modifying the original content, I removed all aspects of the video that do not bear direct reference to the platform mechanics themselves, producing the clip featured below.

FROM COUNTERCULTURE TO CYBERCULTURE

At the core of my examination of YouTube as a platform and its influence over the content we consume through it was a historical understanding of the connection between contemporary thinking on social media, values of ‘digital utopianism’ and 1960s and 70s countercultural ideas, as well as the industrial-military-academic complex. In my further iterations I sought to address this more directly, looking to the writings of Fred Turner on this relationship.

The likes of Stewart Brand and those involved in the Whole Earth Catalog, media art collective USCO and artists such as John Cage saw a value in systems and technology generated through the postwar military-industrial research establishment. Utilising these systems in unison with countercultural ways of living offered potential for bringing about a more individualistic lifestyle, as opposed to one plagued with the so-called evils of bureacracy.

Turner writes:

“Like [mathematician/philosopher] Norbert Wiener decades earlier, many in the counterculture saw in cybernetics a vision of a world built not around vertical hierarchies and top-down flows of power, but around looping circuits of energy and information” (Turner, 2006:38).

DIGITAL HAPPENINGS

As modes of distribution, YouTube and other ‘content democracies’ in some ways mirror John Cage’s attempts to level the hierarchies of artistic production by enacting artistic systems in real time through what Allen Kaprow would describe in 1958 as ‘Happenings’.

A kind of multimedia performance piece, ‘happenings’ such as Cage’s Theatre Piece No. 1 (1952) brought together artists, musicians and other performers to engage the audience in a then unforeseen way. On the occasion of Cage’s ’52 piece, those who visited the events at the experimental Black Mountain College site in North Carolina found themselves surrounded by real-time acts of creation; the painting of Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham’s dance, M.C. Richard’s poetry delivered from the top of a ladder, David Tudor’s erratic piano sounds and a lecture delivered by Cage. The audience were encouraged to move freely between these thematically disconnected but co-existent acts, “bringing to life a world of chance experience built out of everyday materials” (Turner, 2006:48) that blurred the lines between art and life itself.

Experience of these interactions would contribute to the Whole Earth thinking of Stewart Brand. In Turner’s words, “to Brand, happenings offered a picture of a world where hierarchies had dissolved, where each moment might be as wonderful as the last, and where every person could turn her or his life into art” (Turner, 2006:48). In turn, this mindset would directly influence the tech visionaries who would later lay the groundwork for the social media platforms of today. A sense of freedom of ‘movement’ and ‘creation’ are granted to users through complex systems, albeit under the condition of pre-designed rules, whilst leveraged for the sake of generating capital.

My first experiment in relation to this idea was to attempt to create a ‘Happening’ within the space of YouTube itself, whilst appropriating its imagery to serve as the aforementioned “everyday materials” (Turner, 2006:48) that bridged the gap between art and life in Cage’s events.

Nine videos taken from YouTube’s ‘Trending’ page play out in the same viewing field, simultaneous but uncoordinated, in an attempt to shape the video itself into an ‘environment’ in which the viewer’s consciousness of each individual work is transformed.

However, unlike the audience traversing the physical space of Black Mountain College, the way in which we navigate this ‘digital happening’ is limited to the act of viewing (and to a lesser extent listening). In order to watch the act of watching itself, my next iteration made use of optical tracking software to monitor the ‘movements’ of a viewer through the space, so as to observe their interaction with this constructed environment.

The above video displays a ‘heatmap’ style pathway of the viewer’s eyesight as they watch the happening unfold.

Using the gathered viewing data, my subsequent iteration sought to visualise this motion in a static form that illustrates the completed act of existing in the digital space. Plotting each physical instance of sight across a plane led to the following outcome.

I believe there may be potential in exploring this route further. Could the act of viewing itself become a tool for mark-making? Perhaps a video constructed so as to produce a particular pattern of viewing may prove valuable in illustrating the act of viewing itself.

GESTURAL EXPRESSION

Linked closely to Cage’s desire to heighten the sensitivity of his audience were then-contemporary views in modern art that focused on the role of the gesture and art as a natural processes that bridged the gap between the seemingly separated human and nature. Cage sought to integrate the artist and audience more closely with nature through the act of art itself by drawing attention to the natural systems which both unknowingly inhabited.

This thinking served as the motivation behind my next iteration, an attempt to distill the act of watching a YouTube video down to its purely gestural form. Once again, we see an illustration of vision, this time in isolation from that which is seen, so as to more clearly watch the act of watching take place. This raw interpretation raises questions as to the ‘naturalness’ of creating and consuming art; in the context of YouTube, a pre-designed platform defined by rules, is the act truly natural? On the contrary, with rules and systems intrinsic to our humanity, does the addition of such a specified manner in which we must consume the content create an even more authentic way of viewing the act of viewing?

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Turner, Fred (2006)
From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press

Steyerl, Hito (2009)
In Defence of the Poor Image
in The Wretched of the Screen, pp.31-45
Berlin: Sternberg Press