Audeo Vidio

 

On feedback loops between audio and video.

I've had a YouTube channel since 2006, and it has changed so much since then. In the beginning, "channel" was loosely interpreted as more of a metaphor. Some YouTubers call it the "New YouTube", which may mean it has fully matured into the literal meaning.

But I'm not interested in running a TV channel and hustling for likes and subscribers; I just want to create content which can be shown on some kind of screen, and not have it be a TV show. I like the idea that we can create our own tutorials--something I did in the 90s by writing books and articles, but I don't necessarily want to stop writing and shift everything to video.

What I do like is the idea of creating a video while I'm overdubbing a part in a music track I'm working on, which is interesting because it embeds one medium in another--a form of recursion. The Beatles' Let It Be is an example of one medium projecting into another in a feedback loop. In art, an example is photographing a piece of art you're working on, then the photo becomes the actual artwork. Very often the audio from my videos are the ones that I release, so it wasn't just done for the sake of making a video--there was a usable result in the primary medium, and the early draft (maquette if using a metaphor borrowed from art) is captured in a video.

It's amazing how many bass play-alongs there are now. This was something I was doing in 1978 and it was unimaginable that I'd want to film or record them. This is like someone in the 70s playing along with 78s and recording it on a portable cassette player and playing it for the public over a PA system. (More evidence that music never dies--or we never stop caring about it and for it). 

I'm reminded of Rock School: Rock School was a series that ran on PBS in the 1980s, which interestingly, like all of that content from that era, is on YouTube, as a form of video feedback.The same spirit is there, but it wasn't concerned with followers and likes. You watched it and you liked it and it inspired you to play music. Now it's videos inspiring the making of videos as a form of video feedback.

 

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Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway: Continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, 1995

 

 

Video art in the 70s and 80s had to use tube TVs because that was the technology then. But tube TVs are an integral part of the work such as Warhols or Nam June Paik videos shown on TVs. They can be shown on flat panels, but I think a part of the work dies with the technology. This is different from remixing and remastering audio files. You can create mono mixes for playing on transistor radios.

The interesting thing about streaming content is that it doesn't rely on hardware, but does rely on dimension as a kind of "hardware". We can't make a 6x4 painting then "letterbox" it (although this was done with Toulose Lautrec's At The Moulin Rouge with the right side cropped off at the request of owner, and Warhols extending works by extending it with solid color panels. In terms of video being a purely artistic medium, we can't project YouTube videos in a black box gallery in art museums without contextualizing it in some way so that it works like a Bruce Nauman video, or a Stan Douglas, or a Bill Viola. But ironically, how we watch screen content now is sort of like Nauman's Clown Torture. The Nauman is a piece of conceptual art only to be shown in a museum, but it's already on YouTube, and why does it need to be shown in a black box? It is now in the black box of YouTube's algorithms.

Personally, I've never been interested in YouTube as a medium, or having it tell me what content I need to make to satisfy the algorithms and beg people to "like and subscribe and ring the bell". I'm not interested in star ratings, and used to prefer Siskel and Ebert (but they were the guys that started the thumbs thing).[1] This is all the result of the black box of algorithms telling us how to live our lives, and in the end we lose our free will as well.
 

Recent Doug Rushkoff:

"Researchers have found, for example, that the algorithms running social media platforms tend to show people pictures of their ex-lovers having fun. No, users don’t want to see such images. But, through trial and error, the algorithms have discovered that showing us pictures of our exes having fun increases our engagement. We are drawn to click on those pictures and see what our exes are up to, and we’re more likely to do it if we’re jealous that they’ve found a new partner. The algorithms don’t know why this works, and they don’t care. They’re only trying to maximize whichever metric we’ve instructed them to pursue." https://rushkoff.medium.com/program-or-be-programmed-633fb8f045f3 

1. Star ratings started to be used around 2004 as I recall. Prior to that is was the hit-counter that people used on their websites.