Youtube Curation: The Magical, Mystical World of Parker Mah

(He may or may not be the boy in that picture...)

We have a guest Youtube Curation post today, and it is a goodie. Brought to you by a good friend of the blog, if you find yourself with any of that tiresome time on your hands, I encourage you to check out the following selections. You won't be disappointed. Each one is a little cultural gem worthy of it's own space launch. Voyager be damned.

Enjoy.

I have been following your youtube video curation with interest. While it is an amazing cultural phenomenon, I'm not sure it's ready to go the way of the museum yet. In 50 years, are these pixelated, ADDisordered videos really going to stand as a historically relevant encapsulation of human civilization in the 21st century? Is this shit gonna go out on the next voyager spacecraft? Are we going to be committing the planetary equivalent of posting drunken, tutu-wearing, lightsaber-wielding facebook pictures by beaming this stuff out wirelessly, accessible to any passing meteorite...? But I digress. I would like to propose two series of youtube videos:
one, in the category of 'too much time on your hands...'

The Mother of All Funk Chords



Extreme Sheep LED Art



Lego Stop Motion Grease



Watching these videos, the overwhelming question that comes to mind is, 'Why? Why, in the name of all that is good and lowly...'

The second series has to do with the thing I most like to see on youtube which is: people dancing. Here are some choice selections:

Jika Majika



James Brown Gives you Dancing Lessons



Polysics - I My Me Mine (Strong Machine 2 Version)



Original UpRock!



I doubly encourage you to check out Parker's photography at I Spy With My Third Eye.

Last featured on the blog in this post.

Deus Ex Machina for Voyeurs

“YO DAT SHYT OFF DA RACK SON.”

“FUNNY AZZ VID lolz”

“i love this vid but this prick hellodude619 is a fag. he obviouslt does like the vid if he keeps spamming it”



“57 million views. This is just really sad.”

That’s right, ghostrider5378. It is sad.

As of press time, the video “Crank Dat Soulja Boy Spongebob” had 57,605,818 views. I can only assume that number will have increased by the time that you read this post.

Crank Dat's success is just one more piece of evidence that Youtube, far more than the Paleozoic boobtube, is democracy’s medium. A repository for the mundane, the melodramatic, and the magnificent, with more than 80 million videos (requiring storage space in the terabytes) mere clicks away, youtube sits at the heart of online culture. Since its advent in 2005, it has reshaped the way that we view recorded video and wasted innumerable man hours.

But despite the wide shadow youtube casts across our cultural landscape, it’s only relatively recently that the gatekeepers of high culture—artists, curators, New Yorkers—have publicly given the medium its due.

I can think of two instances off the top of my head.

There was weetube, a hilarious, small-scale piece created by Vancouver's Theater Replacement for Hive 2. Described as "part performance, part parlour game," weetube operated on a simple concept, a pair of actors spit lines culled from youtube comment threads.

Go ahead. Try it with the lines at the top of the page. You won't regret it.

Good?

The second art-house presentation that comes to mind, was at Manhattan's Kitchen Gallery in May 2008. The brainchild of curator Rachel Greene, Artists Using Youtube asked three artists—a new school video artist, a writer for Artspeak, and a sculptor with an MFA from Bush’s alma mater—to curate a personal set of youtube videos, revealing “how YouTube serves as a source of inspiration and distraction for many of today’s contemporary artists.”

The New York Times review of the show considered it a mixed bag. They didn’t like clear themes, pop culture adoration, or videos that weren’t repurposed. They did, however, make an awful lot of fuss about recontextualization and placing “primitive artifacts... in the context of high modernism.” Basically, digging through the digital detritus to discover new sources of meaning.

Nowhere was Soulja Boy Squarepants to be found.

That said, later for wankfests. Toss the pretension. Your picks are your picks!

This week’s challenge, snowjobbers: Curate your own set of three youtube videos, rationale of your choice. Bring it.



Bonus: For those of our readers that have the facebook or email address of one your three contributors (I suspect that’s all of you…), we welcome your contributions. Send a youtube link (1) with a 1-2 line explanation and you may well appear in a special reader-produced post. I await with bated breath, people.