I've made a new video for the Post-Industrial Revolution show. It will be called The Politico Sexual History of Patrick Anthony Harrington.
It is a new work, but in a style I have used before.
Here is a previous example of this style of work, it's called Oh Sah Mah (2009).
I think of these works as Info-Dumps. They are made entirely of found material. In Oh Sah Mah, the videos are from Youtube, the text is from a book by John Gray, and the voice is an online text-to-speech reader.
Although I've re-edited these components and put them together as a (vaguely) coherent piece of video work that I see as art. I feel like I'm doing similar work to countless, unnamed (well, I don't remember their names...) Youtubers who have been re-mixing found material for years.
Here is a 10 minute(the maximum length allowed on a regular Youtube video) loop from an episode of The Simpsons, uploaded by ashwilliams123 in 2009.
The arbitrary nature of Youtube videos reminds me of private jokes - shared memories of things that were once funny. That's why I started making the Specific Cultural Reference series of videos. Like this one.
This is like a private joke that no one ever made. I just thought it was weird how Frankie Dettori used to have a branded line of tinned goods - tomatoes and chickpeas. You don't see them in the shops anymore, and you can't find any reference to them online. So I made this video as a sort of monument to what seemed like a weird moment in the history of a public figure. (See more of the videos here, if you google hard enough you might be able to work out the references).
Again, the idea is to act as an observer and editor, selecting references and source material according to a set of obvious search terms and a knowledge of my subject.
The obviousness of the material, colliding with the obscurity of a lot of the narratives is important. Here is a video I made last year with Penny Whitehead and Daniel Simpkins called Disruptive Histories: Tatlin Tower
This is less of an Info-Dump - i.e. the story being told was based on real events, told by Penny and Dan and edited by myself. But the video is interesting.
When I show this video, people often ask if I made the inflatable Tatlin Tower. To me it is pretty obviously a video from Youtube. If you search 'Tatlin Tower' on Youtube, it comes up on the first page of results - but people don't necessarily know that.
The internet makes information completely available for those willing to seek it out. Otherwise, information just sits there, like dirt or rocks. Information is an object, it has depth and weight and just like an object it exists without us needing to observe it.
Sometimes I feel like the guy out of Nausea, but instead of being made to feel sick by the sheer physical presence of objects, it's all the information I could be accessing that makes me feel sick.
When I start a project I like to research, but research is endless - the internet makes it theoretically easy to access information, but sifting through that information and putting it together as a coherent history is incredibly difficult.
So that's where an Info-Dump comes in handy, just select the weirdest shit you can find, and mash it all together.
And if all else fails, just watch all the remixes of 'Keyboard Cat' (after watching the original of course).