User:Laura Macchini/graduationProjectDiary

Project Diary

explanation of how my project used to be about self affirmation of identity and ended up being about confessions

Over the summer, I started becoming more and more fascinated with the concept of constant editing and control over an Online Identity, I had read several books about it, and it seemed a good topic to explore for my graduation project. I started looking at how people behave online, at the pictures they choose to represent them, at the patterns recognizable in people's behaviour online.
Until I saw this video. {{#ev:youtube|oG9LHwWRz1I}} Then, all of a sudden, I realized: I was much more fascinated by the motive that may drive a hyperactive teenage girl to talk for six minutes about her new fuzzy slippers than any other topic I had explored. After that, it was just a matter of time before I stumbled into my first confessional videos {{#ev:youtube|qO21WmdsreI}}

description of what I'm actually trying to do as a graduation project now

what is it about

My graduation project revolves around confessional youtube videos. It consists in a collage/mashup of videos, streaming directly from youtube, projected in a room; the video(s) are going to be influenced by the behaviour of the audience. The goal is to explore the patterns of confession in videoblogs, often borrowed from Reality TV , create an intimate (and somewhat disturbing) experience, out of the remix of various youtube confessions.

why streaming from youtube?

I spent quite some time examining other projects that make use of youtube videoblogs; I have been very disappointed to understand that none of them credited the people who made those videos. None of the artists I found so far contacted the owner of the videos to ask permission, even notify them that their images were being used in an artwork or movie. I plan to contact the makers of the videos I use, explain about my project and my intentions: the purpose of my project is, in part, to create awareness on the fact that when they put videos of themselves online, they are implicitly authorizing others to de-contextualize their words, breach youtube copiright and download everything; they might not want it but it is possible and it happens, and that's the least of their privacy concerns.

how does it work

while there is no one watching, the video shows an idle scene, pieces of video in which a person stares at the camera, waiting for an audience. As soon as visitors enter the installation space, the video gradually changes into scenes in which the vloggers are revealing more and more intimate details about their life; the level of intimacy and the content of the confessions/revelations is related to factors three factors so far, the number of people present, the distance between the spectator/s and the projection, the level of noise recorded.

I want to try to create a sense of intimacy and quiet, in the space of my installation: a narrow 'room', with black walls, and, possibly, silence. This is, in my opinion, the perfect context to experience an intimate confession; this is also going to be the condition necessary to appreciate the full extent of the installation: if too much noise is recorded the confessions are not going to be that intimate.

what does it look like?

link to the videos I made and playlists on AA

Right now I'm using ActiveArchives as an editing tool to create the video playlists for my installation AA
These are some of the playlists that I created, they run with my script, in a single youtube player:
intro: http://cuttr.it/qu59p
medium: http://cuttr.it/y5oh4
high: http://cuttr.it/jbmya

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this was an earlier experiment, I downloaded videos from youtube and manually edited; the password is "pietzwart"

Video on Vimeo