Video Artist Transforms YouTube’s TOS Into a Paranoid Nightmare
-
By Michael Calore
- September 2, 2010 |
- 5:59 pm |
- Categories: Art, Design and Fashion, internet
This extremely odd video, titled “Iterating My Way Into Oblivion,” features a guy listening to a computer voice reading YouTube’s terms of service. It slowly drives him insane.
It’s actually an ongoing, auto-generative piece of digital art. According to the artist, Carlo Zanni, the basic narrative is filmed, and whenever YouTube changes its terms of service, the new text is rendered as audio by text-to-speech software and inserted into the film. As the company continues to update the legalese, new audio will be inserted and the film will change.
Zanni, who lives and works in La Spezia, Italy, says in an e-mail:
“This work follows three previous experimental movies done in the past four years for which I coined the neologism ‘DATA Cinema,’ suggesting a new way to approach filmmaking and narrative forms at large based on the use of live net data, to create ever-changing cinematic live environments.”
In his “eBay Landscape” project, Zanni uses the online auction company’s stock value data and images from the CNET homepage to draw visual landscapes. Wired.com first profiled Zanni in 2006, when he wrote Average Shoveler, a game in which RSS feeds fall from the sky and pile up on the sidewalk like snowbanks, where the player shovels them up.
For “Iterating My Way Into Oblivion,” Zanni says he purposefully references George Orwell’s 1984 by “speculating on the relationships between creative energies and corporate policies evoking the morphing of enlightened arcana into established powers.”
Which is probably why the pig’s head and the various animal hats show up from time to time. The jury’s still out on the Diet Coke can.
See Also:
this video is depressing
whats depressing. is the lack of knowledge people have on how to shoot with HDSLRS.
I found this video unbearable after the first completely out of focus scene.
People were right when they said these cameras were going to change the Film Game.
They were wrong when they didn’t stop to think… NOT TO MANY PEOPLE HAVE TO CAPACITY TO OPERATE IT CORRECTLY.
get a fucking camcorder. OR TAKE A GODDAMN PHOTOGRAPHY CLASS.
P.S.
CHECK YOUR GODDAMN WHITE BALANCE!
AND NO! “P IS NOT FOR PROFESSIONAL MODE”
you goddamn dingus’
@jonleger:
turn the shit off if you don’t like it. ALSO, this isn’t a white balance mistake, it was actually color-graded that way. Reel back that snobbery.
Well, what’s more nightmare is to see youtube movies being paid whenever you want to watch it.
I wish I could choose my video quality: low, medium, high, super-high. I know this is art and all, but I have spent the last hour trying to download it!
from Wikipedia’s article about diet coke ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_Coke )
“In most of continental Europe, the drink is marketed as Coca-Cola Light, but often referred to as Cola or Cola Light, and Coca or Coca Light in France”
@carterson2: just click the “720″ at the bottom right of the video to select different resolutions.
@jonleger. You completely miss the point. Also you don’t know how to spell.
goodness, almost as exciting as warhol’s empire state building.
@all
this was not color corrected whatsoever.
if it had been there would not be any unconsistent frames.
p.s what did i spell wrong? NOT ONE GODDAMN WORD.
I WOULDN’T HAVE MISSED THE POINT IF IT WAS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND DUE TO THE WAY IT WAS PRESENTED.
I suspect the XScreenSaver, “WebCollage” by Jamie Zawinski might also fit in this category.
@jonlegere Regarding your atavistic rage: I think you’re holding it wrong.