I decided to take a few minutes break from subtitling an interview with a Mexican environmental law professor to read some blogs and I am so blown away by this, this guy who goes by the name Kutiman has made a bunch of wonderful songs and music videos out of unrelated youtube clips, mostly random people practicing their instruments. His work has been re-posted here:
http://thru-you.org/
It's absolutely brilliant. and fun! It makes me smile.
Like my friend José said on his blog "The video sequencing is clever and lighthearted, the music tastefully composed and the overall conceit exudes love for humanity.... Much of music is a conversation across space and time, a retracing of other people’s gestures, a palimpsest. Today’s sampling technologies expose those overlays like so much colorful sedimentation."
If I may riff on those ideas - it is truly interesting how positive and light these pieces are. There are some similar projects, like the various "shreds" or like the Evolution Control Committee's "best of default" or whatever it was called, where the ECC went trolling napster for mostly embarrassing stuff that people recorded and accidentally left in their napster share folders, and then made hilarious but kind of mean-spirited ensemble pieces out of them - these were making fun of the sources - but Kutiman seems to rather be celebrating the immense collection of human soul and talent and skill and energy that YouTube is now a sort of repository of. He's taking these people's individual efforts and turning them into some sort of massive global jam band, and the results are beautiful.
It makes me wonder what lies ahead. This may be the beginning of the global hive mind society that some science fiction writers like Vernor Vinge have written about. At some point the interconnected creativity and brainpower of all the millions of humans may become so powerful that what it come up with will be something nobody would be able to understand right now, especially on their own.
That is, if we don't blow ourselves up first.
Posted by steev at Marzo 10, 2009 03:55 PM