An Acoustic Journey Through YouTube

Youtube (YT) is an archive. An archive for not only movies and pictures, but also for music. That is why it is used, not only as a videoplatform, but in the same ammount as a musicplatform. As a musicarchive, YT contains composed music, but also sounds, tones, voices and noises.
The existing music on YT can be divided into music, recorded in the non-network world (such as a record, as a video documentation of a performance or a film and television production) and has been uploaded then on YT, and music that comes from the network context. The spectrum of the archived documents is ranging from anthropological and ethnological, more scientific recordings of classical music, to popular and avant-garde music. The documentation and publications of their own personal play or song, to which I also count producing recitations or how to's, are lined up in the sphere of publishing of all kinds of artistic performing forms of action. I would particularly like to highlight the following phenomena as the use of "power tools" such as "Inbflat" or "doodle guitar", or the many mashups and remixes found in the videos on YT.
The Internet reflects our world symbolically. But YT clearly shows that the symbolic worlds of the network do not only take care of the mapping, furthermore they overlap and overwrite our perception, as in a feedback loop. As an archive of recordings (including sounds) of our habitat, the natural as well as the cultural, comprises YT a non-manageable amount of notes of any kind and is, similar to Wikipedia, constantly expanding with the voluntary cooperation of the participants. The symbolic overlapping and exchange of what is perceived, can no longer take place only within our human reason, but externalizes and materializes in recording devices. The phenomenon of records is not a new phenomenon, but it is happening today in real time, so that if we take part, our world is formed just out of that participation.
The ordering of the so gathered video documents is almost impossible, because their quantity exceeds anything seen so far. Since people can’t handle these archives anymore, the ordering is assigned to algorithms. An enormous amount of parallel worlds is automatically and dynamically designed in algorithmic arrange in a way that defies our more and more direct access (reflection, overview, understanding). In my opinion, an ordering, which creates identity, can only be performed individually and on excerpts and in this way, maybe reconcile the individual with the mass society. The abundance of individual positions, despite the enormous social pressure for uniformity, that emerged so far and still is emerging, are evidence of remarkable experimentation, fascinate me again and again, give me strength and hope and motivate me to participate directly in this form of collective cultural work.
Curatingyoutube chose for itself, in dealing with the phenomena of YT, a method that allows comparative analysis, but also enables to deal with the multitude of phenomena in terms of aesthetic and associations: Selecting and arranging videos in the grid.
For the "Arts Space Radio" by Radio:Cona, I've decided to introduce the enormous musical and tonal variety of the network archive "Youtube" and not to depict a specific art-Canon. In addition to this, I have selected some subjects, which I consider as exemplary and compiled the corresponding videos to a video grid. These grids serve me as an instrument / playlist / sound bank, from which I select videos or music intuitively. The music / sound pieces can be played in parallel, can be mixed, are lined up and repeated. Different variants can arise new perspectives, interpretations and sound journeys.

documentation from the time in Ljubljana in the RadioCona exhibition space at the skuc gallery: