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Musician Uploads Video of Himself to YouTube 1000 Times

by Matthew Zuras on June 4, 2010 at 06:30 AM

Patrick Liddell's YouTube Art
You know how when you repeat a word over and over it eventually begins to lose its meaning and sound like a foreign language? Or how a photocopy of a photocopy loses its details, until all that's left is abstract blobs of toner? Repetition and reproduction have been a key concern for many artists and theorists, from Walter Benjamin's seminal 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' to Alvin Lucier's performance entitled 'I Am Sitting in a Room' (1970), in which the artist recorded, played and re-recorded himself speaking until his speech became pure sound.

In homage to Lucier's work, musician Patrick Liddell (who records as Ontologist) took a modern approach to the problem (or benefit) of degradation. Liddell recorded a video of himself explaining how he would upload that very video over and over until his voice and image were destroyed. You can check out Liddell's first video after the break.

With patience and resolve, Liddell then downloaded his first file from YouTube and then uploaded it again repeating the process until he had reached 1000 iterations. The product of that endeavor is below (turn down your volume!).


Since compressing video and audio effectively removes some of the file's data, each upload/download cycle further decayed the piece. Just like Cory Arcangel's 2004 work 'Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast" compressed over and over as an mp3 666 times' (which is exactly as it sounds, and was also inspired by Lucier's performance), Liddell is exploring the divide between reality and the mimed version of that reality we encounter through media. As Lucier's piece experimented with the fluid nature of sound and language, Liddell is investigating that which is missing every time a communication is repeated. [From: Gawker]

Tags: alvin lucier, AlvinLucier, art, cory arcangel, CoryArcangel, ontologist, patrick liddell, PatrickLiddell, repitition, reproduction, top, youtube, youtube art, YoutubeArt

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