TV on the Youtube

Youtube has become many things above and beyond its basic premise of being a simple video sharing website. It has become amongst others a kinetic repository of the weird, wonderful, mundane and semi-legal; a keyhole voyeuristic platform into others wet film productions; bedroom soapbox; clutter of our culture’s basement; aesthetic belly button fluff; the space between culture’s sofa cushions where all sorts of temporal treasures disappear and, above all, a haven for procrastinators. It has also heralded the aesthetic of blocky, highly compressed flash video and given it definition in a televisual age that is moving away from the pointillist vacuum of the cathode-ray tube towards the crystalline prickliness of the plasma screen. While industry specifications expand so that picture definition can increase proportionally to screen size and television sets can occupy an entire wall of a modest sized room, Youtube wanders quite blissfully in the opposite direction. Set at a default 425 x 350 pixels the viewing area of a Youtube video is smaller than a TV remote. Unless that is you view it at full screen, in which case the picture becomes so pixelated that it is almost as though the identities of the characters have been purposely blocked out so as to protect their innocence. You become witness to a soft focus world free of guilt were everything else beyond the computer screen by contrast harbours its own high definition culpability and shame.

I have been interested for a while now in the space where these two worlds collide. Where television and Youtube mix together their opposing philosophies, clash their aesthetics and create a compromised hybrid of the two. A place of guilt and innocence, where the rapidly scanning lines of a PAL or (even better) NTSC television screen assimilate with the compressed cluster of flash pixels. It is a model that works best when Youtube is the master and television is the servant. For example, instances where footage recorded directly from TV is uploaded, or even better, where someone has put a camera in front of the screen and recorded the TV directly. With luck, and in the best examples, you can still make out the trace lines scanning top to bottom, left to right across the TV set. This bridging of the gap between the analogue and the digital has a unique manifestation on Youtube.

Below are a selection of videos found on Youtube that I have been collecting for a while and that show off this aesthetic: lossy videos that have been transcribed directly from a television screen. More no doubt will be added as and when I come across them so that this might eventually become a celebratory archive of the low quality and pixelated. A refuge for the innocent.