“vinyl crackle expresses a time out of joint. no longer an illusion of presence.. where the mediation is being foregrounded…A signifier of another time, a time beyond the present….” —Mark Fisher, 2011
If the phonographic crackle is the index of time itself, what does it mean for us to listen through YouTube’s codec; to the resonance of YouTube’s time?
Jon Smeathers in collaboration with ?ℭ? Mixtapes & Soft Centre is proud to present recordings from Lost Futures of Me At The Zoo* (LFMZ).
LFMZ was a 4-hour workshop at SOFT CENTRE's inaugural UNFURL festival, speculating on YouTube as a sonic performative tool. The workshop tested YouTube’s potential as an exclusive interface to create mashups, algorithmic DJ sets and envision mixtapes/collages from the rhythmic currents of YouTube’s tempor(e)ality.
LFMZ used theoretical frameworks created by Mark Fisher and Wolfgang Ernst as a means to analyse how we engage with Youtube in order to create new directions in sound collage and technocratic practices. The workshop also explored listening and sound production techniques through the distortion of YouTube’s codec. These recordings emerged from participants sitting on YouTube for an hour, playing with the hotkeys, slowing and speeding videos and opening tabs at random to create wholly original sound collages!
* Me at the zoo is YouTube’s first published video on the 24th of April 2005 by YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim under the username jawed. At the time of writing this, it has accumulated 114,512,402 views. 10 million comments, 42 million likes and 120 thousand dislikes.