Scapes Response
One of the most interesting pieces on display at the Scapes exhibition at the Nash Gallery is Christopher P. Baker’s Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise. The piece is a 60’ by 10’ video projection collage of hundreds of YouTube videos, specifically “diary” type videos in which the subject of the video addresses the audience directly.
Although this piece is in the back of the Nash, gallery-goers encounter it immediately upon entering the space. When I first walked into the gallery, I thought there must have been a large group of people discussing something behind the back wall. I was quite surprised to turn the corner and see that it was a large group of people talking, in a sense. Only these people were video images projected onto a wall, their voices emitted through speakers. Although all the work in the exhibition is excellent, Baker’s audio-visual creation starkly contrasts some of the more traditional, static forms presented by the other artists.
It is difficult not to be awestruck by this piece. When you first encounter the piece it is difficult to take it all in. How does one begin to look at a piece of art that is 60 feet long? I decided to sit down on one of the benches along the back wall and try to watch the video in the best way I could. Sometimes I would decide to focus on one specific video and watch just that one. Other times I decided to take in the entire piece at once.
To say that Hello World! is mesmerizing would be an understatement. Part of that effect comes from the way the videos transition. Some videos will fade into the next, but most will flash quickly, creating a blinking affect.
Christopher’s work raises interesting questions about communication in the 21st century. Is it possible to talk to everyone and no one at the same time? How has the digitization of communication affected interpersonal relationships? Have new mediums of communication, specifically video-sharing Web sites, enhanced communication or diluted it?
I find it interesting that all of the people who made these internet videos believed that they had something very important to say. They are either discussing issues that are very important to them or divulging some aspect of their life that they think the world should know. In that way, they are addressing the entire world at the same time; whoever has internet access could be a potential listener. And yet it is entirely possible that absolutely no one will decide to watch their videos.
How would these people feel if they knew they were part of an artwork? I would imagine that anyone would be excited to appear in a gallery, but at the same time I think that these people would be a little dismayed to see how their voices are lost among the voices in the crowd. By taking away their words they lose some of their identity. They become little more than talking heads, their words indistinguishable above the dyne.
The title of this piece is reminiscent of the classic Kubrick film Dr. Stangelove or: How I Learned to Stopped Worrying and Love the Bomb. The Cold War has been over for nearly 20 years now and the world doesn’t worry about nuclear disaster the way that it used. So what is one of our greatest fears nowadays? One is the increasing computerization of society. Some people are afraid of technology, that it will “take over” our lives, that personal relationships with real human being will be replaced by false, digital relationships. Think of Facebook, MySpace, AIM, etc. Some might argue that those are modes of communication that stifle person-to-person relationships and become a replacement for human interaction. But we don’t need to worry about this, Christopher posits. We should just learn to love this blur of communication: the videos, instant messages, junk email, Facebook applications, text messages, and all their other various forms. The new modes of communication we’ve created are not necessarily bad, just different. It’s a beautiful mess.