At the time of writing a YouTube clip of Susan Boyle (a contestant on a national television talent contest) has received over 92 million views. Over half a million comments have been left on the page. With each comment averaging out at around 15 words, YouTube users have unconsciously collectively generated enough collective content to write over 100 novels worth of information making it one of the top five 'most discussed' videos on YouTube.
Originally I planned to print the entire comments history of Susan Boyle, however this did not exactly go to plan. Whilst I was working YouTube 'updated' its website, claiming it was making the website more minimal and user friendly, however this was a mask for their true intentions. When trying to view all comment on a particular item the page would always get stuck when you passed a months worth of information. Whilst this appears to be a minor technical fault, it is consistant and runs through every video on the site. Displaying thousands of comments uses excessive bandwidth and when YouTube updated there site they reduced the amount of comments that a user could view, yet made this appear as if your internet browser had malfunctioned.
Confronted with this I began thinking about all the content collectively being written that was disappearing into a digital abyss. At this point I chose to look at two other videos taken from the top five 'most discussed' section. They were 'Charlie Bit Me' and 'The Real BNP Supporters'. I believe the nature of the three videos covers three areas of public interest. The banal, the spectacle and the political and I then decided to print out all of the comments from each of these videos for the past month turning them from digital data into a tangible physical form, so I gathered as much information as YouTube would let me and began printing.
My main drive for printing a months worth of comments for each of these videos was to express the absurdity of trying to document digital data and to also preserve a social history that would have been lost. . A mere months worth could fill a filing cabinet. So I bought one. I then decided that if my intentions and motivations for doing this project were to hold any sort of conviction I would have to continue this process for the duration of the degree show, so I bought two more filing cabinets.
It is worth adding that in my original proposal for the exhibition I wanted to place cut away walls with bound copies of every Susan Boyle comment ever written. However I started to believe that this method of display compromised the work and as soon as the comments became bound it transformed the comments from being about the process of archiving (within the cabinets) to the end product of the book and I believe that the process of archiving (whether a feable attempt or not) was crucial to the aesthetic and value of the work.
