With YouTube playlists on our mind, we decided to focus on automation. In playlist settings, we found a section called “Auto add” which we (wrongly) assumed would create a rule simply by entering a keyword (“Title contains: …”, or “Tag”) and then instantaneously filter videos that fit this description into our playlist.

Why we ever thought this would work is up for debate (these new media rooms sure can get hot) as the sheer amount of videos that would eventuate in our playlist would be chaotic. Alas, automation had gone straight out the window. What it actually meant was that videos you uploaded yourself would get filtered into a playlist, which would lend its use to say, an artist uploading their album song by song onto YouTube.

Instead, we turned to the “Collaborate” tab.

What would we do with this? We were still set on creating a playlist of some kind, and inviting collaborators to contribute to the fun. Ideas were pitched – telling a story by creating a cutout paper character, making his cutout accessible to others, and then inviting them to finish a story that we began? A variant of the Viewfinders project that Hannah showed us earlier in the week? Something entirely different? Our project had turned out wonky, and it seemed like we were back to the same square one we always seemed to be at. But, we had the backing of a bunch of fresh info on new media that kept us afloat.

I chose this studio because of its similarities to another studio I did this time last year: Ecologies of Noticing. Our work in this class has mirrored my work in that class insofar as responding to new media concepts, a whole lot of stuff about networks and new ways of thinking about things. Our main assignment was an ongoing collaboration with German students where we created something (short piece of video, short piece of audio) that was then sent to Germany (thanks, internet). In turn, we received something that they made and had to respond to it (with another short piece of video and audio). What resulted was a chain of collaboration, wild, kaleidoscopic pieces of media that attempted to interrogate certain ideas about anthropocentrism (or the rejection of).

Here, YouTube proved an able platform to recreate something in this vein. Their playlist functionality allows for more open collaboration than the work we did in Ecologies (Google Drive is hell). We took what we found interesting about Viewfinders and transposed pieces of it here. We wanted to explore the amateur and unregulated nature of YouTube’s platform in a collaborative setting by attempting a video chain that responds to a certain piece of audio. And this is what we got (so far).