While We Were Working essay

WHILE WE WERE WORKING: a YouTube curatorial endeavor

Nightingale Theatre
Sunday December 14th 2008 7:00 pm
1084 N. Milwaukee Ave. Chicago IL 
(Blue Line to Division stop, walk South, btw Division and Augusta)

Pixar's latest box office starling, is Wall-E. A robot, environmental sage, post apocalyptic janitor, and the earth's last art curator. Wall-E embodies our universal need to rummage, collect, and string meaning between the seemingly random artifacts of our culture and our fetishes. Wall-E's junk pile schlep has inspired While We Were Working, a new curatorial endeavor that attempts to order YouTube, our culture's own looming tower of Trash.

The internet's unwanted or digital detritus is constantly being scraped off the web's cluttered floor and being broken apart and frankensteined into the new. Definitions over ownership and authorship are being elasticized and altered by this constant meddling and re-arranging, and In the process, the line between viral video, Art Art, and just plain unwanted is being happily smudged.

So how do we culture-makers address our new medium, venue, and potential audiences? How do we incorporate and process this superstructure of meaning, whether we are dilettantes, starry-eyed devotees or television-loyalists? And how can you find that good, weird shit out there when there is so much to look at?

Internalizing media's place in our everyday lives is already assured, but thankfully these videos go above and beyond to perform the inevitable. By extricating the banal and taking it to its logical end, these artists create bizarro worlds of displacement and repetition.

As those who stare at computers all day, we feel guilty about this misspent time wandering the internet. By creating a perpetual side project of cataloging, archiving and presenting the best the internet has to offer, we are slowly turning procrastination into productivity. 

While We Were Working is exemplary for using our time wisely so you don't have to.

While We Were Working is curated by Robert Snowden and Eric Fleischauer