Getting to Know You(Tube)
Getting to Know You(Tube) is as a way to cruise YouTube with strangers—to simultaneously get to know new shared community and to explore the phenomenon that is YouTube. A creative public video presentation started in 2011 by Crystal Baxley and Stefan Ransom, GTKY(T) is a way for one to better know their community through the sharing and presentation of YouTube videos. YouTube is a reservoir of knowledge and a video archive that continues to be collectively built by all of us. GTKY(T) presenters share their discoveries, thoughts, and questions regarding this vast knowledge trove, from the awkwardly banal to the wildly mysterious. Tonight’s presenters will include Ralph Pugay, Tabitha Nikolai, and Ním Wunnan.
Ním Wunnan studied painting at Glasgow School of art and is a web designer with a heavy case of synethesia. Ním will discuss a YouTube series called Car Boys that featured an open world car driving simulator. He will frame it as post-post-internet art, explaining how the hosts pushed the limits of the game and brought a narrative element into their videos and into the meta-community of subscribers and fans. A selection of clips will take the audience through the development and subsequent execution of this spontaneously-generated, deeply post-structural, post-internet narrative.
Tabitha Nikolai is a visual artist and low level cybermage. She is currently exploring manifestations of suburban basement occult, and notions of transfuturism. Tabitha will show that the sci-fi version of life-hacks are bio-hacks, and how the future is now. She likes to augment her body and you can too!
Employing a fattened style, Ralph Pugay’s bright blocky colors and simplified forms and figures illustrate scenes that at first appear approachable and playful, but gradually reveal darker, more complex truths. For Getting to Know Youtube, Pugay will play two videos made by KIRAC– a group that presents art and cultural criticism on Youtube.
