Audio-visual installation, YouGhost, at The Sage

YouGhost is a multiple screen collage of materials taken from YouTube lip-synch videos, in the plunderphonics tradition, and was exceptionally well received at its first showing at The Sage in 2009.  It is in the Music Education Centre, which is downstairs from the cafe area, and then the installation is in the corridor on the left at the bottom of the stairs.

 

Entry is free.

 

More details:

YouGhost, by Merrie Snell, is a 20-minute, four-channel video installation in the 'plunderphonics' tradition, a process similar to collage whereby pre-existing recordings are sampled - or 'plundered' - to form the materials for a new composition. The source materials of YouGhost are taken from lip-synching videos produced, performed, and posted by members of the video-sharing web space, Youtube.com

 

Since 2005, two technologies have spurred a lipsynching craze on the internet: affordable digital motion-capture technologies and video-sharing web spaces such as Youtube.com. Lipsynching, while regarded as a mortal sin against musical authenticity, has become a leisure pursuit and genuine mode of expression for vast numbers of PC practitioners who draw inspiration from lipsynching's drag show forerunners, the conventions of music video, and the heretofore private world of bathroom-mirror performance. It is perhaps this latter mode of performance that is most-often invoked, as many of the videos have a voyeuristic quality, a sense that we are watching something private, an unguarded moment of personal vulnerability. For all the posing and mugging, all the calculated silliness, something authentic is communicated through this medium and practice.

 

In YouGhost, lip-synching is understood as a kind of audio-visual collage whereby recorded voices, detached from their original bodies through recording, become combined with new bodies, as the lip-synchers mime to the recordings to create a new, imaginary reality. Heard as 'ghost voices', the disembodied voices of the original sound recordings can be seen to resemble the voices of the dead, perhaps carrying traces of the dead. The lip-synchers, in turn, might be imagined as the mediums through which the ghost voices travel and are themselves mediatized by the technology with which they are captured (entombed) and then re-embodied (resurrected) through the medium of the computer. As 'found' materials, the Youtube videos from which YouGhost is composed are collaged and re-composed to reveal the uncanny, poignant, but also humorous and loveable 'ghosts in the machine'.

 

The installation is open between 10am and 7pm on the Tuesday 22nd to Saturday 26th June.

Published: 22nd June 2010