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Thursday, 02 September 2010 23:59

Video Artist Transforms YouTube's TOS Into a Paranoid Nightmare

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This extremely odd video, titled “Iterating My Way Into Oblivion,” features a guy listening to a computer voice reading YouTube’s terms of service. It slowly drives him insane.

It’s actually an ongoing, auto-generative piece of digital art. According to the artist, Carlo Zanni, the basic narrative is filmed, and whenever YouTube changes its terms of service, the new text is rendered as audio by text-to-speech software and inserted into the film. As the company continues to

update the legalese, new audio will be inserted and the film will change.

Zanni, who lives and works in La Spezia, Italy, says in an e-mail:

“This work follows three previous experimental movies done in the past four years for which I coined the neologism ‘DATA Cinema,’ suggesting a new way to approach filmmaking and narrative forms at large based on the use of live net data, to create ever-changing cinematic live environments.”

In his “eBay Landscape” project, Zanni uses the online auction company’s stock value data and images from the CNET homepage to draw visual landscapes. Wired.com first profiled Zanni in 2006, when he wrote Average Shoveler, a game in which RSS feeds fall from the sky and pile up on the sidewalk like snowbanks, where the player shovels them up.

For “Iterating My Way Into Oblivion,” Zanni says he purposefully references George Orwell’s 1984 by “speculating on the relationships between creative energies and corporate policies evoking the morphing of enlightened arcana into established powers.”

Which is probably why the pig’s head and the various animal hats show up from time to time. The jury’s still out on the Diet Coke can.

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Authors: Michael Calore

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