Matthew Williamson - 'Degeneracy in Online Video Platforms'. Photo by Anne Helmond.
A graduate of the Ontario College of Art & Design, and nowadays an artist working in a broad range of media, from print to web. Matthew Williamson examines the relations between man and machine, and was at Video Vortex to discuss the condition of online video today.
Kicking off with a quote from Michael Snow, who allegedly responded to the fact that his film Wavelength had been watched over 50.000 times on YouTube with:
“The people who watch the video online have not watched the film, but have actually seen a ghost.”
Indeed, the Web is full of these ghosts: Wavelength appears on a lot of online video platforms today. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that there’s a redundant amount of video platform on the Web these days, without much diversification between these platforms: Just take Double Rainbow for example.
This degeneracy is self-generated out of competition and reward. On Youtube, this reward is socializing. On sites such as Megavideo however, this rewarding is more banal, in the form of actual reward points per view. This can only lead to a flood of lowest common denominator content, with the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few.
So what will the future of online video look like? The answer to this question, according to Williamson, is that the majority of the internet content is moving towards video, so the amount of degenerate content will only increase.
On the upside, if enjoy anime music video’s, you’re all set.