I have this memory as a kid dancing and messing around, I think some kind of large family event where the young ones find some upstairs room or adult free enclave and lay down their own kind of rules. Someone has the idea to get out a camera and upload to YouTube. The promise feels not quite possible – as if to capture and suspend the present in some murky elsewhere was beyond anything we could be responsible for.
I am reminded of this watching these videos. Lauren Auder and Tosia Leniarska have taken an old TV set and asked a group of artists, friends and strangers to submit an obscure clip from YouTube that happened to surface to them one day. Lauren and Tosia have sifted through these clips, and that is the show.
One video is 20 seconds of a leather boot on fire in a sink. Another shows a hand with a tyre running over it repeatedly – the hand cushioned in some kind of towelled furrow so the tyre’s impact does nothing in the way of damage. Tosia tells me it’s a niche kind of fetish thing.
By threading these recorded moments untethered of context, Lauren and Tosia allow the viewer the privilege of sitting in the weightlessness of each video running from one to the next, inexplicably. An experience perhaps more akin to the early days of YouTube when the algorithm wasn’t as good at giving you what you already want, and you were left with the surprise of what people other than yourself in the world actually get up to.
My Insta reels feed is saturated with the so-called strange – instructional videos that lead nowhere, random jumpscares in the middle of ASMR clips, lofi animal images backed by distorted mid-2010’s pop – but the comments under even the most unhinged of this kind of content shows general viewer fatigue. Once the viewer has cottoned on to the way so-called ‘strangeness’ is being used to hold user attention, and thus feed the algorithm, the content ceases to be truly strange, its reason to exist become all-too-clear.
Mystique also requires the content maker to be not quite sure what it is they are making. The clips Lauren and Tosia have curated pull along and preserve this more naive, searching idea of what it is to pick up a camera and record something.
In one video a guy films his dog Hazel lying dead or dying. He explains he’s just now picked up the camera as he believes Hazel has only just passed away. The last 30 seconds the man does not speak, the camera just hovers over the dog’s body, registering the jitter and pulse of the hand. There is something painfully stuck. Hazel is still just about alive or has only just died and the moment to record has already been missed. Either way in the last 30 seconds the camera frame hums painfully, searching for what it is that needs to be captured and kept.
The first ever video uploaded to YouTube was Me at the zoo. 20 seconds long, Jawed Karim, one of YouTube’s founders says: ‘all right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks and that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.’ As if the strange mystery of what it is we are all trying to capture in the first place was there from the very beginning.
Even as many of the clips Lauren and Tosia have selected are to do with deaths and ends, the choice to record and upload something is a kind of assertion that something is not to be left behind. In another video a lamb is slashed to fur slabs, the fur attached to another, newly-shorn lamb. By dressing this orphaned lamb in the other dead lamb’s skin it is given a new mother, and the mother is given back her lamb. Despite being a video of flesh and skin, the process looks weightless, a miracle happening among mountains. Something is passed and received, a new cycle formed, even if what was lost hasn’t actually been brought back to life.
Tosia describes the show as a kind of anti-Summer-exhibition. A sofa, an old tv and two big speakers. It’s ad-hoc and low budget, a non-commercial project taking up space when Emalin would otherwise have been closed. Come and sit down and watch some videos you probably otherwise would never have seen. Sit and partake of the little miracle that all over the world people press record and, like you, are not quite sure what it is they might end up seeing.
