48 Hour Minute

In 1968 Andy Warhol said, “In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” This statement proves truer than ever today, with a world as a stage at our fingertips and as the technology to get us there becomes easier to use. We are in a voyeuristic age where posting our pictures from last night’s party, tweeting about where we are going as if to alert the media, checking in on Foursquare, reading an opinion on a blog, introducing the world to our hidden talents or useless rants on YouTube, has become the norm.

According to YouTube statistics, 48 hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube per minute, amounting to 8 years of footage getting uploaded a day. Someone is always watching, always performing, and always there to give their opinion. Many artists have used YouTube as a medium – one of which was a show put on by the Guggenheim Museum in New York, titled ‘Youtube Play’. This statistic was the inspiration for my work “48 Hour Minute”. It is an interactive, screen based installation which looks at 26 viral videos, uploaded from all parts of the world. Each video appears on the screen every 15 seconds as a reference to the saying “15 minutes of fame”. Each 15 seconds represents one minute, and every video represents 48 hours of footage. As the user moves the mouse over a video and clicks on one, it appears on the screen and the users can watch the video in its entirety. If the user moves the mouse, the video stops and a user can select a new video to watch. It is interesting to see each video play and analyze the content between videos that went viral, some with substance and some not.