{"id":1664,"date":"2015-05-27T07:13:41","date_gmt":"2015-05-27T07:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1664"},"modified":"2015-05-27T09:36:33","modified_gmt":"2015-05-27T09:36:33","slug":"goldsmiths-phd-honoured-at-prix-ars-electronica-for-youtube-smash-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1664","title":{"rendered":"Goldsmiths PhD honoured at Prix Ars Electronica for &#8216;YouTube Smash Up&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yVSMY5s5L3Y?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Parag Mital has received an honorary mention at <a href=\"http:\/\/prix2015.aec.at\/prixwinner\/15784\/\">Prix Ars Electronica<\/a> for work completed as part of his PhD here at Goldsmiths Computing.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8216;YouTube Smash Up&#8217; attempts to generatively produce viral content using video material from the Top 10\u00a0most viewed videos on YouTube.<\/p>\n<p>Each week, the Number 1\u00a0video of the week is resynthesized using a computational algorithm matching its sonic and visual content to material only from the remaining Top 10\u00a0videos. This other material is then re-assembled to look and sound like the Number 1\u00a0video. The process does not copy the file, but synthesizes it as a collage of fragments segmented from entirely different material.<\/p>\n<p>In the video above, for example, Pharrell Williams&#8217; <em>Happy<\/em>\u00a0is recreated using music videos by Chris Brown,\u00a0Lady Gaga, John Legend and\u00a0Katy Perry, plus clips and trailers from <em>Footloose<\/em>,\u00a0<em>X-Men: Days of Future Past<\/em>\u00a0and\u00a0<em>The Voice<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Using YouTube\u2019s interface, the videos are also textually tagged with popular culture\u2019s \u201cmost viewed\u201d artifacts, i.e. the database containing the Top 10\u00a0YouTube videos. This process attempts to inject the video into the community, masquerading as an innocent tribute video. The video\u2019s audience, often viewers hoping to find the original Number 1\u00a0video, are almost certainly disturbed by the videos, as illustrated by the video\u2019s overwhelmingly negative \u201clike\u201d ratio, and by comments such as,<em> \u201cnow im [sic] blind\u201d,<\/em> <em>\u201cWill someone kill me in my sleep because I watched this video?\u201d<\/em> and another commenter\u2019s reply to the previous comment,<em> \u201cme 2 [sic]\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Cw5Fo03a6lc?rel=0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Despite their poor reception, likely due to their cut-up and abstract nature, most smashups have been the subject of copyright violations from YouTube\u2019s automated copyright infringement detection system, Content ID. In each case, Content ID flags the videos as duplicates of the Number 1\u00a0video, rather than flagging any of the content actually used from the Number 2\u00a0to 10\u00a0videos. This automated system attempts to automatically discover copyrighted content in newly uploaded videos, informing the original content holders if it finds anything. Most likely the content-rights holders never watch the supposedly infringing videos, and instead forward a cease-and-desist notice threatening a lawsuit. Despite the powerful language used by the content-rights holders, the videos were all put back online after multiple rounds of fair-use arguments and even more cease-and-desist notices.<\/p>\n<p>The videos manipulate a level of representation indistinguishable by a robot perception, a space between pixels and perception, juxtaposing cultural fragments at a proto-object layer in an entirely automated process: Miley Cyrus\u2019s lips collaged against the background of a troupe of dancing animals or Psy\u2019s forehead dancing without the remaining pieces of Psy. Within this space, a disjunct between a state-of-the-art robot perception and those of unsuspecting YouTubers is revealed, asking what constitutes a copyrightable cultural artifact, as algorithms become increasingly more intelligent and as data continues to be manipulated by even more complex pattern-recognition and information-retrieval algorithms. Finally, the videos attempt to probe a dystopian future of automated content generation, when computer algorithms are not only capable of modeling cultural artifacts but also producing them, further embracing their present role as mere content curators.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><em>Parag K. Mital is an artist and interdisciplinary researcher obsessed with the nature of information, representation and attention. Using film, eye-tracking, EEG, and fMRI recordings, he has worked on computational models of audiovisual perception from the perspective of both robots and humans, often revealing the disjunct between the two, through generative film experiences, augmented reality hallucinations and expressive control of large audiovisual corpora. Through this process, he balances his scientific and arts practice, with both reflecting on each other: the science driving the theories, and the artwork re-defining the questions asked within the research.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Some of his\u00a0earlier work includes\u00a0a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/30095044\" target=\"_blank\">resynthesis of Jan Svankmajer\u2019s work<\/a>, a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/30444762\" target=\"_blank\">resynthesis of The Simpson\u2019s intro using only the Family Guy<\/a>, and a resynthesis of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/vimeo.com\/30484820\" target=\"_blank\">Michael Jackson\u2019s Beat It using nature recordings<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>His\u00a0PhD, \u201cAudiovisual Scene Synthesis\u201d, was funded by the Department of Computing, Goldsmiths, University of London, under the supervision of Mick Grierson and Tim Smith.<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gold.ac.uk\/pg\/mphil-phd-arts-computational-tech\/\">About the MPhil\/PhD in Arts &amp; Computational Technology<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/pkmital.com\/home\/youtube-smash-up\/\">More &#8216;YouTube Smash Up&#8217; videos<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Parag Mital has received an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica for work completed as part of his PhD here at Goldsmiths Computing. &#8216;YouTube Smash Up&#8217; attempts to generatively produce viral content using video material from the Top 10\u00a0most viewed videos on YouTube. Each week, the Number 1\u00a0video of the week is resynthesized using a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=1664\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Goldsmiths PhD honoured at Prix Ars Electronica for &#8216;YouTube Smash Up&#8217;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[110,108],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1664"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1668,"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1664\/revisions\/1668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.doc.gold.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}