For my next meeting, I got together with video curator and lecturer Sylvia Zhan. I last met her in Nanjing, China when she was there on a whistle-stop tour arranging an exhibition program. She is interesting for me to connect with because she is just as at home in China as in the UK, straddling the two worlds and providing curatorial continuity that connects them. As an artist I also spend a lot of my time in China, making work and showing it there too, as well as operating in my more familiar context of the UK and Europe.
We started talking about how people are engaging with video nowadays. While the gallery and screenings remain the most prestigious contexts, she was in little doubt that the future was online. We got talking about some of the different ways people come to videos and she gave the example of a friend who posts online videos of food reviews. There are a lot of different platforms out there, some are more sophisticated and some less so, like Kuaishou which attracts a large following who watch, share and comment upon short comic videos.
One of the things that strikes me with many of these, such as Douyin here, is that they are heavily layered. By that I mean there are multiple windows, scrolling texts, pop-up texts, animation and so on. Like most Chinese TV, it creates the impression of movement and vitality by bombarding the viewer with information. This reminded me of Alan Smith’s videos, many of which also feature scrolling text. The content is vastly different and there are no animal ear animations on the screen but this collaging of video and text is common to them.
We arrived at Youtube and Vimeo and discussed the merits of them, the question of duplication and how they produce revenue. This conversation was not, however, mostly centre around money, it was genuinely looking at the contemporary distribution of video and the formats and sub-formats that this has created. I do already have a Youtube channel and have had one film that was a minor hit with 50,000 views. While this has been a useful as a calling card it was not enough to be an effective substitute for live performance.
I was left with the impression that there is a large and rapidly shifting marketplace. I also felt that even if these platforms remove the traditional cultural gatekeepers one still needs to be savvy to these trends and have an eye for popular tastes.
I also realized I have had a short video made about my work that reached a huge audience of around a million. A popular web documentary producer in China made a piece about a performance of mine in a marriage market last year. It may well be that the format and point of interest has to be something quite different to what it originally was in the live performance, or indeed the performance has to be conceived as one that is done solely for the camera. With these questions swirling around and some feedback to come on the videos I have in circulation, we parted with me vowing to look more carefully at what is out there.
