Elegant Oops

This short film won best video in the Experimental category at the Vimeo Festival + Awards. Though the concept might sound boring, or at best amusing, I believe the execution of this amateur hour remix is phenomenal and compelling. Chris Beckman (using a concept by Billy Rennekamp) took 37 reclaimed YouTube videos and seamlessly edited them together at the points in which the cameramen/women lose control of their camcorder/smart phone/etc., and the result feels like one camera being tumbled through time and space, moving from one haphazard situation to another. From the camera’s POV we are struck by fireworks and a train, sent plummeting down mountain paths and snow-covered hills, tossed into the air and strapped to a remote control helicopter, dropped down a well and into a pool, go crowd surfing in a club and take a roller coaster ride.

While I tend to find most artist statements about their work to be pompous and excessively full of conceptual buzz words, Beckman’s description of his work seems to hit the nail right on the head:

Somewhere between a home-video mixtape and a postmodern travelogue, “oops”—a ten-minute art video composed entirely of appropriated YouTube videos, seamlessly stitched together via a motif of camera drops—serves both as transportative adventure and metaphorical elucidation of YouTube itself (i.e. endless related videos), exemplifying the Internet’s infinite repository of “throwaway” social documentation. From suburbia to subterranea, the radically shuffling environs induce a vertiginous yet aesthetically contextual thread—a transcendent, reincarnating POV; our omnipresent Camera—by which, the nature of the ultra-verité videos, eschewing any filmic grounding, plunges the viewer into a relationship of fleeting immediacy w/ its many videographers: a self-portrait at arms length, the digital blur of an obscuring thumb, a disembodied narrating voice. This abstractly voyeuristic portrayal of an ever-filming generation (who won’t let the transcendence of being in A Moment inhibit their document-everything impulse) presages a future where every instant of our existence, from the mundane to the sublime, is preserved and catalogued for all to see.