정치적 공유지의 아카이브: 온라인 민속지 컴필레이션

초록

This paper investigates a group of films and video installations that collect and reassemble citizens’ videos of their lives or voices posted or live-streamed on YouTube and other video-sharing platforms, characterizing them as ‘online ethnographic compilation.’ Encompassing Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament (2009) and its related projects, as well as films by Dominic Gagnon, Ossama Mohammed, and Zhu Shengze, online ethnographic compilation draws viewers’ attention to user-generated videos as a remarkable media of various individuals’ self-expressions and connectivity, and to the political, economic, cultural, and infrastructural dimensions of networked platforms where the videos are circulated. While contextualizing it within the larger tradition of compilation documentary, I argue that online ethnographic compilation produces what I call the ‘archive of the political commons,’ an archive characterized by the collective assemblage of individual user-generated videos that is based on the collection and selection of their aesthetic, affective, and discursive commonality, as it is based on and often critically intervenes in the two ambivalent aspects of participatory culture: first, the practice reveals not simply social media platforms’ emancipatory possibility for users’ interactive, connective, and participatory subjectivity but also the precariousness of both their life and the platforms to which they are invited to connect; and second, given the social promoted by the platforms implicates users’ atomized individuation, the practice reorganizes individual video’s expressions and voices into the sense and memory of collectivity while also preserving their heterogeneity.

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