100 hours per minute, 2015

100 Hours per Minute is an interactive artwork that displays averages of multiple YouTube videos overlaid and played together.

Visitors tweet their searches to @100_HPM using an algorithmically generated, one-time hashtag shown on the installation’s secondary display. These queries go into a queue and their averaged videos are created and presented in real time without sound on the primary display. Upon completion, the averaged videos are uploaded to YouTube and a link is tweeted back to the searcher. When the queue is empty, the installation loops through recent videos.

Every video displayed on 100 Hours per Minute is archived and publicly accessible via YouTube.

We are awash in image. At the time of this writing, YouTube’s statistics page states that 100 hours of video are uploaded every minute. What does this incomprehensible vastness of visual information look like? All the stories and experiences, just data in the aether....

To watch every frame flow by, you’d need 18,000 screens. If you were to average all the videos together instead, and watch the resulting video collage, you’d see Gaussian noise: gray static. In the future, if the rate of uploading increases, eventually you’d see only a flat, unmoving gray. Like the heat death of the universe, all the variation would be removed.

100 hours of video per minute, any part of it viewable at the touch of a button — but the whole of it impossible to understand.

Details

Physical Size: 80 × 60 × 12 in & 8.5 x 7 x 0.5 in
Materials: MicroTile display, LCD screen, Mac Mini, software, YouTube, Twitter
Duration: algorithmically generated video (variable length)
Edition: Unique

Additional details available upon request: director@transfergallery.com

Credits

100 Hours per Minute by Jamie Zigelbaum

Production: Jimmy Tran, Midnight Commercial
Software: Dan Moore

Special thanks to Kelani Nichole and Transfer Gallery