Aspectos da cultura participativa na criação de narrativas digitais que usam o YouTube como banco de dados audiovisual

Abstract

Lev Manovich’s statement that we live the database cultural form can be verified when one contemplates the way all types of information are commonly accessed in a daily basis. Over the last decades, it has been easy to observe the access of the ordinary citizen to communication tools and recording devices that have amplified their image and sound capture capabilities and image storage, these working as truly extensions of the human body. After the emergence of Web 2.0 and, consequently, the possibilities of interaction among users, video sharing platforms, such as YouTube, have become hubs for those images, giving evidence of certain participatory culture in the way online videos are created. Since long time ago, excerpts from databases have been used in audiovisual work, whose filtering of its material is based on images found in personal or public archives. Once such media is revisited, it gains new meaning, as in “The Bartos Family” (1988) and “The Danube Exudes” (1998), by Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács; as well as in “Pacific” (2009), by Marcelo Pedroso. Early this century, Manovich proposed the creation of a narrative form that reflected on the age we live in, while other artists also developed storytelling through clippings, mirroring the way the human being itself does in order to organize thoughts. This perspective gave rise to projects such as “Korsakow Syndrom” (2000), by “Florian Talhofer”; “Soft Cinema” (2005), by Manovich; and “Not Recovered Time” (2006), by Lucas Bambozzi. This very research analyzes some aspects of participatory culture explored differently in two productions that use Youtube as their resource. In the first work analyzed, musician Thiago Correa depicts the events of 2013 with selected images from Youtube, a manual work which led to the video Brasil em Cartaz. In the second one, in Lucas Bambozzi’s project, YouTag, the participant chooses keywords, phrase or title. From there, the software selects images on YouTube and originates a new video, which leads us to believe that these works fit the characteristics of the so-called age of database.