You’re one in million is a project-in-development that explores the correlation between scientific and spiritual notions of interconnectedness in relation to online video-sharing through the site YouTube.
The project plays on it’s title’s double meaning. Being ‘one in a million’ is a term traditionally used to express romantic or admiring sentiments through the idea that a person is unique, but it equally has connotations of insignificance. This duality mirrors the YouTube phenomenon which provides a platform for individual modes of expression through which people often aspire to stardom, while it simultaneously demonstrates a proliferation of mediocrity and, through the infinite referrals to ‘related videos’, an absence of originality.
New media theory describes how sites such as YouTube create a ‘shared media experience’ and a pluralising of space and time. You’re one in a million will explore how this reflects an era in which science has been forced to align with notions of interconnectedness, alternative realities and malleable experiences of space and time that had previously been associated with the spiritual and magical realm of mystics, witches and more recently ‘new age’ philosophies. M theory, the most successful attempt yet to create an overarching ‘theory of everything’ first described by physicist Edward Witten in 1994, epitomises this meeting of spirituality and science. The theory necessitates the interconnectedness of everything, including multiple parallel universes and 11 dimensions, and while the ‘M’ is believed to stand for connective ‘membrane’, Witten explains that “M can stand variously for ‘magic’, ‘mystery’, or ‘matrix’, according to one’s taste’.
You’re one in a million, will bring together otherwise disconnected pieces of YouTube footage to explore how the human quest to understand our significance within the universe plays out on an individual level in the desire (and failure) to feel special and loved through connection with others.
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Josephine Skinner is a PhD candidate in Media Arts who works in post-production with found online video from YouTube. Responding to user-created videos, her work is an exploration of the desire and inevitable failure to bridge the gap between the real and ideal through new media technologies.
During her residency at the Pop-Up studio in The Rocks, Skinner will develop a new work that focuses on overlapping notions in science, spirituality and new media theory such as the pluralising of space-time and interconnectivity. Currently titled You’re one in a million, the project will use YouTube footage to explore how the human quest to understand our significance within the universe plays out for individuals through a desire to connect with others in order to feel special.
Skinner’s exhibition Hopelessly Devoted, which creates pseudo cover bands from YouTube performances of romantic love songs, is on show at MOP Projects until April 15 http://www.mop.org.au/current.html