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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Was the aspect of using YouTube's servers so critical to the artistic quality of this project that he couldn't just substitute a shell script that encodes the video 1000 times over? Would've taken a heck of a lot less time than the year he spent.

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Perhaps, in addition to the artistic aspect of it, he wanted to educate people about what actually happens to video when it is sent to youtube. This is much more relatable than saying, "I wrote this shell script..." Also, having the log of all 1000 versions on youtube is interesting as well.

The other thing about art is that time is usually not a large motivating factor...

The thing is, I'm not convinced that it's youtube's fault; apparently he converted it to mp4 on his own computer after the download from youtube, before re-uploading it. I wonder if he'd have had the same effect if he'd uploaded the same format he ripped from youtube.

Nobody is blaming youtube, video compression or anything of the such. This is to expected behaviour. And no normal person should be able to expect, or want to upload and download a video 1000 times, or even more than 10.

He does say "and the mp4 codec" in his speech, so that's acknowledged at least.

There are clear reasons why not everyone is an artist, patience and endurance is are a huge part of it.

That's also the same reason many people look down on (modern) artists. The use patience to do something everyone else would do in a more efficient way.

Don't mistake patience and endurance for skill.

They're close enough for me.

1% inspiration, 99% persipration.

“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.

I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor." - Nikola Tesla

I'm sure Edison was crying all the way to the bank over the labour he expended.

Oh, Nikola -- missed your chance for an extra jibe in there. "...a little theory and calculation" -- and a big electromagnet, assuming a ferric needle.

I'd say they're highly correlated. How else do you obtain skill?

He proved that point at #100, I guess. And you really think this as an art?

Not "an art", but certainly "art".

Despite what you might think, the majority of the planet has no clue what a shell script is.

Savages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_ignorance

Good point, but it's possible that he enjoyed the process somewhat. Recording 'I am sitting in a room' probably became a little tedious for Lucier as well, in all the time he spent from conceptualization until completion.

And even if he did not enjoy it at all, patio11 makes another good point about it being a better background story for the piece.

Yes, you are probably right. My comment was aimed at the snobbery over the unwashed masses.

If you can't see the humor in feigning elitism over shell scripting (shell scripting!) I really can't help you.

Yes, that interpretation is more charitable. I guess I am too afraid of Unix fanboyism, because I tend to fall into that trap myself, when I am not fighting it.

The benefit is that all 1000 videos are available on YouTube - you can check out the quality at any step along the way.

Maybe I'm overthinking it, but couldn't he have written a shell script that did the uploading and dowloading to Youtube? How would we know if he did?

Sometimes the artistic process is just as important as the final product.

A lot of modern art is sold as a story, and for whatever reason the kind of folks who matter think that "did something by hand a thousand times" is a much better story than "wrote a Perl script."

Art isn't the only thing that has stories, incidentally. Tomatoes have stories these days. (OK, the kind of tomatoes rich people eat have stories. Only poor people eat tomatoes that have no stories.)

i think products targeted at low income demographics are very much sold with a story. a kind of utilitarian "sensibleness" which facilitates contempt for more expensive products.

why would advertisers neglect to exploit human psychology at all socioeconomic levels?

I believe you're right... a hugely successful ad for the Tang powdered drink in South America showed a spoilt rich kid asking his butler for Tang after they were stranded with no oranges in sight. (One of the messages I take from the ad was that the rich kid was missing on what the butler knew all along)

Of course it is universal; what is advertising but giving products a compelling narrative?

No, I'm pretty tomatoes are just sold as tomatoes. Produce is produce until you're trying to justify charging a multiplier of the base price.

Not "just sold as tomatoes", but "sold as just tomatoes". See the Sainsbury's Basics http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=sainsburys+basics brand - the story is that this is as basic as it can be, no cruft, implying better value, lower price.

That's one of the common criticisms of modern art, that it is largely about justification of the work.

After I went to Art Basel last year and happened on a display which was, quite literally, a few kilograms of nutella dumped on the floor, I was hard pressed to disagree...

Yeah, I immediately thought of this t-shirt when reading your comment :) http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts-apparel/unisex/frustrations...

Because "YouTube" has a meaning for regular people, while "x264" doesn't.

A lot of people I speak to associate x264 with pirated film downloads.

Yes it was. The guy wanted to encode the videos using Youtube's _unknown_ encoding process. Encoding using ffmpeg with its default settings isn't the same. (We can now extrapolate Youtube's encoding logic rather than make blind assumptions, which would be the case if the latter were done instead.)

I'm pretty sure they use (perhaps a custom version of) x264 to encode video.

There is a rather large spiritual aspect to mankind's creation of art.

If you look at the history of art, in the western world and elsewhere, it is strongly tied to some sort of religion.

Religious practice typically implements some sort of repetitive behavior or meditation, where the goal is not necessarily to get something done in the physical world.

If you run the process through some sort of reductionist approach, you wouldn't have art to begin with. Why even make a piece of art? What's the point?

While it is interesting to view the creation of art through the lens of an engineer, any attempt to criticize the work through only this lens is not going to stand up very well.

Are you just making the blind assumption that he's a programmer?

One year means he could have spent 364 days learning how to program and do all the 1000 uploads on the final day of the year...

I agree, but...

One day for 1000 iterations means 86.4 seconds to upload to youtube, wait for encoding to finish, then download it.

Youtube is slower than that. :-)

Better give it a week. Maybe a month.

He could work on something else during that month. Automation!

Yes of course, but he can't take 364 days to learn to program.

Or one (maybe a few, I don't know what the going rate for something like this) day working for minimum wage, a few hours to find a freelance programmer, and paying the programmer to write the upload script. Then, spend ~360 days doing whatever.

Something tells me this project was not about efficiency.

I make maple syrup by hand. It requires a huge amount of physical labor, as well as a fairly expensive evaporator and as well as a small building devoted to that single purpose.

The product tastes the same as the stuff I can buy from my neighbor's maple stand for a fraction of the cost and effort. It's wholly irrational.

And I'll do it again next year.

Sometimes the joy comes from doing it the hard way.

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