Hello World!

source: christopherbakernet

Hello World! is a large-scale audio visual installation comprised of thousands of unique video diaries gathered from the internet. The project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard.

On one hand, new media technologies like YouTube have enabled new speakers at an alarming rate. On the other hand, no new technologies have emerged that allow us to listen to all of these new public speakers. Each video consists of a single lone individual speaking candidly to a (potentially massive) imagined audience from a private space such as a bedroom, kitchen, or dorm room. The multi-channel sound composition glides between individuals and the group, allowing viewers to listen in on unique speakers or become immersed in the cacophony. Viewers are encouraged to dwell in the space.
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source: strozzinaorg

Christopher Baker (1979, Radford, VA, USA; lives and works in Minneapolis, MN, USA) is an artist whose work engages the rich collection of social, technological and ideological networks present in the urban landscape. He creates artifacts and situations that reveal and generate relationships within and between these networks. In 2008, he completed a Master of Fine Arts in Experimental and Media Arts at the University of Minnesota. In late 2009, he concluded a yearlong artist residency at Kitchen Budapest, an experimental media lab in Hungary. He is currently a visiting artist at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. His work has been presented in festivals, galleries and museums in the US including The Soap Factory (Minneapolis), The Minnesota Museum of American Artists (Minneapolis), and the Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester, NY), and internationally in venues including Laboral (Gijon, SP), Museum of Communication (Bern, CH), Gallery@ (Barnsley, UK), the Pixelache Festival (Helsinki, FI), as well as venues in Budapest, Copenhagen and Toronto.

The works of the American artist Christopher Baker analyze trends and attitudes within digital technologies and platforms, emphasizing distortions and excesses in their use. The video installation Hello World! or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise is composed of more than 5,000 video clips that the artist extracted from portals such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace and then assembled on a single projection surface.
In each clip a person addresses an anonymous and unknown audience on the internet from his or her protected and private space. Each one talks about his or her daily life, personal preoccupations, desires and fears, or uses the digital space as a self-promotion platform. The webcam plays the dual role of diary and megaphone. The audio tracks of the videos overlap, making it impossible to follow the voices of the individual people. All of their stories collapse into a single “background noise”, becoming part of an enormous overflow of data.
Baker alludes to the problem of online participatory communication. It has evolved from the “one-to-many” communication model of the traditional mass media to a “many-to-many” form of simultaneous communication that makes it increasingly complicated to select truly significant information from the flood of data.
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source: saatchigallery

Hello World! Or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise is a large-scale audio visual installation comprised of thousands of video diaries gathered from the internet. Each of the 5,000 videos that make up the video installation features a single individual speaking candidly to an imagined audience from a private space such as a bedroom, kitchen, or dorm room. The multi-channel sound composition glides between individuals and the group, allowing viewers to listen in on individual speakers or become immersed in the overall cacophony.

The project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard. The artist Christopher Baker, who originally trained as a scientist, is inspired by the interconnectivities – visible and invisible – present in the 21st-century urban landscape and is interested in the practical implications of our increasingly networked lifestyles: ‘Primary to this task is an exploration of the ways we imagine and represent ourselves before (potentially massive) audiences and the ways we navigate and abide in public space. With these interests at heart, large-scale video projections allow me to create works that fuse existing physical spaces with more ephemeral digital elements, resulting in revelatory and sometimes disorienting forms.’