Cartoon (Audio Library of a Viewable World #4)
2024
NOTE: ENABLE SUBTITLES
Cartoon’ is a website-specific YouTube video that turns subtitles into visuals. When the subtitles are activated, large blocks of text appear in a cryptic font that covers the entire screen. By pressing the + and – keys, the size of subtitles can be changed, revealing new bits of the text. The relationship between visual shape and word becomes uncertain and interactive. ‘Cartoon’ is part of the ‘Audio Library of a Viewable World’, a series of YouTube videos that use the platforms features as often interactive elements of the artwork. The video’s soundtrack is composed entirely from the Cartoon category in the YouTube audio library. The cartoon sound effects are heavily delayed to create an opaque and ever shifting avalanche of sound, which mirrors the overstimulating amount of possibly decipherable text.
AI Context
The video features an almost indecipherable text which discusses the relationship between text/image and reality. It serves as an abstract reflection on how AI and other aspects of networked life are unforeseeably affecting our conception of reality.”Anything can happen. Nothing is immovable. Reality is loose. Movement is law. All can be changed. The image alone constitutes reality. Delay is enough to create new facts. A new sign. Emergent. Order. Laws made by realities. Realities by laws. Merge. Reinvent your world. Speculate against gravity. No effects were used. The cartoon needs no effect. It is an instant.”
John-Robin Bold
Germany, United Kingdom
Bio
John-Robin Bold is an artist and composer who works within the fields of experimental electronic music, internet art, and video art. He releases music on labels such as Mille Plateaux and mappa, and shows his work internationally. Since 2018, he has created website-specific works for SoundCloud and YouTube which use both platforms’ interfaces and functions as interactive features in order to address the relationship between art and its online mediation.