John-Robin Bold
Website-specific Art Portfolio
Audio Library of a Viewable World
YouTube video series, 20 videos
2023 – ongoing
Presented in parts at Forum Stadtpark (Graz), Millennium Film Workshop (NYC), Spectacle (NYC), Lot49 (Chicago), Creative Cluster (Vienna), Etehadie Space (Tehran), SET (London), University of Edinburgh, School of Digital Arts (Manchester), Arte Impronta (Puebla), Casa Obscura (Montreal), Farewell (Kansas City), Amatoria Fine Art Books (Sacramento), Trust Support (Berlin), Madame Mim (Valencia), Serving the People Foundation (Milan), Bayt Al Mamzar (Dubai), Kmello (Ecuador), Kyiv Art Book Fair, Creepatorium (Denver), The Bioscope Independent Cinema (Johannesburg), Sands Film Studio (London), Gavu (Prague), La Generale (Paris), The Wrong Biennale, Voidspace Live (London), FACT (Liverpool)
Audio Library of a Viewable World is a series of experimental videos specifically made for YouTube by using its interface and functions as integral elements of the artwork. These ‘website-specific’ videos exist in between the video frame, the subtitles, the description, the comment section, and the viewer’s interaction with them. As it repurposes our common ways of watching videos on YouTube, the project opens a different perspective on how we engage with online video in our daily life. Each video is based on one category of YouTube’s own audio library, a collection of 4000 copyright-free sound effects that have been used in countless videos and heard by millions of viewers since 2013. The sound for each video is composed entirely of samples from the audio library’s respective category.
Excerpts:
Emergency
YouTube video, 4:04min
2023
Images of decontextualised catastrophes are separated by YouTube’s auto-play countdown, establishing an interplay between time, anticipation and event.
Science Fiction
scheduled YouTube video
2023-ongoing
The furthest date that a YouTube live video can be scheduled is two years. The continuous postponing of this video will make sure it is never published whatsoever. The future remains forever evasive. No video can depict it. In the constellation of stars, glowing to us from the distant past, we have a blank slate.
Animals
YouTube video, 2:09min
2024
What can animal selfie filters tell us about the relationship between our self-image as humans in the digital age?
Cartoon
YouTube video, 2:37min
2023
Cartoon turns subtitles into visuals. Large blocks of text appear in an interwoven font which can be zoomed in and out of using the + and – keys.
SoundCloud Gazing
Website-specific music
2018-2022
Exhibited at /rosa (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), The New Art Fest (Lisbon), The Wrong Biennale, PINK (Manchester)
Online music streaming has strongly influenced our listening habits over the last two decades. By setting the frame for distribution and consumption, every platform facilitates certain types of music and listening. SoundCloud Gazing presents three website-specific pieces made for SoundCloud to explore how its features influence the way we experience music online.
TRACK
SoundCloud track, 4:33min
2021
Track originated from thinking about the common habit to look at a SoundCloud track’s envelope and thereby anticipate its development. The envelope graphically represents a track’s climaxes, fade-outs, and build-ups. Track was composed to address this audio-visual relationship’s effect on listener expectation and the experience of time. With frequencies beyond the auditory threshold, sounds too short for the envelope to detect them and comments masquerading as part of the envelope, the typical relationship between envelope and sound gets decoupled.
PLAYLIST
SoundCloud Playlist, 500 100ms tracks
2022, rev. 2025
PLAYLIST takes the playlist feature to an extreme by aligning the maximum number of 500 tracks, most of which are only around 100 milliseconds long. Due to this shortness, the buffering between the tracks becomes noticeable as the silence in-between the sounds. Because the buffering depends on the internet connection and other unstable factors, the changing playback speed makes these technological conditions of music streaming audible. Each track is equipped with its own image, which then turn into a low frame-rate film akin to a digital flip book.
STREAM
SoundCloud profiles, tracks, images
2018 – ongoing
STREAM is an open-ended (net)work that consists currently of around 20 SoundCloud profiles containing over 4 hours of music/sound in over 100 tracks. These rather obscure profiles have followed, liked and reposted each other’s tracks, tricking SoundCloud’s auto-play function to lead automatically from one profile to another. Alternatively, the users can explore this interlinked community of anonymous profiles on their own by the very same routes that are used to explore ‘real communities’ on SoundCloud. STREAM can be accessed and exited by accident or through visiting one of the profiles featured in this playlist.
Click on an image to open that profile. Then enter the stream.
John-Robin Bold, 2018-2024