by Andrew Clay
The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. Oakley in the Land of the Video Bloggers is my personal video/theory project due for completion in 2019 as an experimental documentary/biopic about YouTube video blogging, focusing on Peter Oakley (1927- 2014), YouTube user ‘Geriatric1927’. I discuss the work around issues relating to remixing YouTube videos, and examine the psychology of both early and current YouTube video blogging. Controlling his own narrative (Sørenssen, 2009), Oakley addressed fellow ‘YouTubers’ primarily through a biographical retrospection as part of a practice that emerged as a ‘poetics of early YouTube’ (Hillrichs, 2016). Adopting a Kuleshovian assemblage approach to ready-made video, my experimental geographic project explores the aesthetics and psychology of YouTube video blogging. We are not (yet) ‘after YouTube’. Video continues to absorb the web (Treske, 2015:48) with its ‘zone of intimacy’ (Treske,2013:51), and these aspects of online video theory are examined in relation to the progress of the work.