As an internet-era homage to Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room – a work which featured the artist sitting in a room reading a text, recording it, then playing the recording back into the room, rerecording it, then repeating this process until his words become unrecognizable – YouTube user canzona recorded footage of himself, uploaded it to YouTube, ripped it, then re-uploaded it a thousand times to see the effect and “to eliminate all human qualities my speech and image might have.” To hammer home his video’s connection with Lucier’s original, canzona called it I Am Sitting In A Video Room. The video above shows highlights of the complete 1000 iterations, which took a year to complete, to the day. Have a watch and try not to be creeped out by the watery non-human warbling that becomes apparent at around 25 iterations before it just gets plain weird. You can listen to the inspiration behind it, Alvin Lucier’s I am sitting in a room here.
Advertisement