Journeys




Bizarre Love Triangle on YouTube represents a rhizomatic online journey of musical interpretations, an arrival and exit of a heterogeneous mixture of traditional and new media narratives and visual representations. In YouTube we can be anywhere, and hyperlinked to anything. A place of neither here nor there, but connected to a potential everywhere. As a music fan, we can be inside and outside the digital space, a multiplicity of flows, the semiotic and social, the economic, a power, a force.

One upload, in isolation, but many uploads, connected, a strata, expanded, with dimensions unknown, positioned, reframed. Arriving by numbers, now more than before, institutional forces such as YouTube shape and recreate what we see and hear. Fragments are embedded, repositioned. A narrative created and disrupted. Regenerated discussions, a path to new discoveries. Segments of presence,  departing from places and spaces. 

A YouTube search, a burrow, a line of flightThe music, the fan, the band, expressed through movement and direction. The best and the worst, one and many, unique and repeated. Links revisited, embedded, underground but exposed. 


Images and narratives dislocated, regrouped, redirected to re-emerge. A plateau of multiplicity connected to other multiplicities



Returning to Gough's pedagogic perspective of assemblage (2004, p. 255), this web essay journey has offered me a plateau of learning, an interaction, an enriching of online movement and conceptual refinement. As an ongoing activity, my journey is always in the middle (milieu), as Deleuze and Guattari suggest 'it has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.' (p. 23)

YouTube uploads, in their meshing and re-embedding as part of discrete online environments, can be considered rooted, 'rhizomed', grafted in these online spaces, manipulated through handheld tactile gadgets by fans, offering a prosthetic extension of human, similar to Katherine Hayles's suggestion (1991, p. 2)  YouTube on my 'smart' phone, viewing the latest video upload is a 'flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic component to make protein and silicon operate as a single system.' As I post comments, my distributed cognition, is temporarily viewed, re-embedded, reloaded in multiple locations. YouTube can act as a 'multi-sensory', in a posthuman context, offering music fans a reciprocal lens whereby it redefines and in return affects us what we have an effect on. This ubiquitous status is continuously updated with new material, in a perpetual state of change.

Following posthuman interpretations, Shields (2006, p. 210) is suggesting a flaneur cyborg, who followed 19th century literary tradition, looking for the truth of the flux of public spaces, I would like to suggest that the online mobile music fan seeks musical 'truths', from the social media vantage points, strolling along space and time, along emerging, historic and archival virtual music spaces, with YouTube affording rich pickings, a remediated assemblage.





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