JOSEPHINE SKINNER (University of New South Wales, Australia)
Set against the unromantic backdrop of bedrooms, kitchens, and laundries, YouTube performances of love songs from popular romantic movies, are synchronised into a semblance of unison and elevated beyond the small screen to the cinematic. From Top Gun’s climatic ‘Take My Breath Away’ to Disney Aladdin’s saccharine duet ‘A Whole New World’, the Hopelessly Devoted videos transform cacophonies of clashing vocals and instruments into deceptively coordinated, though often painfully tuneless, pseudo cover bands.
These banal and imperfect ‘covers’ converge moments of personal transformation to reflect the collective desire for love and meaningful connection, and reveal a common drive to harness the magic, tragedy and drama of the big screen for our own lives and countless small monitors. Allowing us to glimpse into the homes of otherwise dispersed and disconnected people, Hopelessly Devoted rethinks historical forms of collage to create a unified narrative and singular window. Through it we see how our networked age of PDAs, ego-casting and self-productions is characterized by the blurring of boundaries between publicity and privacy; democratized media production and mainstream spectacular entertainment.
Taking YouTube’s ‘community’ to its logical conclusion, the series asks if beyond individual experiences of the everyday there is a unified humanity—one of desire, failure, and enduring hope?
2011-2013