Was the aspect of using YouTube's servers so critical to the artistic quality of this project that he couldn't just substitute a shell script that encodes the video 1000 times over? Would've taken a heck of a lot less time than the year he spent.
Perhaps, in addition to the artistic aspect of it, he wanted to educate people about what actually happens to video when it is sent to youtube. This is much more relatable than saying, "I wrote this shell script..." Also, having the log of all 1000 versions on youtube is interesting as well.
The other thing about art is that time is usually not a large motivating factor...
The thing is, I'm not convinced that it's youtube's fault; apparently he converted it to mp4 on his own computer after the download from youtube, before re-uploading it. I wonder if he'd have had the same effect if he'd uploaded the same format he ripped from youtube.
Nobody is blaming youtube, video compression or anything of the such. This is to expected behaviour. And no normal person should be able to expect, or want to upload and download a video 1000 times, or even more than 10.
That's also the same reason many people look down on (modern) artists. The use patience to do something everyone else would do in a more efficient way.
I don't really have much of a dog in this fight one way or the other (nor, for that matter, did I up- or down-vote either of you) - but I'm sort of getting a bit of a tickle in my irony bone from personally insulting someone repeatedly for having different priorities than you ("pathetically arrogant", "narcissistic", etc.), in an attempt to argue that they should be less judgmental.
while I dont particularly understand the parent comment about people looking down on modern artists for being inefficient, they certainly didnt say they did so themselves, and even if they did it would in no way excuse this vitriolic hate filled reply.
Since your account is brand new for this comment, you more than likely are aware this is the type of comment that gets an account banned, and hope that something is in place to handle this situation. But if you are genuinely new, then I dont think I am out of place to say comments like yours have absolutely no place here.
Only a supremely self-involved, judgmental, narcissistic asshole would think it's appropriate to look down on others for having different ideas about how they want to spend the short time we get on this planet.
Truly, it's hard to imagine how badly one's parents would have to fuck up to raise a child that thought that such sentiments were appropriate.
Those who might look down upon others for engaging in an inefficient activity are not just hypocrites, they are arrogant fools. They are asserting that they know the best way for every person to spend their life.
It is sad that HN appears to support such thoughtless, worthless, bigoted, narcissistic behavior.
I think some people are rather contemptuous of individuals who brought art down to the standard of "simply a bunch of paints splattered on a canvas". So much so that it become indistinguishable from a mess.
I could even imagine a bunch of every-day normal freelance laborers cleaning an art gallery and accidentally throwing thousand of dollars worth of art piece simply because it is indistinguishable from a mess.
Art may be subjective, but people can perceive skills in the painting of a nude human figure. They cannot however, see anything in an art piece that are simply lines, colors, texture, with no forms whatsoever.
People like me and others will never be able to understand the extreme abstractionism that exists in art today and ages past. Art to me are nude painting, landscape, cartoons, and comics, not the silly cubism, the colors and the texture, or just a bunch of splattered paints.
When you don't understand a piece of art, do you say that you don't understand that the artist was trying to say... or do you say "I look down upon the artist."
I'm guessing you're a reasonable person and just say 'I don't get it, and don't care.' As opposed to the utterly unreasonable opinion espoused by the OP, in which instead of not caring, he looks down upon the artist.
There's a difference between saying "I don't get it" and saying "after careful analysis and consideration, this artistic expression is either pointlessly obscure in its meaning or absolutely meaningless".
I understand that not getting something is frustrating, but that doesn't make it useless. It means you don't get it.
Some people do get it. The artist gets it. His or her peers get it. A certain group of aficionados get it. Some chunk of the general public gets it. Decades later, many many more people may get it.
Believe it or not, some art is hard to understand. It requires an understanding of what came before it, it might require a lot of experience with similar work. It may require careful study or deep reflection. It may require changing your mental state or viewing it differently.
This is somewhat silly without having a specific art object to debate, but I see variations of your argument all the time made as an attempt to discredit or dismiss a work of genius that they simply don't get.
For instance, you talk a lot about what a piece of art means, but much of art embraced concepts of subjectivity and meaninglessness before social psychology even existed as a proper discipline.
In fact, some of the seemingly obscure art is a meta-critique on obscure art.
The very goal of looking for the meaning of a piece in the sense of a message it is trying to convey is going to be wrong-headed in a large number of cases right out of the gate.
What's the meaning of jazz music? What's the meaning of architecture? Or the movements of modern dance or a Rothko painting?
My point is, while you can imagine a scenario in which the artist is being smug jerk trying to look smart by being impossible, that's much, much more rare than someone approaching a work of art and arrogantly saying, "That is just garbage," about something that a large number of educated people recognize as brilliance.
And Calvin's got a good point about art snobs, not artists and not the audience for art at large.
It's not that I don't understand that, but it's easy to go too far into obscurism, and it's even easier to claim obscurism when all you've created is meaninglessness. Added to this is a bunch of social psychology that says observers can create meaning out of nonsense if they're prompted in the right way. As one artist put it:
Calvin: People always make the mistake of thinking art is created for them. But really, art is a private language for sophisticates to congratulate themselves on their superiority to the rest of the world. As my artist's statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance.
Hobbes: You misspelled Weltanschauung.
Calvin: A good artist's statement says more than his art ever does.
You see this all the time with professors. So many of them sit in their offices and for years at a time create essentially nothing of value for months or years at a time. They go down paths that seem doomed to fail in an attempt to learn something or create something. But most of what they make is minutia, interesting only to their colleagues and even then, it's not very interesting at all.
Most of them would be thrilled if they did just one groundbreaking thing in their entire careers.
Clearly their work is totally useless. Clearly they should be ignored. Clearly the process has no value.
And worst of all, many of them will, when this is pointed out to them, tell you that their work is incredibly important even if it has only made a minor iterative change to some obscure corner of the world, recognizable only by fellow experts in their field.
I've got plenty of criticism for the academic world, but you seem to vastly undervalue the accomplishment of advancing the state of human knowledge, even by just a little bit.
It's those little iterative advances that are the foundation of all major discoveries and all substantive technologies.
In case you didn't notice (which you apparently didn't), my post was satire. Of course incremental progress has value, and even failure has value. (particularly if the failure occurs publicly.)
I'd never look down on an academic because he'd documented 100 ways not to do something, nor because he operated in an obscure corner of an obscure field with no obvious and immediate utility to society.
The world changes too often and too unpredictably for me to guess what will end up being important for society in the long haul.
I can't determine with perfect certainty, no. But there are truly very few rare things in this world we can determine with perfect certainty.
The alternate position--which you seem to espouse--is that it's fundamentally impossible to judge art, hence we have to accept all purported attempts at art as "good art". I'm arguing that we can make imperfect judgments; you're arguing we can make no judgments. The very notion of "good art" loses its meaning if the term "good" can no longer distinguish some art from other art, hence your position is completely nihilistic and far more denigrating of art than mine is, because you condemn all art to an indistinguishable morass.
No, but if I painted a sloppy parody of his style and then painted runny droplets of brown and yellow paint over the top, I think that would say "I look down on the artist" much more poignantly.
I can understand why someone is looking down on modern art.
Classic art doesn't need that much rationalization to be meaningful. I think that art isn't first of all a product of thought, but an expression of feelings. So the access to the art is by looking and feeling.
Modern art isn't per se meaningful, you can't understand it by just looking at it. There has to be a rational superstructure which creates the meaning for it. And some artist push too hard the creation of this superstructure. So that the explanations seem arbitrary.
Calling somebody an asshole isn't a positional declaration. It does not say you are better or worse than them, just that they are an asshole. Presumably you have flaws as well. Everyone does.
Saying you look down on them, on the other hand, is a direct claim to superiority.
“If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor." - Nikola Tesla
Oh, Nikola -- missed your chance for an extra jibe in there. "...a little theory and calculation" -- and a big electromagnet, assuming a ferric needle.
Good point, but it's possible that he enjoyed the process somewhat. Recording 'I am sitting in a room' probably became a little tedious for Lucier as well, in all the time he spent from conceptualization until completion.
And even if he did not enjoy it at all, patio11 makes another good point about it being a better background story for the piece.
Yes, that interpretation is more charitable. I guess I am too afraid of Unix fanboyism, because I tend to fall into that trap myself, when I am not fighting it.
A lot of modern art is sold as a story, and for whatever reason the kind of folks who matter think that "did something by hand a thousand times" is a much better story than "wrote a Perl script."
Art isn't the only thing that has stories, incidentally. Tomatoes have stories these days. (OK, the kind of tomatoes rich people eat have stories. Only poor people eat tomatoes that have no stories.)
That's one of the common criticisms of modern art, that it is largely about justification of the work.
After I went to Art Basel last year and happened on a display which was, quite literally, a few kilograms of nutella dumped on the floor, I was hard pressed to disagree...
i think products targeted at low income demographics are very much sold with a story. a kind of utilitarian "sensibleness" which facilitates contempt for more expensive products.
why would advertisers neglect to exploit human psychology at all socioeconomic levels?
Not "just sold as tomatoes", but "sold as just tomatoes". See the Sainsbury's Basics http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=sainsburys+basics brand - the story is that this is as basic as it can be, no cruft, implying better value, lower price.
I believe you're right... a hugely successful ad for the Tang powdered drink in South America showed a spoilt rich kid asking his butler for Tang after they were stranded with no oranges in sight. (One of the messages I take from the ad was that the rich kid was missing on what the butler knew all along)
Yes it was. The guy wanted to encode the videos using Youtube's _unknown_ encoding process. Encoding using ffmpeg with its default settings isn't the same. (We can now extrapolate Youtube's encoding logic rather than make blind assumptions, which would be the case if the latter were done instead.)
There is a rather large spiritual aspect to mankind's creation of art.
If you look at the history of art, in the western world and elsewhere, it is strongly tied to some sort of religion.
Religious practice typically implements some sort of repetitive behavior or meditation, where the goal is not necessarily to get something done in the physical world.
If you run the process through some sort of reductionist approach, you wouldn't have art to begin with. Why even make a piece of art? What's the point?
While it is interesting to view the creation of art through the lens of an engineer, any attempt to criticize the work through only this lens is not going to stand up very well.
Or one (maybe a few, I don't know what the going rate for something like this) day working for minimum wage, a few hours to find a freelance programmer, and paying the programmer to write the upload script. Then, spend ~360 days doing whatever.
Something tells me this project was not about efficiency.
I make maple syrup by hand. It requires a huge amount of physical labor, as well as a fairly expensive evaporator and as well as a small building devoted to that single purpose.
The product tastes the same as the stuff I can buy from my neighbor's maple stand for a fraction of the cost and effort. It's wholly irrational.
And I'll do it again next year.
Sometimes the joy comes from doing it the hard way.
The HN community could have saved a lot of time writing a shell script to post a snide comment about writing a shell script from every account instead of forcing everyone in the thread to do it individually.
As was alluded to in the comments there, most of the loss was probably due to stretching and demagnetization of the two tapes. Generational loss would most likely consist of horizontal scanline offset (due to time base skew) and horizontal blurring, though eventually the time may get off far enough to cause some of the other artifacts seen in that video.
MS Windows (XP IIRC) used to warn you if you used the built in image rotation function for JPEGs that it was lossy. I've a feeling it was fixed in SP2 but I've not used MS Win for years so am not really sure.
Sometimes this effect of multiple lossy compressions is very apparent on certain... ahem... adult sites, which steal content from other adult sites. When the content has been decompressed and recompressed enough times certain artifacts start to appear, as well as other issues like aspect ratio problems.
Does this mean YouTube's compression settings don't target a specific bit-rate but instead aim to make it "no larger than X and at least y% smaller" than what was uploaded?
I'm surprised it's not just a pass-through at a certain point (if nothing else, that'd save CPU cycles).
And youtube serves content in different resolutions (SD vs HD) and formats (flash vs ipod). It's possible his choice of either of these had a negative effect on the quality. It's also possible it all happened during his on conversion on his local machine.
I wonder what results he would have gotten if he pulled the h264 copy down that is served to apple devices and uploaded it without modifying it.
What's really cool about this is that his stated purpose ("to remove all human characteristics from both my voice and my image") is fulfilled by his voice and the individual frames - but the way the shapes move is still very human. A lot more human than CGI animation is still doing, actually.
I'm surprised it continued to change after detail was lost. Seems like there would be some measurable property of a codec/decode process that could be quantified - the entropy? It would be a desirable property to be 'idem-potent', e.g. after one cycle the result settles.
I can understand the video getting messed up, but what happened to the audio? From what I understand re-encoding an mp3 doesn't do much - all the waveforms that were going to be thrown out, were already the first time. On the second pass nothing much changes.
Or did he rip the video using speakers and mic, rather than downloading the digital data from youtube?
I have a feeling the errors came during the ripping process, not the encoding process.
Sure it does, typically. It’s no different from video in this way: ideally, all of the image features that would get thrown out were thrown out the first time, but the codec isn’t that smart.
Most implementations of lossy compression algorithms don’t have stability under re-encoding as a goal. (A few do – some image editors are smart about passing through unchanged JPEG blocks, for example, and I think mp3wrap will join MP3s cleanly.)
I’m too lazy to look into exactly how he did this, but it’s not impossible that the audio artifacts came from pure MP3^n re-encoding. It’s a case that most compressors ignore.
Why hypothesize? Create a directory. Copy your favorite MP3 into it as both "source.mp3" and "orig.mp3". (orig.mp3 is just for convenient comparison later.) Then:
for i in {1..100}; do lame source.mp3 dest.mp3; mv -f dest.mp3 source.mp3; done
Then listen to the resulting "source.mp3" at the end. Send whatever params to lame you want in that command line, though the defaults strike me as pretty good for this test.
BTW, when people point out that scripting this is easy, they're not kidding. We're talking shell one-liner here, forget even hitting perl.
I'm on about iteration 7 as I write this and it's definitely breaking down.
A reddit post on that exact experiment. Sadly, the file is down.
As a side note, I had a post here that I deleted about this, worded something like "Yes, they used that song". I went back to read the topic, and found I'd made nearly the exact same comment on the story over a year ago. I guess I'm a tad predictable.
That file only increased my questions on what happened to the audio on this vid. The song is quite recognizable. So why did the youtube one turn into garble?
And the jpg one is just incorrect. He kept increasing the compression ratio, which proves nothing at all. For a more accurate view see http://hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/355-How-I-M... which shows that after a certain point the jpeg stops changing. (Which is what I expected the mp3 to do, but I guess it doesn't.)
Kudos for actually checking, but of course this only proves it for lame with certain flags. There are several popular compressors and many many options. As someone mentioned, YouTube doesn’t say what it uses, but it may be possible to figure it out.
Learning how to do for loops in shell was a big Unix productivity breakthrough for me. I just wish the syntax were cleaner – silly things like quoting rules and not using $ on variables on the LHS keep tripping me up. I’m probably wasting my own time in the long run by not getting good with something like http://www.scsh.net/ .
I wasn't familiar with the audio piece that inspired this so I downloaded the mp3 from http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html . It turned out to be a nice background soundtrack for programming today.
Music with words usually distracts me when I'm working, but this didn't.
Next time the topic of bandwidth caps comes up remember this guy. I don't want to knock his project but I think it illustrates a point that unlimited bandwidth and access to services tends to make people less concerned about using bandwidth efficiently.
Nothing. I'm sure he probably would have if forced to. I know from my own (bad) habits I often waste bandwidth just because I can. Common example of this is having a file downloaded to my laptop sitting in my backpack but instead of taking it out, waking it up, mounting the share and copying it I'll just re-download it from the Internet instead because I'm lazy and there's really no downside for me.
I'm not a video expert, but I did write some software for muxing and demuxing for a company I worked for some time ago. The major problem I had was that video and audio are stored at different "frame rates" (almost in a literal sense). A frame of encoded audio is generally shorter (in seconds of playback) than a single video frame is displayed on screen for. So, if you were cutting and splicing video, you'd end having to decode the audio, break apart the first and last frame's worth of it, re-encode it, and then offset the timing of the audio from the video. This is very obnoxious to get perfect.
I've got no idea if that's what impacted this guy's video though, but I'm sure it's far from the only weird thing involved in video compression.
