8 Weeks in LA (2007)
video project, exhibition with eight individual videos installations

8 Weeks in LA was part of a series of projects exploring YouTube, the idea of "relevance", the repositioning of roles in entertainment, and the reprocessing of the video object.
The output of this project consists of eight microenvironments that each contain a monitor that is continuously cycling through the events that occurred during the artist's specified " 8 weeks in LA"  (June 1 st - July 31 st).

Each day's events were constructed using the headlines from the Los Angeles Times and a short "personal headline" (a description of what the artist did on that particular day while in LA). For example, July 14th : "Israel Blocks Lebanese Coast" (LA Times) & "Horrible Day Woke Up at Sara's with Black Eye and Bruises" (Personal).

The individual words or phrases from each day's events were entered into YouTube's relevance algorithm and the corresponding videos were sampled and displayed together in a grid. Each day has two corresponding layouts (one from the public, The LA Times, and one from the private, the artist's experience) and anywhere from 3-8 videos on each of those layouts. The result is a 3-7 minute patchwork of recycled YouTube video clips for each of the 61 days sampled. The matching text slowly appears underneath each video as it is played.

Each of the YouTube videos in this piece is extracted from the site on the particular date represented. Also, each video is defined by YouTube's "Sort by Relevance" feature. The title of this feature (and the connection it implies) brings the idea of relevance into play.