Recently, net art pioneers JODI (Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans) have developed an interest in the web 2.0 phenomenon, user-generated content and commenting on the internet. JODI's intervention on YouTube, audioswap5, is a prank and ongoing performance on the popular video sharing website. There, the artists collected home videos by amateur singers – performing dubbed songs with lyrics about the internet, computers, gaming and programming.

JODI transferred the audio tracks of these original YouTube videos onto vinyl records. Then the vinyls were filmed on a turntable, and uploaded back on YouTube, as video comments under the original videos.

With this action, repeated many times, JODI have applied two strategies that are typical for the medium-speci…ic approach in media and video art. One method or strategy is the separation of image and sound, or the removal and deconstruction of synchronicity. The other strategy involves the transfer of content from one medium to another, in this case from digital back to analog.

With this layered work of comments and re-interpretations, the artists raise a discussion about copyright, re-use and remix, copy and original, situating their action at the epicenter of internet folklore itself. The title of the work refers to a service of YouTube which encourages users to replace the (illegal, copyrighted) audio track of an uploaded video with a ‘legal’ one provided by YouTube itself. Read more...