The winner of the NoTube Contest is the participant who manages to find the most valueless video on YouTube.
A video uploaded on YouTube is generally oriented to a large audience, has a simple narrative and can be easily categorized.
A NoTube video, instead, fails in every promise and contradicts viewers’ expectations for a meaningful experience. A good NoTube video can not be summarized, does not offer any keyword for searching it, is not linked by any other web site, has not been discussed and can not be discussed.
A good submission to the NoTube Contest makes it difficult to answer these three basic questions:
1) Why has this video been produced?
2) Why has this video been published?
3) Who should be interested in watching this video?
The NoTube Contest does not award video makers. It is about exploiting the YouTube search engine and find, in its meanders, what was not supposed to be found.
How close can we get to pure emptiness?
Why are we producing and saving these messages?
In an age obsessed with digital preservation, constantly growing databases, search engine optimization, unlimited encyclopedias, the NoTube Contest is here to investigate in the dark side of meaning production.
Find out how to participate at
Deadline for submissions: 28th March 2010
NoTube 2010 jury
Right after the deadline a special jury will choose the winner from a shortlist of applicants
– Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi is a philosopher, media-theorist and activist. He took part in Radio Alice, the first pirate radio in Italy (1976-78), in the Autonomia movement and the Telestreet project. He co-founded the e-zine Rekombinant. Authors of several books, he teaches Social History of Communication at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan, Italy.
– Konrad Becker is an author, artist, composer and producer. In 1979 he founded Monoton, a seminal electronic music project. Director and co-founder of the Institute for New Culture Technologies/t0 (www.t0.or.at) and of Public Netbase (1994-2006), he initiated and runs World-Information Institute (world-information.org/wii), a cultural intelligence agency. More recently, he founded the Global-Security-Alliance (www.global-security-alliance.com). Recent book publications include: “Strategic Reality Dictionary” (2009) and “Deep Search” (2009).
– Patrick Lichty is a conceptually-based artist, writer, curator, and activist. He has been exhibiting internationally since 1990, and is best known for his 3D animations with the activist group The Yes Men, and as Editor in-Chief of Intelligent Agent Magazine in New York City. He is currently a member of the faculty of the Interactive Art & Media Department of Columbia College, Chicago.
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