50 50 by Oliver Laric is a version of the 50 Cent track In Da Club composed of 50 other versions of the song culled from YouTube user videos. In each of the videos, a user (or users) performs a homemade karaoke performance of a pop song in front of a home video camera or webcam.
Laric cuts these versions together to create a single, seamless performance of the track which has less to say about In Da Club and more to say about the fact that the world of images in 2007 – the year the video was initially uploaded – is composed of versions of In Da Club as much as it is composed of the original track.
When one searches for a pop song on YouTube, more often than not one will find versions of the track produced by rank-and-file YouTube users as opposed to an “original” version.
And if one does find an “original” version of the song, it will still be versioned anyway through the video’s visual component – say a slide show of thematically relevant imagery or a static screen of text and graphic elements advertising whatever it is that the user sells.
This ecology of versions is what 50 50 shows me.
Tags: 50 50, 50 cent, art, contemporary art, iconclasm, icons, new media, oliver laric, performance, seventeen gallery, versions, youtube