Rumble (1993) is a work created in 2009 by Kari Altmann.
She plays a YouTube clip depicting hand-held, date-stamped camcorder footage of a rumbling Malaysian landslide dating from 1993 through the yooouuutuuube.com video mosaic effect generator.
(Yooouuutuuube.com is a tool wherein one enters a YouTube url and a “size” for the video referenced in the url which results in – first – the creation of a domino [or rumble] effect of multiple “screens” – each of which plays the video just a hair off of the time of the one preceding it – and – second – the eventual filling-in of the entire screen with these streaming, out-of-sync video ripples – each of which contains several to dozens to hundreds of the original videos in an ongoing mosaic flicker through the run-time of the video.)
A point to note is that the artist included the date of the original landslide video, 1993, in her title.
This isn’t something that artists typically do.
So, what makes the date 1993 worth including in the title?
Well, what happened in 1993?
For one thing, CERN (the same Swiss organization behind the Large Hadron Collider) announced that the World Wide Web would be free to enter for anyone with an Internet connection.
In much of Altmann’s work, she equates the Web database with an archaeological site or a landscape that one can sift through.
In 1993, this landscape came into being with a rumble.
That’s what the work shows me.