Video content online has exponentially grown since the user-generated content explosion of 2008 with the introduction of YouTube. With the growth of video content has come new genres and related practices amongst community members including AMSR videos, Let’s Play videos, ‘How-To’ tutorials, Unboxing videos, Life Hack videos, DIY Craft, and Explainer videos. What can the language in these genres and their collective practices tell us about ourselves as a culture? How can more refined tools for accessing the language content of these resources and analysis of the material yield new creative directions in remixing for artists, poets and composers working with language?
To explore these questions, I am developing a software and methodology called ANATTĀ that can assist in looking closer at media culture to provide insights into language patterns in large volumes of video. It is an open source language-centered video parsing software and generative multi-channel playback system to explore new creative forms arising from excerpting, recombining and displaying linguistic queries.
ANATTĀ enables refined searches based on phonetic analysis, parts of speech analysis, active/passive voice analysis, sentiment analysis, syllable counting and complex language pattern parsing. With these searches it allows the user to scrape, fragment, recombine and multiply linguistic content from spoken language in vast quantities of video files. The methodology and software provides greater ability for find nuance in remix aesthetics, finding patterns in the media that surrounds us.
The system enables play and experimentation without fixed notions to where the material will take the user; to be open to chance combinations that remove the source material from its linear succession while working within a defined linguistic framework. ANATTĀ, the Pali word for nonattachment, seeks to sidestep the ego in the creative process, providing an opportunity for “letting go” of directorial control to cultivate alternative possibilities not previously know before starting. With language as its focus and with the ability to pull apart and reassemble the language embedded in libraries of video, users can explore how they may use information technology to defy rational language and cultivate alternative ways of seeing the systems that speak through us.