satishnaidu2000003

In its form it is the year's most product-of-its-times movie, not least because of the manner in which it tries to arrange itself so as to find a meaning from the numerous videos on Youtube, which themselves are arranged without a central narrative and follow the logic of database – of tags, of users, of titles, of searching and search results. It is a film that is not merely content to be a product of its times, and that it finds a way of aligning the very spaces that Mr. Michael Bay used for his film to find an altogether different meaning, alliances, politics, and ideology guiding our world is touching in its sincerity. Its raw-material/medium/unit is a database of videos, creating a trail of "hyperlinks" that could have been arranged or picked differently, to find a new narrative, and in that I feel it is, at least for now, the ultimate digital film of the year. What's more, Mr. Lee uploaded it onto Youtube, thus merging the creation of content (culture) into the representation of content (culture) as an essential democratic feature of the medium it is operating in, rendering the restless curiosity of its gaze and the volatility of its experience as another passive entry in Youtube's huge repository (what Lev Manovich calls the new cultural algorithm: reality-> media->data- >database). Until, someone, you or I, open it, view it, and make it talk again. To our tune.