On Saturday I logged into my YouTube account for the first time in months. I’d been intending to upload a new short video, but didn’t do as I’d planned because I discovered my channel had been reformatted after a platform update and looked very rough because I hadn’t tweaked it. I quickly slapped together a channel banner – and I was deliberately sloppy because YouTube (owned by Google) doesn’t give you much control. They want images for digital devices like smart phones, computers and televisions, so insist on high resolutions for the latter, and then won’t let you adjust them individually or allow you to use something different for different screens. So much for choice!

The redesigned YouTube required a channel trailer – so I made one quickly, drawing on my knowledge of both lettrist cinema and censorship on the platform. There is a discrepency between soundtrack and image (well in this case text) and the more sexually ‘arousing’ material is on the soundtrack (which seems to be less of a problem for the anti-iconoclasts at YouTube). The trailer continues my digitising of avant-garde and experimental film-making tropes of the twentieth-century – and, of course, digitisation is deliberately used to transform the material so that it moves on from what went before. The new short film I’d intended to put up entitled Tides Of Lust also riffs on experimental cinema from a digital perspective, but that video will have to bang around my hard drive for a while longer since – as anyone who understands anything about maximising audience on social networking platforms knows  – you need to pace your posts.

And then finally I had to address the other material YouTube wants on channel pages: playlists of recent posts and popular posts among other things (the user can decide which to use and how they’re ordered – there is a ‘choice’ of vertical and horizontal formats too). Popular posts as a YouTube trope is inevitable because ‘what appears is good, and what is good appears’ – at least if you believe in the ‘logic’ of late-capitalism. My most popular post with more than forty-six thousand hits is a video of my head being shaved in 1986, something I’d made a long time ago but didn’t bother to show anywhere for the next twenty years. However, it just seemed right for YouTube – and found a niche audience among gay men with a head shaving fetish.

My next most popular post was a digital updating and parody of a Flux Film of the 1960s… but YouTube banned it for inappropriate content, so I put it on Vimeo (a platform that I in any case I prefer). Not that there was any inappropriate content, unless you think a mathematical countdown and clanging sounds are obscene! Despite having problems with a hardcore and bordering on abstract anti-film, YouTube had no problems at all with my next most popular video, a recording of a prank call I made to a prostitute pretending I was looking to have sex with a contortionist. The audio content is explicit and the visuals just consist of a text version of the call – both for the hard of hearing and those that might have difficulty understanding London accents (a lot of American English speakers, not to mention those that speak English as a second language).

The only reason for maintaining some kind of presence on YouTube is because it reaches different audiences to those on Vimeo and Ubu, but nonetheless YouTube is looking increasingly not just so last year but so last decade too….