
YouTube is like a charity shop. Most of what is there is complete shit. 99% of content is the digital equivalent of a tatty Katie Price book or a phone case for a phone that was last manufactured 9 years ago. It just needs deleting. It has no function, purpose or value and sooner or later we’re going to have to say ‘lads, we’re a bit fucked in terms of the amount of energy and resources we’re giving to keeping anything anyone has ever done on the internet, so we probably need to get rid of this shite and use that energy for pumping away the floodwater to somewhere we can use it to put out the wildfires’
A charity shop’s appeal however, is the 1% of things that aren’t shite. The absolute gold dust you stumble upon. My favourite ever thing was a £250 jacket I found for a £5 in absolute mint condition that I then wore for ten years till it disintegrated. YouTube has a similar ability to throw up just enough brilliance in the midst of the shit to keep me going back and looking for more.

For every 99 videos where the conclusion you draw is ‘that person has seriously misjudged their ability to tell a story‘ or ‘the fact that appears to be popular is genuinely a symbol of the shallow animal nature of the human mind beneath the veneer of civilisation‘ there is 1 thing that invokes the reaction of ‘it’s actually fucking great to be alive at a point where anyone can make this shit and there’s no real gatekeeper because that was brilliant‘
My current favourite thing is GIFGAS. I’ve always liked abandoned things and having a mooch. I’ve always enjoyed going to places that aren’t really supposed to be ‘destinations’ or in ‘destinations’ going to the parts that lurk behind the facade. GIFGAS is not alone in doing this. Many, many people do the whole ‘Urbex travel adventure’ thing and plenty do it well enough for me to watch them a few times. One or two even get me coming back regularly. Only GIFGAS makes me treat his content with the reverence I would treat the release of a new film by a famous director. Most shit, I watch whilst doing something else – his stuff, I find time to immerse myself in and absorb, without distraction.
What is it I love about this guy?
Firstly, there’s a real quality to his imagery. He takes time to frame things, he shoots stuff that demands your attention – but, he does it in a way that seems relaxed and part of what he’s doing as opposed to the purpose of the exercise. I’ve watched plenty of stuff where essentially, the exercise is to show off the skills of the filmmaker – it’s the YouTube equivalent of that guitarist who solos over everything. You end up thinking ‘that guy was talented, aye, but there was no music there really, just technical ability‘ – the same reaction is evoked when a story that could be told in ten minutes is turned into a seemingly endless parade of drone shots and ‘clever’ angles with different lenses.

Secondly, yer man doesn’t blather on constantly. He talks, sparingly and concisely about where he’s going and what he’s seeing but great long sections of his work is cut to music or ambient sound. This not only makes his work immersive and gives a sense of place, but it suggests that he, himself is absorbed in his surroundings. You get a far greater sense of place when the filmmaker isn’t constantly pushing themselves upon you and insisting that what we’re seeing is ‘amazing’ or stating the obvious such as ‘I’m walking up these stairs’
I love his matter-of-factness about what he’s doing. He does mad shit, like ride a freight train for 500 miles or climb a random mountain to see what’s on the other side – but he does it in the manner of someone just going about their business. This is what he does. This is how he spends his time and you get the feeling that whether or not the camera was with him, he’d be doing something similar. That’s really quite a rare feeling in an era where so much of what ‘creators’ do appears staged for the sake of the ‘creation’
Then, there’s the montages and the music. Seriously though. In a lot of his videos, there are extended sections where shaky camera footage and beautiful HD drone footage is cut together with some absolutely golden soundtrack and they’re sometimes so beautiful that they put you in a kind of blissful reverie. They’re the sort of stuff you could put in an art gallery and people would remark about them being ‘a dream-state reverie about landscapes relationship to industry and the notion of travel and the nomadic urge’

I’m now going to indulge in that sort of artwank talk myself. In the early part of the last century, the situationists wrote wonderful things about breaking rules in the way we move around our environment in order to reshape the way we are thinking about place and society. I love this guy, because, not only does he do that in a physical sense, he runs a channel that looks absolutely nothing like a YouTube channel should. He creates things that reject the idea of short form, highlights reel content, he has engendered almost no sense of ‘cult of personality’ and there’s absolute zero feeling of content churn or schedule. He makes the video he wants, he releases it when it’s ready and you can wait months for a new one. In the context of trying to create internet content that’s almost unique. It’s, in a way, as much of a statement as the films he makes.
To me, that’s beautiful. He’s just a guy who goes to places and films shit. There’s nothing innately remarkable about that. The fact he does it with art and no discernible sense of ego makes it not only pleasurable to watch but also inspires a sense of creation. One of the functions of art is to help us see the everyday in a new light. To notice beauty or inspire thought about what is around us. GIFGAS makes me want to film shit and present it in a way that is beautiful. His work is crafted enough to demand respect and my full attention, but homespun enough to feel as if it’s something I could do if I tried hard enough.
I’m never going to ride in freight trucks across Europe, but the world is full of stories and places that demand attention and to document them in the way he does reminds me of a way I wish to relate to the world. There’s a sense of unspoken wonder and observation in his work that cuts quite deep. There’s a sense that, as he pans the camera to catch a bird in the distance flying into the sunset forming behind two industrial chimneys, that this is the entire purpose of the exercise. That he’s captured something that is really quite difficult to put into words and successfully distilled that moment into something that can be experienced by others.
I can’t think of many other ‘creators’ who evoke such a response.

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