8:00 PM, $7 suggested donation

The YouTube Assembly featuring Jesse McLean

The YouTube Assembly consists of screening web-based video for a live and participating audience. Each event features a guest host presenting a collection of YouTube clips that elaborate on a project or theme in which they have some expertise or interest. In the spirit of the popular YouTube interface, audience members are encouraged to comment on the videos they watch, except out loud and in real time with no anonymity. After the presentation the host then invites audience members to share their own clips. Like karaoke or an open mic, the YouTube Assembly creates a situation in which people take turns entertaining each other, thus bypassing the arguably isolating aspect of online networks like YouTube and encourage real, face-to-face interaction.

The YTA is sponsored by Homeroom Chicago and is hosted by the Nightingale.

Thematically based around fan culture, this screening will take a look at both fans and fan-created videos. Through our own cloudy voyeuristic lens, we will explore what it means to admire, to emulate and to obsess.

Jesse McLean’s work is motivated by a deep curiosity about human behavior and relationships, especially as presented and observed through the mediation of found footage. Her recent work interpolates the production, proliferation, and consumption of televisual experience, investigating how this transfer of information creates a bind of complex relationships between maker and viewer. Interested both in the power and the failure of the mediated experience to bring us together, McLean’s work asks the viewer to walk the line between voyeur and participant.

Jesse McLean received her MFA in Moving Image from University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work has been shown extensively throughout Chicago, as well as numerous film festivals around the country and beyond.