FCJ-169 Mapping Moving-Image Culture: Topographical Interface and YouTube

This article considers cartographic and topographical aesthetics of digital interface and network navigation through the example of YouTube’s post-Cosmic Panda redesign, which visualizes the vastness of the site’s stored content while conveying contiguity and accessibility. Focussing on YouTube’s visual rhetoric of the screen-frame and thumbnails, this article explores affinities with the mosaic and grid, two visual forms historically significant to cartographic production and organization. By contrasting YouTube’s interface to the strategies of other image-sharing platforms, it demonstrates the website’s emphasis on exploration through visual cues that eschew the linearity of film and video for a longitudinal-latitudinal structure. In so doing, it relates YouTube’s strategy to the branding of its parent company, Google, the idea of regenerative mash-ups, and relevant theories of the mosaic and grid drawn from geography, media studies, visual culture, and art history. It ends with a consideration of alternative means of display that engage the culture and content of on-line video sharing, embodied in artworks by Christopher Baker and Wreck and Salvage. issue 23: General Issue 2014