Yeah, we are Yokoza. Yokoza is an art collected, formed by four people.

Me, Davide, then Matteo, Paolo and Filippo. And we worked together since 2006. And we are based in Italy, Germany and the UK. We are... Yeah, it's the second slide that starts like that.

We are particularly interested in the promises of new technologies, the ideologies behind these promises, what can be achieved with these technologies, but also why they so often disappoint. In the next 30 minutes, I will introduce you two projects.

The one is the NoTube contest, the contest for the most valueless video on YouTube. And the second project is called In Time of Peace. And it's about the life of a drone after war and terror. But let's start with the first project, the NoTube contest,

that this year will take place in Switzerland, as you can see from the slide. And the winner of the NoTube contest is the participant who managed to find the most valueless video on YouTube. A video uploaded on YouTube is generally oriented to have a large audience,

has a simple narrative and can be easily categorized. A NoTube video instead fails in every promise and contradicts every viewer's expectation for a meaningful experience. And these are the videos in which we are interested.

A good NoTube video cannot be summarized, does not offer any keyword, is not linked everywhere, has not been discussed, and there is no need to discuss it. A good NoTube video can be defined as valueless

if it matches these three criteria. No reason to make it, no reason to watch it, and no reason to publish it. YouTube has plenty of fun videos, viral videos, commercial videos,

videos that are expected to be watched to reach millions of viewers and that sometimes succeed in this. However, for each video that reaches one million viewers, there are probably one million videos with no views or with very few views.

And these are the videos we are curious about. And these NoTube videos are also in fact extremely difficult to find as they usually do not have any keywords, tag or content to be searched. Also, the submission for the NoTube contest open today,

you can simply post a video using this hashtag to participate to the contest. And also, the winner of the NoTube contest will have a ticket to it in a restaurant in front of the Google office in Zurich.

In Switzerland, in Zurich. So, YouTube. YouTube, the slogan of YouTube is broadcast yourself. But is there always an audience? Should be there, an audience?

YouTube makes quite a big promise that every video with this service, I mean, it's quite impenetive, it's the promise that every video you upload will be saved and this video is potentially accessible by anyone. YouTube achieve is potentially unlimited and grows constantly.

However, how much of what is saved makes sense and can be considered to be valuable. We are mostly interested in how this video that have no evident value can be found, collected and curated.

The NoTube contest is our way, first of all, involving people in taking time to pay attention to these videos. Most of the time, they are boring, but take time to watch it. Also, it's our way to take care of these videos.

But let's have a look to some of these videos so that we can understand what are we talking about exactly. I promise you that they will be not too boring, so, well, OK. Now, let's move it here.

Wait. In this video, you will see also some winner of the previous edition of the NoTube contest.

That's a winner of the 2011 edition. This one was really a good winner.

This was a runner-up. This is also very interesting. I mean, it's a shoe.

It works. You can also break it. Oh, that's... It's too long.

Basically, it's a woman talking with her mother in the room. It's really too long. It's too boring, also, for me. That was a runner-up of the 2009 edition.

We are almost done, and do not be worried about it.

And here we have... Oh, that's Too Late Night in Tel Aviv, the winner of the 2010 edition. You can see that it's clearly the winner.

Yeah, and that's the winner of 2009. And that was... And I think it was also enough, probably.

So, in our work, we are generally interested in the boundaries between failure and success. The promises of new technologies and the disappointment these often generate. But more than that, we are interested in what could happen after this failure.

Regarding NoTube, even if the promise of YouTube, of broadcasting yourself, is often disappointed, this does not mean that YouTube is a failure.

Instead, we are curious about the multiple forms of failure that YouTube generates, and how they contradict the YouTube statement while generating new, foremost content that no one is expected to care about.

Our main questions are how to take care of this stuff and how to imagine new stories after the dissatisfaction of the new technologies as YouTube but as other new technologies.

Another project where we have been investigated in such a similar aspect is the work called In Time of Peace. In Time of Peace is a series based around drones.

It's nothing new. We find drones to be particularly fascinating. They were created as a war technology and now also becoming more and more part of our everyday life. We are told, for example, that drones can deliver goods, like these Amazon drones. They can deliver pizza, they can map the territory,

they can bomb countries. However, in all the stories we are told about drones, we mostly find drones to be used for something, to be an instrument, to kill people or to help people, but to be an instrument.

I really like this picture because it feels like the drone is feeling like a butterfly. It's really... It's having fun, it's having a relax. And that's our view about this project. So, in Time of Peace, it's an attempt

to imagine the life of a drone after war and terror, and also outside any instrumental perspective. Namely, we imagine how the life of a drone could be if the drone is left by itself and without any human constriction or intervention.

And our first idea was that probably, probably, the drone will try to keep itself fit, maybe running a race. And so we basically put an app called Nike Plus upon the drone,

and we have monitored the activity of a drone running the 100 meter race by tracking its performance with a device for runner. And also we noticed that the results of its performance were quite unpredictable,

and also sometimes did not finish the race at all. Let's have a look at the video in which the drone is trying to finish this 100 meter. I have it here, not here, wait, wait a moment.

So that was, as you say, not that easy.

We also tried to imagine what always remains in this context. We have collected a series of a drone taking selfies.

Most toy drones come with a built-in camera that is usually used by humans, both for making video, video making as for surveillance purposes. We thought that drones, once liberated by human perspective, would point their camera against a mirror

in this act of liberating vanity. We also imagined that drones wouldn't be creative in choosing the location for their selfies, so basically imitating their owners.

What we mostly want to capture in these selfies is the banality of the life of a drone in times of peace. If a drone did not have to operate in a worse scenario or be used by a human being, it will probably do very banal and unimaginative activities,

such as taking selfies. Here is a snowboard shop. Here in the bathroom, as most of the selfies are. That's where the name of this project comes from,

in times of peace. It comes from a quote from a text written by Paul Virilio in 1983. It says, logistic was defined as the procedure following which a nation's potential is transferred to its armed force

in times of peace as in times of war. And this idea of merging together the development of technologies for war with those for everyday life is quite clear in drones, but also for video games, computers and the Internet in general.

Moreover, it blurs the two scenarios together to the point in which they are really difficult to distinguish, really difficult to separate. And so, that is our final question.

As with drones, can we actually imagine a life in times of peace? Thanks for your attention. So, if you have questions, I can answer to your questions.

Questions, please line up at the microphones. Any questions? Well, let's thank Jocoser, and thanks for his excellent talk. Thank you.