Katrina Inagaki
US videomaker
biography
participant in
CologneOFF IV – 4th Cologne Online Film Festival 2008
VideoChannel Cologne – Found Footage!
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Video title:
The Fall of Public Man
2009, 4:54
There are hundreds of videos featuring girls wrapping each other in plastic wrap on YouTube, some with up to 200,000 hits. While fetish may account for the popularity of and certainly the comments posted on these videos (e.g. “I’d like to cut a hole in that Saran Wrap for my _____”), the majority of the videos are homemade by very young teenage girls, who are giggling and appear to be having innocent, slumber party fun, with no intention of attracting bondage fetishists. In this work, which takes its title from the Richard Sennett book of the same name, I explore the use of the internet and specifically the quasi-anonymous networked platform, YouTube, for public self-presentation on a mass scale. All of the material is sourced from YouTube users who claimed to have created the content themselves, and who made no copyrights.
The idea for this video came to me in an unexpected way. While living in Berlin last year, I ran out of Saran Wrap. Since I do not speak German, I had to look up the word in order to communicate with the storekeeper. Of course, I searched YouTube for a video lesson. In my results list, was a video of a teenage girl wrapped in red cling film with 67,000 hits – “Saran Wrap Sarah” – which I put into this work. It was later brought to my attention that a similar phenomenon can be found in the “Girls Sitting on Balloons” YouTube genre.