This art exhibit is like YouTube, but real life

Always wanted to be a YouTube star?
Now you can try your hand at it in real life.*

Come to Practice Gallery @ 11th St to get on UsTube like our sales guy @peteherickson pic.twitter.com/KzTJwR9K7e

— Technical.ly Philly (@TechnicallyPHL) January 9, 2016

UsTube at Callowhill’s Practice Gallery invites you to get on the most ephemeral form of YouTube ever. It’s an art exhibit by Donna Oblongata, a former member of the Baltimore-based artist collective Wham City. (Oblongata’s now based in Philadelphia. You might have caught her immersive outdoor rendition of The Wizard of Oz at Bartram’s Garden last summer.)
From Practice Gallery’s website:

You’re on a bus, you’re at your desk, or you’re in bed watching videos of baby animals or baby babies. This gives us, as viewers, a short burst of joy—one we can revisit and replay over and over. Yet, experiencing these videos via a digital medium betrays the inherent un-realness of the watching experience. UsTube invites you to watch a video of something that is occurring in the here and now, and you’ll be witnessing it all happen the first (and only time) it ever will. Not only that— but the act of making the video and watching the video are essentially the same here.

The exhibit runs until Jan. 24 and Practice is open on the weekends and by appointment.
We’ve seen a handful of art exhibits that explore the lines between technology and “real life” (whatever that means), like Lee Tusman’s video-game-in-real-life and Peter Erickson’s INTERFACE exhibit. (Erickson is, full disclosure, Technical.ly’s business manager.)
—
*Apparently, the pay ain’t great.