When looking at a digital collection, whether it's a library catalog, YouTube search results, or products in an online store, it's easy to forget that the collection's records were, in fact, made by people. The inclusion or exclusion of items in the set, the metadata gathered and presented about those items, and the way the set is organized and presented—these are all conscious decisions that many different people had a hand in.

Yet when visitors scroll through pairs of pants on a clothing site, for example, the decisions that made that collection what it is are largely invisible. Even if 500 different people created the records for each pair of pants, every record is superficially the same. Though making a collection involves inherently subjective choices, these choices are often hidden under a veil of objectivity.

In this project, I created my own design transformation of a traditionally-constructed video library (similar to those found on YouTube). I changed the descriptive information (metadata) of the video collection to foreground the subjectivity and residuality that lurk under the under the surface of conventional collections.

The result of this transformation is an unsettling, radically subjective collection of videos, in which several perspectives clamor for attention within the space of a single record. Sounds crazy? Just imagine trying to create it!

The goal of the project is for viewers to remember that there are real human beings with agendas behind every classification system, collection, and record they use. I hope viewers comes away from the transformation with a more critical perspective on the videos’ creators, the collection’s creator, and their own implicit biases and assumptions.

Totally confused? There's an explanation!