oops by CHRIS BECKMAN. digital video. 2009. concept by BILLY RENNEKAMP

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Earlier this year Oops – a video by CHRIS BECKMAN who graduated from Drury in May 2010 with a degree in Fine Arts in the Department of Art and Art History – won the 2010 Vimeo Awards in the Experimental category.

Oddly enough, this ten-minute video (originally created for a class assignment called Video Art), somewhere between a home-video mixtape and a postmodern travelogue and composed entirely of appropriated YouTube videos, is bizarrely compelling.

He began the project by selecting 100-150 videos off of YouTube of people doing accidental things, such as, dropping the camera. Eventually, he used portions of 40-45 YouTube videos. Then he seamlessly stitched together these videos: “It’s cool that people feel free enough to upload videos of them dropping the camera, it’s another thing that kind of attracted me to the videos. Salvaging almost useless things to make something that people want to watch.”

CHRIS BECKMAN has been invited to attend the 2011 Sundance Film Festival where his video will be screened in the short film program.