A piece of digital history arrives in London. The Victoria and Albert Museum has acquired the first video ever uploaded to YouTubetitled Me at the zoofilmed in 2005 by Jawed Karim in front of an elephant cage at the San Diego Zoo. A few months earlier, Karim had founded the platform together with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, starting a global phenomenon that, in 2006, was acquired by Google for 1.65 billion dollars.
Capture is not just about video, but also YouTube’s first “watch” pagecomplete with metadata, code and original interface. In this way, the museum preserves all the digital experience that marked the beginning of an era in which anyone could become Creator.
An icon of digital culture
Me at the zoo lasts just 18 secondsbut he collected more 382 million views and 18 million likes. In the clip, Jawed Karim talks briefly about elephants at the zoo, giving life to a content that is now recognized as a symbol of the first period of YouTube: a web perceived as democratic and openwhere anyone could share images and tell stories.
The V&A Museum has worked with YouTube’s digital preservation team and museum design professionals to reconstruct the original experience of the platform. The aim is to make the public understand how online videos and digital interfaces have changed the way of seeing and producing images, transforming the web into a truly global visual culture.
From the web to the museum: the new frontier
In recent years, institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the British Museum have begun to include not only physical objects in their collections, but also digital artifacts. The capture of YouTube’s first video marks an important step towards recognizing digital as matter of cultural conservationopening new scenarios for the visual history of the 21st century.
The video and the “watch” page thus become tools for reflecting on the role of online videos in the construction of identity, community and collective memoriesrecognizing that digital production constitutes one of the most relevant cultural phenomena of the last twenty years. YouTube is no longer just a platform: with Me at the zooenters museums, between art, memory and technology, immortalizing the banality that has changed the digital world. The only flaw? That the video was filmed in a zooa context made of cages and animals in captivity.
