This week’s video is BOOTYCLIPSE (2007), a video recently added to the blog for the YouTube Play Biennial, sponsored by YouTube and The Guggenheim Museum. YouTube Play attempts to use YouTube as a means of presentation and distribution of art and featured BOOTYCLIPSE as a work that engages the form of the YouTube site itself.

Dennis Knopf hijacks the ubiquitous bootyshake video but removes the dancer by making a version that loops the moment between when the dancer turns on the camera and when he/she comes into the frame. The effect is often the same blaring music but this time it plays to an empty room. By retaining the same title and tags he diverts many of the hits the original would have gotten, giving the video a sort of rick-rolling effect, and thwarting viewers in search of the real booty.

From a dance perspective, we’re left to contemplate the intimacy of being allowed into someone’s bedroom without the distraction of the intended act – the bootyshake – an ostentatious display of skill and sexuality. What does Knopf’s video reveal about the similarity between these moments? Between the mini-genre of these videos? About the dancers themselves? Is it a transgression of personal space to amplify unintended focal points? And for myself, why do I feel slightly guilty for watching what was hidden in plain sight?