If you’ve ever purchased anything from IKEA, you’ll know that the assembly part can sometimes be a frustrating endeavour. You could be assembling a piece of furniture and find some parts of the instructions confusing, or you’re just greeted the assembly kit with a blank look.

If this even vaguely sounds like you, you’d be glad to know that IKEA USA has started up a new Youtube playlist called ‘How To Build‘. As the title suggests, it gives you step-by-step video instructions about putting together a piece of furniture from the store. There’s no dialogue or voiceover, no cheesy intro or ending, just a visual representation of how to assemble an IKEA product.

So far there is only one video in the playlist, the assembly of a MALM bed, but you would imagine that more videos will be added in the future. While its usefulness for the moment is extremely limited because of this, it will begin to develop once they add more videos to the collection.

It will be handy as with more and more people owning smartphones and tablets, they can just refer to the video to gain a better idea about assembling it. Of course, the majority of people won’t really need this as we’re all capable of reading instructions, but for those who get easily frustrated, this (and the other numerous Youtube videos out there dealing with the subject) may do the trick.

You may remember earlier this month I wrote about a crazy father who shot his daughter’s laptop on a Youtube video because of a Facebook message she had posted. It caused a lot of controversy and the original post has over 200 comments with people arguing both sides of the case and calling me all sorts of names for daring to call him out.

Well, the good news is that he is back with a second video rant, and this time his target is American TV personality Dr Phil. Although he is without a weapon this time, he does still have a good old six minute rant.

The original video has 30 million views at this stage and although this one has just been released, it is sure to explode in popularity again. It is all starting to smell a little bit fishy to me now though because it feels like the father is starting to turn into an internet celebrity, and I still wouldn’t be surprised to find out the whole thing is just some sort of stunt.

Even the fact that he is using Youtube annotations to encourage subscribers and calling his videos “Facebook Parenting” make this feel strange to me, and het only next logical step with this, being America and all, is that he ends up with his own chat show dishing out advice to other people’s children on how to practice tough love.

Response To Dr Phil

The Original Video

If you didn’t see the first video where he goes on a seven minute rant before shooting the laptop then here it is. If you want to see just how mixed the response to this story was check out the original comments here for some heated debate.

An audio visual installation composed of 5,000 internet video diaries is currently on display at famed modern art gallery, the Saatchi Gallery, in London. Entitled “Hello World! Or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise”, the work by US artist Christopher Baker consists of video diaries being projected on a wall and the voices from the videos being heard in a “multi-channel sound composition”, which allows the viewer to listen to the combined effect of the thousands of voices or to focus on an individual voice.

It is the first time that the 2008 installation has been displayed in the UK, and the work will be sure to challenge many people’s perception of what constitutes art today, and how the internet can be understood in terms of modern art, so that ‘modern art’ and ‘the internet’ need not be necessarily seen as mutually exclusive terms. The internet is, after all, a human invention, but perhaps one that humans sometimes feel they cannot fully claim understanding of and ownership over, as the internet has become so vast and so full of content, as this installation indicates, with its chorus of human faces and voices detailing their lives, vying to be heard, competing against thousands of others.

The personal videos could be read as individual attempts to humanise the technology of the internet and personal identity, the understanding of which has undergone a major shift in recent times. The videos now have a whole new audience and a new context in which to be understood, the modern art world, which is a development that creators of video diaries probably never envisage when they record themselves on camera and post it online.

The description of the work on the Saatchi Gallery site says that “the project is a meditation on the contemporary plight of democratic, participative media and the fundamental human desire to be heard. The artist Christopher Baker, who originally trained as a scientist, is inspired by the interconnectivities – visible and invisible- present in the 21st-century urban landscape and is interested in the practical implications of our increasingly networked lifestyles”.

For those not resident in London, the video below provides as close an experience as possible to actually attending the exhibition. The sheer size of the work, as made evident in the video,  makes for an overwhelming experience; in their individual attempts to be heard in the modern world, are the voices in these videos in fact having the opposite effect and drowning each other out?