In some of the earliest days of YouTube a creepy short video goes viral.
Not everyone remembers the internet without YouTube. It’s hard to overstate the impact the web streaming site has had not just on the internet but on entertainment and culture as a whole.
Launched in 2005 and founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, the video sharing site generated fifteen billion dollars in revenue in 2019 and has been owned by tech giant Google since 2006. Put mildly, a business success.
But like anything else on the internet that has such an enormous user base – YouTube has become home to some of the most bizarre and mysterious content of all time. Some are short films by brilliant artists and others are completely unexplained and disturbing.
In the video “Dining Room or There is Nothing” The scene is already set. A puppet of a young woman stares into the camera at the head of a dining room table. A spoon in hand and bowl of porridge in front of her. She begins saying some backwards recorded gibberish and then startlingly slams her face down into her bowl. Where she seemingly lies in wait for a bit before raising her head again proclaiming, “There is Nothing.”
It’s a weird video to say the least and it’s one hundred percent worth checking out if creepy shit is your thing (which is likely if you’ve read this far)
So what is this video and why does it exist? Well, none of that is really mysterious anymore. In 2006 this video would have had a much more creepy feel to it – with the identity of content creator’s not being as upfront and advertised as they are now.
The creator is a director and artist named David Earle. He has a litany of videos that are all varied in different styles. A viral pioneer of the early days of YouTube.
While many of us were smoking pot in our one bedroom apartments fresh out of high school enjoying early videos like: “Leave Britney Alone” – other much more forward thinkers like, David Earle were harnessing the power of this new media platform to get their work and messages across.
On his website David discusses, “Dining Room or There is Nothing”. He goes on to explain, “This piece was inspired by a personal paradoxical desire for empirical proof that there is nothing on the ‘other’ side of life. I wanted to blur the distinction between the two states, and to state the paradox by showing someone who is coming back from life (or death), and denies its existence, thereby fulfilling the paradox”.
Check out more of David’s work:
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