Woman Counting Down from 9:99 Along with Microwave Timer Is Surprise YouTube Hit
Mathematics enthusiast Vi Hart has a fairly popular YouTube channel made up of videos about math, with about a quarter-million subscribers and nearly 50 million cumulative views. Also a blog.
But Hart also has a “secret” YouTube channel that is about…well, it’s hard to say what it’s really about.
It started a couple of months ago, when she released a video with the (John Cage-evoking?) title “9:99.”
It shows a microwave clock counting down from 9:99, with someone (Hart, we must assume) reading the countdown in the background. And it is closing in on 40,000 YouTube views.
This appears to be the first in a series: Sequels include a microwave clock counting down from 9:98, a microwave clock counting down from 9:97, and so on.
Views have been declining, but the recent “9:90” has about 1,400, which is not bad, if you think about the context.
Presumably, some sliver of Hart’s fans from her less…esoteric…ventures are dedicated enough to follow her down this curious path.
Which is what? Why is she doing this?
Robert Krulwich examined this “dramatically dull” exercise recently, and pointed to a rather lengthy blog post by Hart, which I read as suggesting that this is the result of a creative self-challenge—and a kind of satire of creative self-challenges. Here’s a relevant excerpt:
“See, just because I make fun of the creation process of something doesn’t mean it isn’t art. And we learn surprising things when we indulge in projects that seem too simple to be worth our time. I don’t know if anyone will actually enjoy watching a video of me counting down from 9:99 to End, but for me, standing there in the dark behind the camera counting down into the mic, it was quite an experience.”
OK. But, it’s one thing to make one video like this, and quite another to convert the experience into an ongoing series. Krulwich mentions a Hart viewer calculating: “It is going to take you a little over 19 years to get down to zero (doing one video a week).”
I haven’t checked the math on that, but maybe Hart has. And in fairness, from the videos I’ve seen, she does seem to vary things a bit—sometimes you can hear others’ voices in the background, or joining intermittently in the counting.
The good news, I suppose, is that toward the end, the videos can be much more quickly made—and, for however many of Hart’s fans stick with it to the end, watch.
I’m guessing “0:01” will be pretty exciting!
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