Saatchi has opened a dedicated video gallery, and how he's done so illuminates the collector's attitude to this least trophy-like of mediums. It's in a little shop near the Saatchi Gallery, wedged between a shoe store and a bra emporium. Glassed at both ends, there is a central corridor of light that means Christopher Baker's projected work, 'Hello World! Or: How I Learned to Stop Listening and Love the Noise' – a wall-filling grid of some 5,000 internet-sourced video diaries – can barely be seen.
One could be charitable and say this helps. Baker's raids on YouTube, MySpace et al are partly sustained by plangent irony: each diarist stands centre stage in an online world so vast (these extracts barely skimming its surface) they're statistically negligible. A man in urine-yellow light rubs his eyes sleepily and keeps confessing, a mother upraises her baby, a girl intently strums an acoustic guitar, a woman chatters while applying makeup, but the composite soundtrack is a softly cacophonous, layered blur in which nothing stands out – (respect to the grizzled gent doing sign language).
Occasionally, though, the audio spotlights a single voice, illustrating the sanguine flipside of Baker's macro/micro demonstration piece – that the net can enable one-to-one intimacy, wherein the abounding whole fades away. Then again, find me the person who didn't already know that: I've got a daylit video gallery I'd like to sell them.