YouTube makes Artists of Us All

Last fall, dog walkers Kurt Brown and Julia Taylor followed elusive British street artist Banksy’s one month “residency” in New York. Every day in October, the pair filmed their search for the artist’s work, posting videos and snapshots of the hunt on YouTube and Instagram. This urban scavenger hunt began each day with a trail of online breadcrumbs, starting with Banksy’s cryptic online posts about the whereabouts of that day’s piece, followed by Instagram and Twitter tips from fellow Banksy hunters.

Shortly after the month-long run, documentary filmmaker Chris Moukarbel contacted Brown and Taylor about their footage. They were surprised. Their YouTube channel wasn’t getting much traffic, Brown said (some videos have upwards of 400 views, while others have fewer than 20) and they didn’t think of themselves as professional video bloggers.

“When we were going through it, it didn’t really feel like we were a part of this international news event,” said Brown. “We were just running around taking pictures of things on walls.”

The devoted pursuit of Banksy’s work, and the online trail left by such hunters that still lives online, are as much the subject of Moukarbel’s new documentary, Banksy Does New York, as the street artist who captured the city’s collective attention.

“In a lot of ways, this was about the role of the internet and social media in telling our stories,” Moukarbel said by phone, after pulling off the Los Angeles freeway to find cell reception. “We’re now doing documentaries of our lives every day when we post something online. In this case, the film was following a famous artist for one month, but it was also following the lives of every individual who interacted with that artist in some way. And the way we could put a frame around it was look at their social media output for that month.”

Banksy spray-painted his signature characters in various locations throughout the boroughs, with nearly half in lower Manhattan. His New York contributions also included performance art, like a truck filled with squeaking animal puppets that traveled around the city, and online videos. Each piece is shown in the HBO Documentary Films production, which premieres on the network on Nov. 17 at 9 p.m., as are the substantial crowds the work attracted, along with the occasional building owners who found throngs of iPhone-wielding New Yorkers snapping photos of their properties. But Moukarbel didn’t film these scenes; he didn’t begin work on the documentary until after the artist’s residency ended.

Instead, along with his production crew, he searched hashtags like #banksyny to find photos and videos that captured not only the artwork but the public’s response to the installations.

“The hashtags were creating an online archive,” he said. “It was an interesting snapshot of that month on the internet. We started editing before we even started shooting.”

The film is a hybrid of user-generated social media content, archival news footage and original interviews with the art critics, gallerists and journalists who followed the project. When he found footage online that he wanted to use, Moukarbel and his team contacted the creators, like Brown and Taylor, to seek permission to use their content. The user-generated footage, Moukarbel said, allowed him to explore the firsthand effects the “accidental interactions” with the art had on individuals.

“Increasingly, stories are multidimensional,” said Jeremy Caplan, a business and technology journalist and the director of education at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. “We used to think of stories as presenting the viewpoint primarily of the storyteller, but increasingly stories we tell are made up of the stories of all or many of us who are thinking about what’s going on and bringing our own perspective.”

Online media’s role in crafting narratives and personal identities is a recurrent theme in Moukarbel’s work. His first feature length documentary, 2012’s Me @ the Zoo, followed internet celebrity Chris Crocker, whose YouTube videos have been viewed over 270 million times (including a highly-publicized, emotional defense of pop star Britney Spears). Moukarbel’s newest project, the upcoming HBO series Sex//Now, scheduled to air this winter, examines how internet technology has changed sexual interactions.

“Our lives right now are shifting between the real world and virtual spaces,” said Moukarbel. “For me to think about how to tell a story effectively and accurately, I have to imagine how it’s playing out in this [online] world.”

During his stint in New York, Banksy took to his website and his Instagram account to announce each new piece and prompt the hunt for its whereabouts, a tactic that succeeds in part because of the pervasiveness of camera phones, Google Maps and Instagram. But despite his international fame and online visibility, Banksy, who has never been photographed, remains a careful mystery, with an identity crafted from both his highly visible work and his shadowy evasion.

“In a lot of ways, it was intended to play out online as it was in real life,” Moukarbel said of the residency. “And from our perspective, as storytellers, we had to tell it through social media as well. It was the only accurate way to tell a story like this.”

Banksy Does New York is from HBO Documentary Films and debuts on HBO on Monday, Nov. 17 at 9 p.m.