Re-Composing YouTube

YouTube features a wide array of multimodal musical figurations, including fan-made music videos, musical aestheticisations of pre-circulating content, and musical self-performances. Jonas Wolf explores open-ended forms of musical creative relay on YouTube, delving into formal, imitative, affective, and (non-)institutional aspects of networked media remix and (self-)aestheticisation. Beyond creating value for non-musical fields of discourse, this study is directed at filling a gap in a largely ocularcentric domain of study. It provides a concise theory of vernacular composition within our time's total digital archive that accounts for socio-aesthetic phenomena and their relation to systems of knowledge, control, and discourse.

Jonas Wolf is a musicologist interested in the relationships between musical discourse, cultural and artistic practices as well as historical and contemporary media environments. After graduating from Folkwang Universität der Künste (Essen, Germany), he joined the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, where he defended his doctoral thesis in 2023. His theoretical and methodological approach is informed by a wide array of disciplines and schools of study such as critical theory, poststructuralist theory, semiotics, psychoanalysis and media studies.