„Jetzt helfe ich mir selbst“ (Now I Can Help Myself) - The 100 best Internet video tutorials

Today, in the age of do-it-yourself (DIY), the Internet video tutorial has become what the German book series Jetzt helfe ich mir selbst (Now I Can Help Myself) once was for the car enthusiast. From profane problems with installing printer drivers and tying shoelaces to putting on makeup – or building weapons – the Internet has an instruction manual and help available for almost everything nowadays. How-to videos have become a major phenomenon in the DIY culture. The exhibition shows a selection of the 100 funniest and most absurd, exciting, uncanny, and amusing video tutorials online.

Presented on 100 monitors and projection screens, visitors to the exhibition Jetzt helfe ich mir selbst are met by the rising tide of the world’s how-to knowledge rolled up into a single show. On view are videos showing how to open a bottle of beer with a sheet of paper, a lock with a paper clip; how to construct a fully functional gas mask; how to mend a bicycle inner tube without a repair kit; how to wash your hair in the absence of gravity or your dog in the bathtub. How to count in Finnish or draw 'nothing'. People are talking and gabbling on every channel, expounding useful and sometimes less than useful information. Didn’t you always want to know how to catch a kangaroo with your bare hands? A clever Australian can show you. How can I survive my first night playing the Minecraft computer game? And how can I survive out of doors, outside civilization, in nature? Would you like to know how to make it past every bouncer, guaranteed? There’s a specialist for this, too. Additional video tutorials instruct viewers on how to urinate in public without anyone noticing (“How to piss in public”); how to conceal their acne with make-up; and from somewhere in Africa, how to put on an eight-part veil and eat a hamburger in England while wearing the veil; how to play air guitar, walk in high heels, deburr a fender with a baseball bat.

Apart from all this, didn’t you always want to know how to become Pope, cut onions into cubes, survive an attack of zombies, sharpen pencils, or 'improve' the sound of a car exhaust pipe? How to whittle a flute from a carrot or make a two-pound Snickers bar? It’s all explained in the video tutorials of the exhibition Jetzt helfe ich mir selbst. And an exhibition like this naturally has to have its mass-media DIY forerunners, too: none other than the American TV painter Bob Ross and Jean Pütz, our man from the German Hobbythek show.

Sometimes, though, video tutorials can go terribly wrong. You get to see what to avoid when using a curling iron, or what happens when you try to heat up a bottle’s contents in a microwave oven. Some how-to videos are scary or spooky, for instance the “Arm Tutorial,” ostensibly made to explain the usage of an arm, but filmed in surroundings that resemble a psychiatric institution, or the video tutorial that provides instructions on how to build a pump gun from parts that have passed through airport security. Another video shows a child explaining how to construct a working crossbow from things he finds in his bedroom. Video tutorials also show us things that we don’t want to see – and explain how they work.

The 100 'best' video tutorials are deliberately shown in close proximity and presented in a kind of cacophony: everyone talking at the same time, everywhere people yakking away and explaining things. The form of the how-to videos ranges from clips recorded on smart phones to semi-professionally produced films. The key question the exhibition poses, however, is why people make these video tutorials in the first place; why they feel compelled to explain to others how to do a particular thing without a (recognizable) reward and without even knowing their audience. In the Internet, the public is initially anonymous and abstract. Do the makers just want to pass on what they know in an altruistic gesture? Are they looking for fame and honor? Or is it about money, after all?

The exhibition is based on an idea by Dr. Inke Arns (Artistic Director of the HMKV) and came about in cooperation with a seminar conducted by the Department for Cultural Reflection at the University of Witten/Herdecke (directed by Jun.-Prof. Dr. Christian Grüny and Frederik Bury).

Design: labor b designbüro, Dortmund

In cooperation with:

Universität Witten/Herdecke
Medion

Media partner:

ARTE Creative
Ruhrgestalten