Street Protests and Affects on YouTube Investigating DIY Videos of Violent Street Protests as an Archive of Affect and Event Desire

This article argues that YouTube, as a platform for sharing DIY videos, is an useful resource for understanding the role of affective processes before, during and after protest events. As a case study the article investigates the documentation on YouTube of two antagonistic demonstrations in Aarhus, Denmark, on 31 March 2012. We argue that the collected material, consisting of 71 YouTube videos, can be analysed to reveal a wish or will to experience the demonstrations affectively through three forms of DIY video production: 1) a form where the videos affectively charge the demonstrations before their actualisation; 2) a form where the affective potential of witnessing political violence is actively engaged, sought out, and enjoyed by the video producers during the event; and 3) a form where the affective intensity of the demonstrations is confirmed and prolonged after-thefact, and the excessive nature of future confrontations implicitly ‘pre-charged’. The videos as such are not only approached as ideological mobilization propaganda or as documentation of political events, but also as an archive capable of revealing the presence and dynamics of the affective dimension of street protest events. Kølvraa, Christoffer and Carsten Stage: ”Street protests and affects on YouTube Investigating DIY videos of violent street protests as an archive of affect and event desire”, Culture Unbound, Volume 8, 2016: 122–143. Published by Linköping University Electronic Press: http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se


Introduction and methodology
On 31 March 2012, the so-called Danish Defence League (DDL) organised a political demonstration in Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark.The timing of this event undoubtedly had to do with the DDL's wish to raise its own public profile by seizing an opportunity to invite the leaders of its sister organisation, the 'English Defence League' (EDL), who at the time was receiving a lot of attention in British and international media due to its part in various violent incidents and protests in the UK.In addition, whereas the Danish extreme left-wing is centred in the capital of Copenhagen, Aarhus is a congregation point for Danish far-right movements (Larsen 2012), and this was certainly part of the motivation for choosing Aarhus as the venue for the DDL/EDL demonstration, whose stated goal was to arrange an event that would bring together the many different 'national leagues' established around Europe to fight what is perceived as the threatening influence of Islam.The demonstration attracted approximately 200 participants, whereas a counter-demonstration called ' Aarhus for Mangfoldighed' (' Aarhus for Diversity'), which marched through the city of Aarhus just a few hundred meters away from the DDL demonstration, attracted several thousand participants.Among the attendees at the counter-demonstration were members of various Danish and international far-left 'anti-fascist' organisations.
In the days leading up to the event, and on the 31st of March itself, there was intense debate and media-analysis of the political meaning and implications of the protests and the actors involved.However, in both the media and on the streets, there was also a more intangible 'atmosphere' of rising tensions and expectations clearly connected less to the specific 'politics' of the event and more to the potential for violent clashes -between right-wing and left-wing political activists, between the EDL/DDL and members of Aarhus's immigrant community, or between any of these three groups and the police, who inadvertently added to this atmosphere by having descended on the city in what was to be the largest police presence outside the capital for 35 years.Thus even if the concentration of national and international media attention, as well as YouTube media production, leading up to and capturing the events of the day itself can be understood as a discursive struggle produced by the ideological enmities of the present antagonists, another, affective, dimension is also noticeable -especially within and throughout the YouTube videos.As this article attempts to show, these DIY YouTube videossome produced by both camps, but overwhelmingly by individual onlookers with no specific or clear affiliation to either party in the conflict -can be analysed to reveal an overarching and amorphous desire to pursue and experience the sheer affective intensity, which the street protests (especially from the risk of them resulting in various forms of violence) seemed to promise would materialise on the streets of an otherwise somewhat 'uneventful' Danish provincial city.

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Although this affective dimension is well-known to both protesters and academics, the sheer excitement or intensity of observing such events is notoriously hard to capture empirically and analytically.We hypothesise that the source material made up of the DIY YouTube videos might offer a new approach for capturing 'affect' in protest events which moves beyond what might can be achieved through more classical methods e.g.ethnographic observation, sociological framing or close discourse-analytical scrutiny of respective ideological standpoints.We fully acknowledge that the 'discursive-ideological' and affective dimensions are in reality intertwined and mutually supportive.Their separation and the focus on one without the other is, however, a valuable heuristic-analytical approach because it allows us to concentrate on methodologically capturing the dimension, which has arguably proved the more difficult: that of affective intensity.What becomes clear when analysing these videos is that affect (in various forms) and the connection between bodies and spaces play important roles in acts of protest, and political events such as this one can create '(in)tense spaces' that influence the flow of bodies towards, around, or away from moments of potential affective intensity.In other words, what we are primarily interested in is analysing how the YouTube videos attest not only to how subjects performatively position themselves ideologically (through the symbolic practice of arguing and demonstrating for their different views), but also to the charging of, searching for and recirculation of affective intensity during street protests.

Material, method and analytical approach
Although the demonstrations and clashes in Aarhus were substantial on a Danish scale, it is of course true that both in the years before and after 2012 larger events and/or clashes between the extreme left and right have occurred in other European states, perhaps the most notable in Germany.The justification for examining the Aarhus event here rests neither on its empirical magnitude nor its historical significance, but rather on our own local knowledge of the events and the city that they relate to.It is important that we -due to our status as residents -are familiar and acquainted with the distinct spatialities of the city space reflected in the videos and with the actual events as they occurred.This local knowledge makes it possible for us to accurately reconstruct the singular video's connection to the protests as they evolved and moved around the town.
Our empirical material consists of 71 YouTube videos produced before, during, and after the demonstrations, all of which vary in length, narrative content, and style.Despite the changeability in form and length we included all 71 videos in our study as even the shorter videos were helpful in getting a sense of the protest spaces and events as they evolved.These do not include uploads of

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TV transmitted material (e.g.news footage), as we were interested in the more mundane and mobile amateur 'Do It Yourself ' (DIY) recordings as they are able to provide audio-visual documentation of how bodies move, circulate and affectively respond to this type of political event.With regards to the videos, we collected our material through extensive searches on YouTube, using various search terms likely to be linked to the demonstrations (e.g.'DDL' , 'EDL' , ' Aarhus' , 'demo' , 'demonstration' , ' Aarhus for Mangfoldighed' , 'Robinson' , '31.3.2012') and by 'snowballing' related videos until no more videos from the event could be found.We approached the sample of 71 videos by watching and arranging them chronologically which made it possible to arrange the sample into three categories consisting of videos made prior to, during, and after the demonstrations.We could not have in-depth analysis for all 71 videos as part of the analysis, therefore we have included representative videos from each of these categories to offer an overview of the material (see the Appendix for video numbers used to reference them).
While watching the videos we were focused on describing the primary role of the video in relation to the event -for example: to anticipate future actions, to mobilize ideologically, to document in a relatively neutral manner, to seek or flee dramatic events, to mock or ridicule opponents.In the analysis we chose to focus on three different ways in which the affective logics of engaging in street protest are realised in the videos.Firstly we studied videos which, in the weeks before 31 March, sought to build the affective potential of the coming demonstrations by either articulating or physically mapping the excessive potential of the particular event space, i.e. by using various visual and editing means to convey a message that an event would materialise in Aarhus on the 31st of March.Secondly, we examined the videos shot on the day of the demonstrations, especially with regards to how they illustrated the way in which the affective potential of witnessing political violence is actively desired, sought out, and enjoyed by the video producers during the event.This was identified primarily from the way in which mobility and movement patterns, revealed in the videos, indicated the body carrying camera 'being moved' both affectively and physically in relation to the real or potential excess of political violence.Thirdly, we investigated a form where the experienced affective power of the demonstrations is confirmed, prolonged, and politically integrated after the actual happenings, often thereby interwoven with the implicit 'pre-charging' of future protest events.This form appears typically in videos which retrospectively seek to present the meaning of the event and to insert it into wider political discourses, including engagement with political opponents, such as through the ironic or derogative re-articulation of the content of other videos, thereby building up affective energy for future events through provocations (Mc-Cosker 2015).
To approach an event such as that in Aarhus as a site of this affective dimen-

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Journal of Current Cultural Research sion of the political event -rather than only as a hegemonic struggle between antagonistic discourses -requires novel analytical strategies.Instead of discursive articulation, implication and closure, they might capture the dynamics of affective pre-charging, probing and recirculation.By no means are we denying that the demonstrations were also clearly an antagonistic struggle between articulated ideological programmes and discourses, and that this dichotomy could be made the subject of analysis in its own right.Here, however, we want to focus on the elements of affective pre-charging, probing and recirculation as crucial dimensions of street protesting.In order to do this, we must first further develop our theoretical framing of the connection between protest events, extremism, affect and YouTube as a social media platform.

Radical protests, 'eventness' and affect
The affective potential of the Aarhus demonstrations is linked to the politically extremist nature of some of the involved organisations and their history of staging and enacting political violence in the streets.Radical forms of both rightwing and left-wing politics and their street-level manifestations in the form of demonstrations, happenings or violent clashes with the police have re-emerged in force in recent years (including after the demonstrations that we investigated), including the anti-globalisation protests of the far left against the WTO, to a more recent recurrence of the far right in the form of movements such as PEGIDA.
Regarding the rise of right-wing political actors, attention has long been focused on the entry and success of parties into European parliaments with clear national or nationalistic agendas.However, the rise of a parliamentary far right is accompanied by new movements arising on what has been termed 'the extreme right' (Caiani, della Porta & Wagemann 2012).The so-called 'Defence Leagues' which met in Aarhus could be characterised as such an extreme right movement.Such movements do not have distinct parliamentary ambitions, therefore their political agendas can be notoriously vague.Such extreme movements instead rely on a 'march and grow' tactic, in which street-presence -including violent clashes with political opponents or police -is thought of as the main vehicle of recruitment (Renton & Goodwin 2010).While social media has certainly provided a rich new venue for such movements to attract new followers, political event-making in the streets remains a central part of their activist repertoire.This is equally true of radical left-wing movements.Also widely recognised in the social movement literature is the complex and shifting link between the actual contents of political discourse and the affective excitement of street level participation (della Porta 2008;Gould 2009).Rather than ideological reflection and conviction logically preceding and precipitating

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Journal of Current Cultural Research activist practice, the emotional investment and excitement of the political event or clash itself constitutes a somewhat independent dimension of movement, involvement and recruitment.Indeed, this excitement linked to participation does not always rely on a firm grasp of ideological doctrine, and might even be partly 'enjoyed' relatively free of ideological content.This is most clearly exemplified by the figure of the independent 'spectator' in and around political events with a high risk of violent clashes, who is simply present to sense the atmosphere and witness potential clashes, i.e. pursuing the affective force of the event without actually participating in its political dimension.
Thus besides being inscribed with a certain meaning -as a protest against violent Islam, against fascism, or as a challenge to public order -the protests also simply come to embody the promise of being an 'event' , of being the setting for something affectively extraordinary, of something moving, and of something worth experiencing, sensing, and recording.Indeed this sense of something extra-ordinary is at the heart of Derrida's discussion of what might be said to fundamentally define an 'event ' (2003: 441), where he emphasises from the outset that '[i]t is worth recalling that an event implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipated(…)' .In fact most theories about the 'event' stress its extraordinary character, when compared to the normal routines or occurrences of life, even if different theories do not always agree on how profound this break with normality must be to be labelled 'an event' , e.g. the smaller perceptual events of Brian Massumi (2002) vs. the major historical events of Alain Badiou (2005), or which social and cultural effects events have, e.g. the culturally reproductive character of the media event of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1994) vs. the media event as opening the world to the radically new, according to Jacques Derrida (2003).
However, it is not our intention to engage in an endeavour to evaluate whether or not the demonstrations were 'real events' in a wider sense, i.e. happenings with the ability to disrupt 'the ordinary course of history' (Derrida 2003: 446) (see also Badiou, 2005).As noted earlier the Aarhus protest was not chosen for its historical magnitude.Our focus is instead on understanding how subjects anticipated, pursued and engaged with what they experienced or imagined to be disruptive affective intensity.The videos in this sense do not document a 'historical event' but attest to the way in which the 'eventness' of what was, in fact, a minor occurrence of street protests is generated by the expectation, engagement and circulation of bodies 'moved' by the promise and experience of affective intensity.
Thus instead of approaching events as something that simply occur, we understand 'eventness' as the affective investment in the potentialities of a given event-space.That is as a desire for disruptive affective experiences, and one which can be co-produced, documented and re-circulated through acts of video production and which may be traced out in the way that physical mobility, positioning,

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Journal of Current Cultural Research and excitement are embedded in the products of DIY videos.Investigating such 'eventness' entails showing how this desire results in a dynamic event space in which bodies move about, according to the ever-shifting, affective topographies: craving, searching, and losing as well as occasionally finding experiences of passionate excess -of affective intensity at the heart of the event.
Of course affect is as much a contested concept as 'event' .The first wave of affect theorists, like Brian Massumi, Patricia Clough, Teressa Brennan, and Nigel Thrift, defined affect as a form of immediate bodily sensation of intensity preceding discursive and cognitive understanding/categorisation.This understanding of affect is opposed by theories of affect focusing on discursive and cultural preconditions for the production of affect (Butler 2009;Leys 2011, Wetherell 2012), or the ways that texts/representations try to 'stick' affect to certain objects or bodies (Ahmed 2004) (see Knudsen and Stage 2015).Where the first position stresses the possibility of immediate sensation of the world, the second focuses on discourses channelling and motivating certain affective reactions or economies.
We position our understanding of affect in a pragmatic, and creative, grey zone between these poles, as both perspectives are relevant to understanding our material.Before and after the event existing discourses are key to the videos' attempts to spread and stick certain affects to religious groups and opponents, and in imagining the awaiting clash between political enemies.After the event discourses are also reproduced through the mocking of opponents and charging of not-yet-specified future events.Yet during the actual protests a more unpredictable space of affective encounters seems to reveal itself through the immediate reactions and responses to the street space.This space is, of course, not devoid of discourses -the opponent's immediate affective force is also intertwined with the discourses known by the sensing body.However, the videos themselves do not seem to be interested in analysing or articulating political subject positions and statements, but rather in finding 'the action' and experiencing transgressive moments of violence.

YouTube as an affective protest archive
The democratic potential of YouTube has been heavily debated by focusing on e.g. the platform's ability to foster participation (Bruns 2008;Burgess and Green 2009), to voice dissonances regarding political issues (Christensen 2008), and, more critically, its lack of proper political deliberation (Hess 2009).Research has focused on the affective dynamics of YouTube as a particular space for new types of political engagement and mobilization (McCosker 2015;Knudsen and Stage 2015).In this article we do not make any claims about the democratic or political status of YouTube as such, but rather argue that YouTube can serve as an in-

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Journal of Current Cultural Research teresting archive that changes how protest events and their affective dimensions may be accessed analytically.This is due to the fact that larger protest events are increasingly documented through mobile technologies, like smartphones, and in multiple ways -from multiple perspectives and by multiple bodies -on YouTube.Therefore, this platform offers the researcher an assemblage of spontaneous and naturally occurring experiential material from protest events.
The mobility of the smartphone as a recording device combined with the possibility of quick, easy, and free uploaded and distributed recorded material from events has created a new arena for understanding how protest events are experienced and sensed by the body that carries the camera.The recorded material can be messy, poorly narrated and parts of it will consist of small and seemingly insignificant shots of banal occurrences.However, in its entirety the material is useful in mapping how the event was prepared, how it was experienced from various perspectives (e.g. by opposing camps or neutral spectators), how it developed in terms of energetic intensification and de-intensification, where and when it peaked, how bodies moved and were attracted and pushed away by particular happenings, and how it was remembered and integrated into narratives in the days following the actual protests.In this way the 71 videos are not interesting because they created a vibrant public sphere or generated debate -a majority of the videos have very few views and no comments -but because they offer us multiple pointsof-view and recorded experiences from the same political event.
A key assumption in this article is that the act of recording is not only a question of communicating content or documenting events for future memory work.Instead, we also understand recording as a way of relating bodies to imagined, experienced and remembered spaces in a way that charges, detects or re-circulates the affective intensity of these spaces.In this perspective using DIY media technologies to prepare for, document, or recall an event does not necessarily disconnect the producer from the experience of affective 'liveness' (Auslander 1999), but may be a way of charging, accessing, or recirculating the eventness of the protest space through affective feedback loops (Papacharissi 2015).In using this perspective, this article adds to an ongoing and increasing investigation of the affective-political potential and characteristics of (digital) media (Blackman 2012 YouTube is one of the most interesting affective protest archives due to its size and global significance as well as its status as the largest existing user-driven archive of audio-visual documentations (Kessler and Schäfer 2009;Snickars 2009).As a consequence, researchers (and other users) suddenly have access to a large number of different subjective and (recorded) real-time 'blocks of sensation' , 'ways of seeing' and investments related to specific events (Deleuze and Guattari 1991;Merleau-Ponty 1993).YouTube thus influences how protest events can be accessed from a distance -e.g. as an empirical resource for affective research on protest events.

A) Charging the event: The promise of 'something happening' in Aarhus
We began our analysis with the videos trying to 'charge' the future demonstrations as affective events.The first six videos (no.1-6 in the Appendix) in the sample were produced before 31 March, and convey the purpose and meaning of the coming event from one camp or the other.In other words, these videos offer rather traditional ideological surfaces, which present, defend, and illustrate a political ontology in an easily accessible form.For example, five videos (no.1-3 and 5-6) are simply mash-ups of stills, graphics, and music intended to positively promote the agenda of the different European 'leagues' fighting Islam, by combining symbols related to the national leagues or symbolic figures (e.g. the crusader in video 3) with pictures depicting Islam as a barbaric, brainwashing, irrational, or oppressive religion, threatening to take over national European cultures (see the use of the neologism 'Eurabia' (Carr 2006)).
These videos clearly function to mobilize activists (Lievrouw 2011) on two levels.First, they convey a message which directly criticises Islam through its content, the goal of which is to reach viewers who agree with the ideological substance of the EDL project.This way of communicating also tries to instrumentalize affective responses -to install an ideological identification with the offered sub-

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Journal of Current Cultural Research ject-positions -by associating fear, horror, and disgust with Islam or those who look Middle-Eastern.One example is the use of a bloody face (video no.1), shown very briefly during a rapid sequence of images, aimed at sticking a negative affect to Islam and Muslims (Ahmed 2004).This rather classical type of mobilization through ideological representation is nevertheless supplemented by a more diffuse anticipation or promise of the Aarhus meeting as being grand, historical, or a new beginning (e.g.video no. 1) -in other words, an event in the Derridean sense of the word.The imperative statement, 'Be there' , is repeated several times during these videos (e.g.video no.5), but it does not function simply as a command or as an invocation of some ideological duty.Rather it plays on the contrast with 'not being there' in terms of having 'missed it' and as such being personally robbed of the experience of affective intensity clearly implied.In that way mediation affectively charges the coming event by promising that being physically present at the event will be worthwhile: your presence there with not only entail a political statement, but it will also be an exciting experience.
While the interesting physical and affective practices mentioned are primarily based on imagining a future physical activity through audiovisual, ideological statements, the last of the preliminary videos promises an even more concrete experience.This video (no.4), uploaded on 19 March with the title 'Smid racisterne ud af Århus 31.marts!' (translation: 'Throw the racists out of Aarhus on March 31!'), is made by a producer opposed to the EDL agenda and, in one take, simply records the short walk between the square in front of the town hall in Aarhus where the diversity demonstration will begin, and 'Mølleparken' , where the EDL/DDL demonstration will be located.Through black and white graphics, it explains that the walk from the diversity demonstration to the site of 'the racists' takes only four minutes.Thus, the video invests the urban space of Aarhus with a 'future affect' by mapping its topography as a battlefield between racists and anti-racists, and offers the most basic navigation for facilitating a violent clash.
The promise of the event as a potential setting for an affective experience of excess remains either a discreet subtext in the more explicitly ideological videos, or is expressed through the physical form of walking through a future affective event space.The desire for extraordinary, affective intensity -often in the form of the expectation of a violent confrontation with the opposing camp -is not articulated as such, but its promise is nonetheless 'guaranteed' by references to the possibility and necessity of physical confrontations.

B) Seeking and being moved by the event
The dualism between the inscribing of definite ideological meaning to the event and the pure promise of the event as a setting for potential affective excess is also

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present in the videos recorded on the day.On the one hand the controlled, expected, and orderly performativity of the demonstrations themselves (the gathering, the display of banners, the speeches, the marching along the assigned route) is the focus of some videos.The ambition seems to be to document the impressive number of participants in the diversity demonstrations, and some even hope to deliver their understanding of the politics, through e.g.featuring interviews or speeches.One good example is the 20-minute video (no.54), ' Aarhus for mangfoldighed 31 marts 2012 -Turen til Århus og tilbage til kbh' (' Aarhus for Diversity 31 March 2012 -The trip to Aarhus and back to Copenhagen'), which follows a group of demonstrators leaving Copenhagen in the morning by bus to join the diversity demonstration in Aarhus.
It is clear that the goal of this video is not simply to document the event, but also to document the mediating individual's participation in it.In that sense, these documenting videos function socially as individual or collective tokens, linking certain bodies to certain events, thereby adding symbolic and political value to these bodies ('I/we did it.We did something to fight our political opponent').In other words, they constitute an easily decipherable political statement in the form of a conventionalised political performance illustrated by lengthy shots of the demonstration walking through the city or listening through speakers.These videos of 'walking bodies' therefore intentionally and deliberately offer a number of clearly ideological subjects and subject-positions for recognition and identification by the viewer.
On the contrary, the majority of videos from the day of the demonstrations do not embody this kind of overt game of recognition.What comes across is a much more unstable and fleeting dimension of the event as a setting for affective intensity.In fact, instead of the lingering over and dissection of a recognised practice or object (e.g.having participated in acts of resistance), these are seemingly videos whose subject matter actually escapes them; videos that continually look for that which would be worth shooting, for what they do not know until they find it, for the enigmatic affective centre of the event.

Probing bodies
A number of videos have titles and context which actually seem indifferent to the particular set of political antagonisms supposedly being played out at this event.Both the 'filming' bodies indicated by the camera's own movement, and the filmed ones fleetingly caught in its viewfinder, are acting in radically different ways than the walking and standing individuals of the recognisable demonstration.These are tense and highly mobile bodies: seeking, probing, fleeing, running, sneaking, covering, or voyeuristically peeping from doorways and alleys, yet not manifestly marked by any identifiable political subjectivity or articulation.These are no longer

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'subjects making a statement' , but simply 'passionate bodies' whose 'politics' or allegiances in relation to the unfolding conflict often remain obscure if not irrelevant.
Many of these videos open with or include footage that depicts what might be called 'probing for the event' .This might be termed the first stage of affective intensity mediated in this type of video.It does not entail purposeful and planned walking, but a jittery drifting about the city space, obviously in search of 'where it is happening' , i.e. of locations of affective tension and physical uncertainty.Examples are videos such as ' Aarhus demo april 2012' (no.55), where the producer moves around the city in search of dramatic incidents and clashes between the political camps, or between one of the camps and the police.' Aarhus 31.Marts 2012 -DDL/EDL bliver sparket ud af byen -DDL/EDL getting kicked out of town' (no.46), despite its title, focuses very little on the DDL/EDL and more on the various clashes and almost game-like encounters between the left-wing camp and the police.Finally, 'Indvandrere og autonome forsøger at lege kispus med politiet i Aarhus' (no.52) (trans.'Immigrants and left-wing activists try to play tricks on the police in Aarhus') follows a diverse group of demonstrators running about the centre of Aarhus.
Even if the locations of the two opposing demonstrations are frequented in these videos, they show very little or no interest in the political message of the demonstrations themselves.The feel of this footage is not that of a documentation of 'having been there' and having made a worthwhile political statement, but rather it records an increasingly tense mood of 'trying to get there' .For instance, in the above-mentioned videos, a long time is spent dwelling on the impressive number of policemen standing at the ready on the margins of the demonstrations.It is as though the lingering shots of chatting policemen and parked vehicles are supposed to underpin the promise of some excess to come which will justify the presence of such manifest displays of state power.
If the ideological imagery of the pre-demonstration mobilizing videos fulfils its function at the moment of simple congregation, i.e. the moment when people arrive to display their political subjectivities in their respective demonstrations, then the promise of an event which is also present in the pre-demonstration videos is what leads to this probing mode of mediation.This is the search for what was promised in terms of affective intensity.This searching and craving for the affective core of the event seems to become ever more intense, as it is no longer able to inscribe itself in a future promise (as in the pre-demonstration videos), but instead manifests itself -at the site and time where it was promised -in the palpable fear that nothing might happen after all.

The running body
The next stage of affective intensity in many of the videos involves a shift from tense expectation to some relief from it.Above all its form and motif are the run-

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Journal of Current Cultural Research ning body.Typically, this simply involves a segment of the video in which the shaking of the frame reveals the rhythm of running, and it captures, fleetingly or in fragments, the images of other running bodies.This running seems to proclaim 'now something has happened'; something was encountered by somebody, and was significant enough to cause this collective flight.In these sequences the mode of probing is replaced by a mode of retraction as the camera turns and sometimes -as in the video, ' Aarhus demo april 2012' (no.50) -seeks refuge and protection.In this particular video, the producer is very close to the most dramatic incident of the day.The incident involved the DDL/EDL bus being attacked as it left Aarhus, with someone throwing a paving stone and smashing a bus window.After experiencing this up-close, the video producer -judging from his outburst and tone of voice -is clearly worried that the right-wing activists will leave the bus and respond violently to the attack.Therefore, he seeks protection with a group of people in a nearby supermarket.Here, the glass doors are locked, leaving the producer 'close enough, but not too close' to the action in the street.Crucially, this physical movement of retraction is not reducible to a subject seeking to extract him-or herself from danger.The video does not conclude with the arrival at safe environments from which the subjects dissipates from the event space.Rather the moment the video producing subject seem to realise that he or she has successfully removed themselves from danger, a moment of confused hesitation ensues only to be predictably followed by a renewed effort at probing or searching for that very site of affective intensity, which they had fled only moments ago.
In another, longer video -'Demonstrations in Aarhus March 31 2012' (no.13) -the camera finds itself at a perfect distance from the action.Peeping from a doorway, the person behind the camera has the perfect view of a promising event space.Engaged but not immediately endangered, it captures an odd confrontation.At one end of the street the police are lined up in a tight chain, alert but unmoving.At the other end, a sizable crowd of youths is congregating.They are seemingly a mix of anti-fascist demonstrators and young men from the city's immigrant community.The camera moves swiftly from one group to the other, as one hears the two cameramen talking excitedly: they have found it -this is where it will happen.However, what happens is far less spectacular than the build-up seems to have promised.In almost 10 minutes of footage, small contingents of youths repeatedly run to within 10 meters of the police chain, shouting and gesturing.The police remain passive, seemingly refusing to fulfil their part in realising the event.Over a megaphone, a policeman repeatedly announces that the DDL has left town: 'There is nothing to protest -go home' .Yet this is clearly no longer about the political message.It seems to be a pure craving for the event; if the DDL cannot deliver, then the police will do.The situation drags on.Nothing happens.The cameramen seem half scornful of the youths, now reduced to 'troublemakers' , without any ju-

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Journal of Current Cultural Research stifying politics to back up their pursuit of a confrontation.Finally, a youth throws a firecracker at the police, who finally decide to give chase.The police line lunges forward, and the entire mass of youths turns and runs.The cameraman gasps, 'this is exactly what they have been waiting for' -with these words conveniently covering over the fact that this is also true of himself and his viewers.Yet this 'event' is hardly unexpected or 'disruptive' .It has been laboriously extracted from the unwilling police force, and in the end, its substance is, once again, simply and only that of running bodies.This indicates what is already implied by the other videos, namely that the event which is so desired and pursued, in actuality has no material substance of its own -no referent which can be filmed to substantiate the claim that 'it happened' and 'I was there' .
Thus in order to grasp and analyse the affective dimension of such street protests -their eventness so to speak -we cannot simply look for some material proof that this is 'really' an event.Rather we must attempt to 'read' , not just the discursive articulations of ideological antagonists, but also the affective topography revealed by the moving bodies whose distribution in the event space seem to trace the contours and centre of it through attraction and repulsion.In this way the affective investments and intensities revealed are the event itself; not as an intrinsically and immanently surprising, momentous, and sudden instance of something never-before-experienced, but as the performative self-contradiction of a craving, a hope for, and finally, the laboriously intentional and forceful extraction of something at least nominally eventful; something which might be worth filming.
Although we are certainly not claiming that all political street confrontations are necessarily 'anti-climactic' in this way, through the example of the Aarhus demonstrations we are able to point out that the very concept of the event seems to contain the inherent tension between an affective investment in its potentiality for an excessive experience, and the fact that for many, if not most, the centre of 'where it is' will remain elusive.This means that in order to understand how such events function to mobilize, galvanize and energise political movements, we do not need to go in search of the elusive core of 'eventness' , but could focus on how the affective topography is mapped out in real-time by the very bodies that it escapes.For such an endeavour the material of DIY YouTube videos can prove a highly valuable archive of affect.

C) Prolonging and pre-charging the event
In the days following the demonstrations, various videos of the event were uploaded to YouTube.Many of them very explicitly embarked on a political battle over how to interpret the event.Thus, mediation becomes a way of returning to established political positions via public contestation.Following Reading, these videos

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Journal of Current Cultural Research seem to contribute to 'the globital memory field' by adding bits to the continuous digital struggle over how to remember the past (Reading 2011).One way of doing this is to edit versions of the event in a way that privileges the political agenda of the producer, another is to participate in a potentially heated debate by leaving comments below a given video.A lesser-used strategy is to rename or edit already existing videos made by opponents to either expose or mock them.An example of this tactic is the video called 'Racisme i Danish Defence League bussen 31 marts 2012 med orginal lyd' (no.48) (trans.'Racism in the Danish Defence League bus 31 March 2012 with original sound') from 1 April, which shows a recording from inside the DDL/EDL bus leaving the demonstration and being attacked by political opponents.The original recording, made by a DDL/EDL sympathiser is no longer available online.It has been changed -all the music is removed so you can actually hear the racist and hostile comments made by the people inside the bus.Thus, the content of the video is 're-articulated' as being about racist tendencies in the EDL/DDL, instead of the EDL/DDL being attacked by aggressive activists.
The bus video is also the object of other creative or provocative re-articulations that use sequences from the original bus video, but add new figures to create a more humorous and potentially viral meme, underlining the defeat or ridiculousness of the EDL/DDL.One of them, called 'Play Off The EDL Keyboard Cat!' (no.66), shows an 'anti-fascist' cat (cf. the Keyboard Cat meme) which uses the shouting and chanting from inside the bus as the starting point for playing music.These 'post festum' videos and discussions use mediation as a way of channelling and sharing political views as well as being tools to mock, ridicule, and expose opponents.Thus, we return to a type of communication characterising the first group of 'charging' videos that is also clearly rooted in familiar political oppositions and focused on ideological content.Affect is once more something opponents try to 'stick' to certain images and words (e.g.ridiculing laughter in relation to DDL/EDL), which is not a result of body/space/event-relations.If the body is somehow involved, it is perhaps through 1) a less direct confirmation of the fact that an event actually did take place in Aarhus -an experience, which is then prolonged via the recirculation of affect through outbursts directed at political opponents, and 2) a less articulated promise -'I will be there the next time -at the next event!' .In these 'post festum' videos the producer is seemingly caught in-between events and thus between the confirmation of past events and the 'pre-charging' of future events.

Conclusion
Political demonstrations are not only loci of ideological positioning but also event spaces of affective intensity.One way to grasp and track their affective dimension

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Journal of Current Cultural Research is to observe the effect that they have on how excited bodies move about and are moved in that space.In this article we have used this acknowledgement of the affective fabric of political investment in events to analyse the forms of desire for 'eventness' expressed and revealed in digital DIY videos from a specific political happening.We have identified three dominant forms of event desire in the 71 videos analysed: 1) videos, where the demonstrations are affectively charged before their actualisation; 2) videos, where the affective potential of witnessing political violence is actively desired, sought, and enjoyed by the video producers during the event; and 3) videos, where the 'eventness' of the demonstrations is confirmed and prolonged after the happenings, and the excessive nature of future confrontations implicitly 'pre-charged' .
More generally we have argued that social media platforms offer new and unique insights into the affective dynamics of events, owing to the easy and immediate possibility of continuous media production and distribution.Via this material, it becomes possible to focus not only on ideological content, but also on the physical desires for certain experiences, expressed both in the content of the preand post-demonstration videos, and in the movements of the camera-body, or the patterns of physical attraction and repulsion with regard to spaces of political excess revealed in the videos.Thus, every single video, regardless of its length and possible lack of traditional ideological content, becomes a valuable trace of bodily ways of relating and connecting affectively to protest events.
Christoffer Kølvraa is Associate Professor in the Section for European Studies in the School of Culture and Society at Aarhus University (DK).In his research, he has written on theories of discourse, affect and identity, on issues of far right movements, nationalism and ideology, and on contemporary and historical notions of European identity.Email: eurock@cas.au.dkCarsten Stage is Associate Professor at the School of Communication and Culture at Aarhus University (DK).His main research interests are affect and online communication, illness blogging, participatory culture, digital activism, discourse analysis and globalization.Email: norcs@cc.au.dk ;Kuntsman 2012;Garde-Hansen & Gorton 2013; Benski & Fisher 2014;Grusin 2010;Featherstone 2010; Gibbs 2008;Munster 2013;Parikka 2010; McCosker 2015;Papacharissi 2015) as we try to understand the way in which digital mediation is involved in affective experiences of eventness.This also distinguishes our approach from other ways of interpreting similar material as e.g.'citizen journalism'(Mortensen 2011) or 'mobile witnessing' (Reading 2011).Via these approaches DIY mediations are treated as acts of informational documentation creating either new forms of news material or memory documents, participating in what Anna Reading (2011) has called 'the globital memory field' .Our interest instead is how the videos discloseCulture UnboundJournal of Current Cultural Research in-situ practices of creating and revealing certain affective dynamics between places, bodies, technologies and political events.As stressed by both Garde-Hansen & Gorton (2013) and Benski & Fisher (2014), users' continuous 'archiving of the present' turns the Internet into an interesting resource for this kind of affect research -or, quoting Benski and Fischer, into 'a unique laboratory for the study of emotions'(Benski & Fisher 2014: 6).Kunstman also stresses how the immediacy of much Internet communication and archiving ends up offering us access to valuable 'archives of feeling' (cf.Cvetkovich 2004) that registers impulses 'once vibrant, but now "saved as"' (cf. the work of Garde-Hansen, Hoskins and Reading referred to in Kuntsman 2012: 6-7).