It’s Friday night at the Babylon Nightclub, and a patchy crowd is awkwardly waving glow sticks in the dark, club-scented air, running in opposite directions, and screaming hysterically. They’re attempting to vote on their favourite YouTube video – a pair of feet being rubbed in hot sauce? An old lady giving instructions on how to make mash ups?

It’s a full out YouTube Battle, and presiding over the chaos is Jeremy Bailey, a Toronto-based media artist. He said he’s a creator of “purposefully bad, satirically bad software” and he’s been asked by Artengine, an Ottawa arts centre and the Battle’s co-host, to create an automated judge for the battle.

A screen measures enthusiasm through motion detection (glow stick waving) and sound pitch (drunk screaming) to calculate the vote. The software seems a little temperamental, and Bailey admited a conventional raise-your-hand-to-vote approach is probably more accurate, “but less fun.”

And the competition is tough. The eight teams can have three-minute time slots to use strategically for one extra long, extra hilarious video, or for several short clips.

“Obviously our attention for Internet videos is pretty frickin’ short,” Ryan Stec, the artistic director of Artengine said.

But to win the audience’s approval, videos need to strike the right balance between viral standard and obscure find, to achieve the perfect level of kitsch. This could range from badly produced rap videos, to Saturday Night Live skits, to a montage of Oprah screaming the names of celebrities. The Dec. 4 battle was the third of its kind in Ottawa, but the first to be hosted at Babylon by Artengine and Canteen Art Shop. The concept was pioneered in Paris, Stec said, and is a cousin of the now-standard iPod battle.

The YouTube battle itself is already a fixture in our living rooms, especially before a night out, he said. A public battle just mimics your standard pre-drink video share, where friendly exchanges quickly turn to competitive taste making.

But while Stec said a YouTube battle may mimic DJ culture “as the cultivator and distributor of cool”, ultimately it’s more about pop culture knowledge than raw skill.

“This is really about your cleverness and intuitive relationship with pop culture,” he said. “But that makes it sound a lot more intellectual than it is!”