Just memorizing the words in this box is not the same as understanding the material well enough to use it in the world, or to do well when you are tested on it. Some of this material is explained in depth starting at the left of this box, or on the main study site.
The avant garde, to remind you, was an attititude toward art particularly popular from about 1850-1950 where artists hoped to be the vanguard of progressive change in human society and human consciousness. Art that was ahead of its time.
One particular movement, Dada, seemed "ahead of its time" in its absurdist and almost nihilistic response to the reality of its time. It may be debatable how "progressive" Dada (and the other avant gardes) really were, but they were certainly contrary to the norms, and in this they disrupted consciousness in ways that could lead to positive change (or not).
When I first started teaching this class, I tried to show parallels between the avant garde absurdism of Dadaism and the current absurdism of genres like dank memes, supercuts, and YouTube Poops. These emergent forms on the Internet, I argued, bore comparison to the chaotic creativity of the Dadaists, facing their own social and cultural predicaments 100 years ago.
Maybe, I was on to something. In the last few years there has been a flurry of writing about the rebirth of Dada on the Internet, comparing the high art movement of 100 years ago to the practices of many grassroots meme-makers now. For instance, take a look at Violetta Skittiles's "Memes as a Form of Protest Art: a Neo-neo Dadaist Movement" from March 2021. If you Google "memes" and "Dadaism" or "shitposting" and "Dadaism" you will find many more discussions. In 2023 the TikTok aesthetic called Corecore was also compared to Dada.
Shitposting is intervening in an online discussion with an absurdist and seemingly irrelevant but dismissive gesture, typically an image macro. As such, it hardly seems progressive, and in fact the term is more generally associated with anti-progressive disruptions of serious public debates.
Memes, on the other hand, can come from a more progressive or anti-establishment place. In many cases, however, they still tend toward a detached ironization.
Dadaism and absurdist meme-making are ways of expressing and releasing our frustration because we are powerless against the large inhuman systems in which we live, and we personally want to feel power we don't have.
So both are questionable in their disregard for social struggles that are real and for the suffering of real people. They are about “transcending” social struggles in a combination of anger, nihilism, and ironic amusement.
I often find myself consuming memes and other forms of Internet appropriation as "High Art," and certainly there is a psychedelic aspect to many user-made forms of media on the Internet, including those I mentioned above: dank memes, supercuts, and YouTube Poops.
There may be a liberatory and insightful aspect of a personal kind to the surreal and absurdist practise of memery. This could potentially lead to a remix of human consciousness in general, though that is probably utopian. Nevertheless, if more people became fully mindful, lived in the immediate moment rather than an abstract "story" or spectacle, it could be good for them and for each other, and for helping us to deal with reality instead of escape it all the time in manufactured stories about reality.
Like mushrooms or LSD (or in mild ways, weed) (or less pharmaceutical mindfulness practices such as meditation or yoga), memes may break up the ingrained thinking we have developed throughout our lives, and disrupt our tendency to live in the past or the future or the media, and thus open us up to questioning and rethinking internalized societal norms and systems.
We may see things more fully in their essentially meaningless thingfulness, or re-find the more basic and positive meaningfulness of them that has been drained away by our rigid and repetitive normal ways of experiencing reality. We might fully appreciate eating a bowl of brown rice again, for instance.
Recall the idea of Society of the Spectacle. The argument was that we are increasingly alienated from reality by our consumption of a manufactured spectacle in the media. Could the people's re-appropriation of the media break down that unreal spectacle and put us back into touch with the truth of existence?
Dadaists and meme makers might well argue that reality is absurd and terrifying, while the manufactured spectacle is unreal and comforting. Does Internet culture in a sense provide an escape from the "escape" of manufactured culture? We turn to unreal media to escape. Are Internet genres like dank memes taking us even further away from reality, or could they in a certain sense be pushing us back that way? Limor Shifman in her book Memes in Digital Culture (2013) discussed how memes are often focused on matters of failed masculinity, whereas the majority of mainstream culture has been focused on images of supposedly successful masculinity. In the focus on fails, Internet culture could be said to be allowing us to feel superior, like so much comedy that is really about feeling power in witnessing someone else's suffering vicariously, or they could be reminding us that life is full of fails, real life is not like in the movies, the glamour magazines, the rap music videos, etc. Inviting us back to the reality that life itself is very much a fail.
A classic dank meme (video meme) of the 2010s was the Shooting Stars meme. (Earworm warning.)
The format of this meme combines the music from Bag Raiders' song "Shooting Stars" (2008) with spacey motifs from the Synthwave-styled official music video of 2009 using tiktok and vine and other user-generated video elements that mostly revolve around fails. The effect is absurdist and amusing, but also highly creative and an excellent example of Internet remix. Is watching this mashup of campy guilty synthwave pleasure and real people's fails a way of feeling superior or does it bring us into contact again with our shared humanity?
I think Internet media is often more about true reality than manufactured media is. I could be wrong of course. Media isn't reality, I know that. But it can never be really disconnected from reality, either. I also know that.
Like psychedelic drugs or avant garde art at their best, Internet art scrambles our brains, blows our minds, makes us laugh, and leaves us open to making new connections and understandings of what is real, important, and meaningful. Or at least we escape the "other reality" for awhile. Laughter itself is a rupture into reality, as our body erupts into the now: even if only for a brief second we are not trapped in "reality" (human made structures), the past and the future (imaginary projects), media ...
For the rest of this lesson, I will look at the more obvious examples of emerging online video genres that use appropriation. If you know of others, I hope you'll tell me about them or present them in the People's Appropriation Workshop next week.
I do not discuss TikTok appropriation here. This is a new field for me, and also one that may have fewer links to the avant garde practices of appropriation I want to mention. But I am interested in learning more ... especially if any of it seems counter-cultural or progressive.
The genres I'll talk about here are unofficial music videos, revids and redubs, supercuts, and YouTube Poops.
A YouTube video genre in which an original video is made for a song (whether or not the song already has an official video).
Unofficial music videos can take many forms, including live-action dramatization, lip-syncing, and original animation. From a remix culture point of view, three prominent sub-genres are worth recognizing:
Anime music videos, as the name suggests, are made by re-cutting clips from anime and using songs, music, or trailer announcements and other audio elements to create an original audio-visual experience. There is a very large community, especially in Asia, devoted to making and watching these videos. See the Anime Music Video site for an English-language entrance into this world
Though not as common as anime videos, there is also a fandom that uses machinima techniques to make original pirate videos for songs, Gaming Music Videos.
Gaming videos may be “serious” interpretations of the gaming world, as with Khallys’s 2013 World of Warcraft video “Tide of War,” which cuts machinima footage over the song “The Howling” by Within Temptation, or it may be more of a détournement of the original gaming environment’s culture, as in various Avengers “dance-off” videos created by gameplay artist Mightyraccoon!, including one that was then appropriated and re-edited as a Bollywood dance-off by Jajuist Edits.
Fanvids are the oldest and most politically interesting form of unofficial music video. See the main article for more details.
An interesting variation on the unofficial music video is the redub music video. In this kind of mashup, you use the video from an official music video, but you replace the audio with a different song or other audio content.
A controversial but well done and much-watched example is LOTI’s “This is America so call me maybe” (2018), a partial redub of Childish Gambino’s “This is America” video (2018) with Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” (2012).
An often quite subversive form of music video redub is the “musicless video.” Possibly the best and (I believe) one of the first was Mario Wienerroither’s redub of David Bowie and Mick Jagger’s 1985 video for “Dancing in the Street.”
Here is the original video from 1985 (pretty bad).
And here is Wienerroither’s version:
Despite the fact that Bowie and Jagger are super-talented legends, a 21st century audience might be tempted to think that the badness has something to do with the historical period the original video was made in. But Wienerroither’s YouTube channel presents a dizzying array of these kinds of experiments, including many from more recent pop culture. Here’s one that’s rather delightful:
The musicless music video draws attention to the aggrandized visual content of the video and how laughable it might be in many cases if it were not accompanied by a powerful song.
In this genre a new cover of the song is created in which the lyrics refer directly to the action we see in the video. Again, this began as a sendup of corny or pretentious 1980s motifs, but has since spread into our own corny and pretentious videos from the recent past.
This is my term for a mashup video created mainly or entirely by adding original or re-edited audio from other sources over a largely unchanged video clip, as in the examples above.
REDUB: UNALTERED VIDEO, ALTERED AUDIO
Typical uses include
The complementary video remix is a revid.
This is my term for a mashup video created mainly or entirely by adding original or re-edited video from other sources over a largely unchanged audio soundtrack.
REVID: UNALTERED AUDIO, ALTERED VIDEO
Some of the most common revid uses are
In the trailer mashup above, the seductive power of the supposedly transgressive film Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) is mocked and subverted by combining the portentious audio from its trailer with footage from the Will Farrell film Anchorman (2004). Anchorman, and many of Farrell's films, get their humour from broadly exaggerating conventions of masculine power, sex appeal, erotic tension, and so forth, undermining these idealistic and unreal dimensions of manufactured culture.
A supercut is a video mashup that shows examples of a particular word, idea, meme, image or theme from a variety of sources. Supercuts.org: “A fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliche from film and TV.
Purpose: Typically humour, entertainment, homage, or celebration, but sometimes used with a politicized, subversive, or surrealist intent.
Examples of supercut can be found in high art before it became an Internet genre. A famous example in the art world is Christian Marclay's Telephones (1995), an 8-minute supercut of phones ringing, being answered, and being hung up, mostly from old black-and-white movies.
Wrenched from their original context, and recombined this way, the clips force the viewer in the gallery to see the phones outside of a clear narrative context. This phones are there in their phones-ness, but there is also a certain uneasiness to the way Marclay has juxtaposed the clips. You can experience phone more directly, without the context of a plot and how the phone call works in that context, but it can also make you feel weird about the whole concept of phone, and think about phones in a fresh, or less mediated, way. Marclay is making use here of the avant garde strategy of defamiliarization.
Graphic designers working in advertising are often among the most talented artists in our capitalist world, and certainly the coolest and most art-world influenced of those designers are probably the ones working on Apple's marketing team. Apple approached Marclay to see if they could use some of his high art video in an ad (it's hard to imagine how that ad would have felt), but Marclay refused to have his art commodified and repurposed in this way. So Apple glibly knocked off the idea instead as part of its "Hello" campaign (2007):
A couple of examples of supercuts:
Though the "purpose" of a supercut is humour, its effect is often to draw a viewer's attention to an overused motif of popular media that they have ceased to notice or think about.
A video or video/audio mashup that combines different source material, often in an attempt to be intentionally annoying and usually in a mood that is more or less parodic, satirical or surreal.
The intentions and effects of appropriation as practiced in poops is a matter of controversy – or sometimes indifference – among practitioners, fans, critics, and those who study the phenomenon. Michael Wesch, an anthropologist who is considered one of the foremost academic authorities on social media has described YouTube Poops as “absurdist remixes that ape and mock the lowest technical and aesthetic standards of remix culture to comment on remix culture itself.”
It’s not quite clear what that “comment” is intended to be. Some see them as drawing our attention precisely to how easy it is to remix other people’s creations now. Clearly they are disruptive of mainstream media, and generally they annoy and offend people with material that in its original form is usually relaxing or seemingly innocent (children’s cartoons and video games, game shows, trivial movies, etc., as well as somewhat “higher” stuff, like Spongebob).
The fandom Wiki page on this mode discusses the recurring techniques found in the appropriation of source material to turn it into poops:
Certain techniques are usually apparent in every YouTube Poop video. These techniques have been coined as Poopisms. They do not refer to the source material, but how the source material is treated. The techniques are as follows;
Ear Rape: Volume is maxed out and distorted. The intention is generally to annoy. This genre has also appeared in some MLG montage parodies.
Stutter Loop: A short piece of video is looped in order to call attention or emphasize something.
Stutter Loop Plus: A stutter loop with random effects added.
Stutter Loop Minus: A stutter loop with only audio.
Sentence Mixing (sometimes called Word Splicing): Words are cut and rearranged, often to create profanity or entirely new sentences.
Spadinner: A blanket term used to refer to the outdated and overused sources such as Super Mario World (especially the episode Mama Luigi), Hotel Mario, and The Wand of Gamelon. This technique eventually led to the creation of sentence mixing.
Classic YTPMV: A sample is sequenced to an audio track to vaguely simulate something like “singing.”
YTPMV: Notes in source materials are pitch shifted to replicate music
Some people have seen the genre as having a trajectory over the years 2008-2013 (the exact dates are disputed) and consider the genre to be in decline now. In the 2010s, “YouTubePoop” has come to be a bit of a catch-all phrase for absurd and abstract video mashup, typically with a faintly satirical feel. Some semi-coherent sub-genres can be identified.
An interesting phenomenon from the heyday of Poops was the so-called "Tennis Match," in which one pooper would make a poop and would then send it to another pooper who would remash the video with additional effects and footage, lob it back to the original pooper, who would again modify it, and so forth. Here is the original "serve":
And here is a link to the full tennis match.
Absurdist re-edits: here footage is recut and redubbed to create a surreal and sometimes abstract but nevertheless mostly normal-feeling version of a recognizable tv show or video, e.g. Family Food or WhehW of FoF!
Interview re-edits/mashups: online interviews are recut, taking things that the participants have really said, but remixing them out of context, to create absurdist humour or draw attention to repetitive motifs a la supercuts. For instance, after rapper 6ix9ine’s legal problems and plea-bargaining in 2018, many poopers mashed up footage of him that in most cases is meant to mock and criticize the celebrity.
Jordan Peterson, a University of Toronto psychology professor, became a celebrity after taking an outspoken position against gender-fluidity. This led to a much expanded public speaking career and a bestselling book. Meanwhile, many people on the Internet had started listening to the charismatic and unpredictable (but politically dubious) influencer’s interviews and talks as a kind of meaningless free-form abstract art. And a number of interview re-edits have been created, especially leveraging Peterson’s appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience. This one uses two of Peterson’s appearances on the show to simulate an absurd self-interview between two aspects of Peterson’s persona:
Replacement Remixes (or Word Replacement Remixes): re-edited videos in which when a particular word occurs it is replaced with other words, sounds or other effects.
A variation on this that I call the “Buteverytime” poop style is very prevalent in the late 2010s. This involves “programmatic” changes to video footage (cf. audio track hacking), in which every example of a particular motif is replaced by something else, usually of an absurdist nature.
For example, the song hit 2009 song Fireflies by Owl City has been treated to countless modifications of this kind, including one in which the song is presented with the lyrics in alphabetical order:
A variation on this modifies the original in some way every time something happens. For example, The Bee Movie But Every Time They Say Bee It Gets Faster, where the full movie has been included but the incremental speeding up makes the whole thing come in at under 8 minutes.
Tumblr Awards/Comments Awards: video in which social media comments or text messages, real or invented, are read in a machine-like voice like an AI personal assistant. These are perhaps better considered as a form of “dank meme.”
Speed hacking: Absurdist distortions of time such as slowing down a few seconds of footage to several hours might fall into this category as well. E.g., We are number one but it’s slowed down to 24 hours.