Oral Presentation - Paradigm-a-Dozen

Art in a Digital World

     English philosopher George Edward Moore once remarked that “a great artist is always before his [or her] time or behind it,” and with the advent of this new “digital age,” his quote could not be more prescient nearly seventy years later. Over the past fifteen years or so, the Internet has revolutionized the way we communicate, interact, and spend our free time. We are riding the crest of this constantly evolving technology, where the next “cutting edge,” the next billion-dollar idea lurks just around the corner. At the same time, the Internet creates an unprecedented archive, cataloging the world's information as a unified collective, accessible to anyone with a connection. At once, the Internet exists ahead and behind its time, described by Moore, preserving the past while marching onwards towards an unknown, ever-changing future. Thus, the Internet exists as a breeding ground for new artforms and artists, giving virtually everyone a chance to speak their mind and achieve universal recognition, something unheard of a mere twenty years ago. Memes like LOLcats and other phenomena are direct products of the Internet, combining words and images into “remixed,” chuckle-inducing visual jokes that become ingrained in our popular culture. “Remix” or “mashup” art has exploded onto the mainstream in the past few years as people twist or change culture as they see fit, creating a new generation of subversive, culture-jamming art that can be viewed anytime. One such group at the forefront of this new movement is Everything is Terrible!, a collective that scours video stores, thrift markets, and garage sales for hilariously bizarre VHS tapes from yesteryear. The group then digitally edits and remixes these long-forgotten, now-obsolete videos into whacked-out, ridiculously entertaining shorts. Although these clips are meant to be funny, they subtly make a profound statement on the state of our pop culture. These videos, once fleeting, ephemeral VHS fodder, now have a second life on the Internet. Part found footage, part digital trickery, part fever dream, these videos reflect a postmodern aesthetic, both critiquing and nostalgically looking back upon a dying form of entertainment. 
     Currently one of my favorite websites, Everything is Terrible! gleefully blurs the line between art, mashup, and hallucination. Take a peek at one of their most infamous videos,entitled "Stranger Danger:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxAndD9lVqM.a seemingly innocuous video about child safety drenched in early 1990s cheese. Bizarrely, the video stars what appears to be an alien creature, narrowly evading pedophiles to a ridiculously corny theme song. Everything is Terrible! knows that this video is hilariously godawful, enjoyable strictly in an ironic sense, and edits it accordingly to highlight the most puzzling aspects of the video. This "self-conscious, reflexive" (Bass 8) condition is wholly indicative of a post-modern text: a work that cannibalizes material from the past into a meditative pastiche. Looking at this woefully misguided video today, one can't help but laugh at all the elements working against it: using an alien as a poster child for kid safety, having a underlying sense of inappropriate, cartoonish humor, and the sheer idea that kids would learn anything from it. Thanks to the Internet and the warped minds at Everything is Terrible!, they have saved this gem from video obscurity, preserving it as almost a time capsule of halcyon days of the early-1990s. We look back at this video with a tinge of nostalgia, but also with a sobering foresight. Kids actually had to watch this stuff in classrooms back when the O.J. Simpson scandal was just hitting the newsstands. Personally, I never had to watch videos on this level of cheesiness, but it was damn near close. Watching these videos now, I can't help but wonder if, in an infinitesimal way, they played a part in my development as a child, and fragments of it are still ingrained in my psyche like VHS shrapnel. Everything is Terrible! simultaneously subverts and critiques this notion by highlighting the most head-scratching aspects of a video into a two-minute post-modern masterpiece - existing in both the past and the future.