digitalages

[digitalages]

Legitimizing User-generated Content, Remixing, and Memefication

Internet memes tend to be appropriative works, relying on existing images and media and audiences’ prior knowledge of the works appropriated, or at least familiarity with the lexicon of this style of communication. It seems that this style should be a natural progression from appropriative works of the past century, on grounds of both technological and cultural development. Putting aside the possibilities of producing original content that digital cameras have brought about; digital media and the internet have allowed for immediate and near-infinite edits and remixes. I think it’s apt to compare remixes, whether they be audio or visual or both, to writing. These forms draw on established cultural texts and artefacts to create something new or generate dialogue, in the same way that literature or written criticism does. And if it’s too much to compare memes to great prose, it’s at least worth recognising that they require complex cultural knowledge to create or consume. Even if that knowledge may be taken for granted in the era where generations of people considered to be “digital natives” are coming of age and creating these kinds of texts.

In an scholarly article on youtube remixes Tom Ballard identifies a specific kind of video parody ubiquitous on the platform as “video ideographs”. These videos don’t necessarily subvert or contradict the original form or message within the work being parodied. He says, “To be a genuine ideograph, video parody must rely upon an already existing video, and it must imitate that video precisely in at least some ways in order to invoke the themes and ideology of the original.” I’d like to look to a few examples of this to illustrate the concept.

The O.C. season 2 finale may have been more or less lost to the annals of early 00s television history, but the use of Imogen Heap’s song “Hide and Seek” (or the Jason Derulo song that liberally samples the “mmm whatcha say” hook) to signify overwrought on screen deaths has lived on.

The then-current-release song itself juxtaposed over the scene pushes the melodrama over the edge into camp. The edit’s use of slow-motion and reaction shots are already over the top, albeit intentionally as it fits the generic mode of The O.C. While the song’s lyrics fit the scene, musically it’s a strange pick. The choice to use this avant-garde pop song breaks the usual conventions of dramatic music that generally underscores this type of scene, and undercuts the seriousness. However it does serve to make what could have been a standard plot point extremely memorable in its uncanniness. 

The SNL parody of the scene which may not fit Ballard’s stricter definition of video ideograph, as it pushes the concept of a melodramatic television death past its logical conclusion and lampoons televisual conventions. However at this moment with over 33 million views on Youtube it may easily have had a larger cultural reach than its source material. The needle drops on the song, as in the O.C. scene after a gunshot, but as each successive character enters the room and is shot the song restarts, to comic effect as multiple shots are fired. Following the reading of letter predicting the whole chain of events (another trope of certain melodramas) the multiple shots end in the song overlaid multiple times and every character dead on the floor. 

“As technologies make video creation and circulation easier, they will likely become more developed and ubiquitous. … Satire has been with us since ancient times, and it seems that the modern version will only continue to expand use and meanings of ideographs into the future.” Ballard, T. (2016)

Another great use of source material comes in this edit of a scene from American Psycho. Business cards are very well edited over to be old school online forum signature cards. American Psycho is itself a satire, and the edit doesn’t go to further ridicule the films or the characters; rather it uses the scene as a rhetorical structure to satirise the identifiers of a different niche social group. The pissing contest between fictional Wall Street traders over business cards is equally as absurd as the one-up-manship that plays out in niche internet forums. However the ridiculousness of business men comparing cartoon character signatures is amplified if the viewer is familiar with the specific characters used and their cultural connotation. A video game mecha-suited soldier vs. a vocaloid avatar vs. an edgy albino hedgehog vs. the human prince turned llama from a Disney film crying in the rain- all have very distinct sources and signifiers within online communities. That knowledge augments the humour of the scene.

Vernonator6497

From here I’d like to look at one creator’s work as a case study for this type of remix culture. Semi-anonymous cross-platform-posted video edits from Vernonator6497 have racked up over 16 million views on Youtube alone. Many of his more simple edits involve removing the music from live performance videos of established pop stars and inserting cartoonish sound effects- heavy breathing, ruffling fabric, shoe squeaks, and claps.

What I’ve found equal parts fascinating and cringe-inducing is the series of videos that pull from Wendy Williams’ public appearances.

Wendy Williams and the The Wendy Williams Show makes a perfect object for this kind of digital appropriation. She has a well established personality and persona ripe for re/decontextualization. She has history of slightly to very strange behaviour on air. It’s fair to say she’s very striking and distinctive looking (even before being shopped). The meeting of her own innate weirdness and willingness to purposefully provoke guests and generate controversy (as talk show hosts are wont to do) creates plenty of entertaining and outlandish live television, in and of itself. But the moments of dead air or mistakes endemic to shooting live television serve equally well as fodder for this type of remix when overlaid with effects and edits. Categorised cheekily as WendCU (Wendy Cinematic Universe) by the creator, I’d like to look at some of the longer (than one minute) videos within that series and look at how they approach creating a narrative through remix and reference.

Wendy: Endgame is named in reference to the Marvel franchise, which many of the subsequent addictions to the WendCU continue. From Free Wendy 2: The Adventure Home, to The Haunting of Wendy Williams, to the Emancipation of Wendy (Redux). Other recognisable public figures’ personas- like Guy Fieri, influencer James Charles, Mariah Carey- are regularly remixed and pitted against Wendy with fitted out face filters, laser eyes, and telekinetic explosions. I’d like to focus on Wendy: Endgame because rather than playing with multiple personas, in an existential turn it pits Wendy against herself.

As Wendy exits the stage of her talk show to audiences cheering her out, behind the scenes footage follows her to the editing room of her show and all the people working in it. In trademark style the scene becomes silent save for foley footsteps, jangling keys, creaking chairs, and gulps. An editor goes to pull up footage and it’s overlaid with a video of a differently dressed Wendy Williams in a green robe, sitting on her studio floor playing jacks and glancing up into the camera. The original Wendy asks, “Now what is that?” to which the other Wendy replies “That’s me.” Dramatic music cuts in. The image cuts between the wide-eyed original Wendy watching the screen and the other Wendy speaking to camera about plans to talk. Ominous music plays as the screen cuts out and the image cuts between the first Wendy, still agog, and the editors shown to be laughing in her direction. As she walks away the video becomes distorted and jump cuts as she walks away, the other Wendy’s dialogue playing over it. After a door shuts behind her and she walks into the stage of her talk show, implied to be across from her supernatural double sitting in the audience seating, while the music from the alien scene in Annihilation (when Natalie Portman does a choreographed Harpo Marx mirror routine with an extraterrestrial) plays. A nonsensical conversation between the two Wendys is cobbled together from the existing clips. The other Wendy, blue light shooting from her chest explodes the heads of two men sitting in the audience on either side of her. “How do you do that?” asks the original Wendy to no answer. The scene culminates in the other Wendy saying “We’ve got each other everybody?” with a dramatic pause and groan from the original Wendy punctuating it. The other Wendy blurts “...or not” and with a flick of her wrist explodes the original Wendy while the image goes red and “Unmade” by Thom Yorke plays. A ghostly face reappears over the original Wendy’s exploded head while audio of the studio audience chanting “Wendy” plays. The body and ghostly head are digitally transposed to the seat next to the other Wendy facing each other. The scene ends on a close up of the other Wendy saying “perfect”.

While this video out of the WendCU may not be the best of the bunch, I see it as the beginning of more serious attempts at narrative within this series of videos that seem to be by and large “for fun” memes. It manages to be both humorous and uncanny in it’s use of raw material almost exclusively from the Wendy Williams. The edit deftly uses spacial logic and obvious editing to heighten the emotional and (loose narrative) logic of the video. The eeriness and use of supernatural doubles looks like it could have been ripped from the Black Lodge of Twin Peaks, were it not set in a talkshow studio. This kind of remix that pulls heavily from cinematic conventions while making use of the obvious video editing style of the moment elevates the form. Memes and adjacent forms of user generated media are becoming increasingly complex, and this example illustrates the possibilities and growing tendencies for creators to synthesise high and low art into their works.

It’s hard to say how well or long works like this- that are intended for immediate consumption in dialogue with other contemporary texts- will hold up. Non-commercial digital remixes have a leg up on self-referential and metatextual modes ubiquitous in film and television from the past few decades; the parodic, unofficial, unprofitable nature of these works leaves creators more or less free from concerns of legal rights or financial repercussions of using appropriated material.

References

Ballard, T. (2016). YouTube Video Parodies and the Video Ideograph. Rocky Mountain Review, [online] 70(1), pp.10–22. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/24898564.

HAFNER, C.A. (2015). Remix Culture and English Language Teaching: The Expression of Learner Voice in Digital Multimodal Compositions. TESOL Quarterly, [online] 49(3), pp.486–509. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43893769.

Knobel, M. and Lankshear, C. (2008). Remix: The Art and Craft of Endless Hybridization. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, [online] 52(1), pp.22–33. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30139647.

[digitalages]

Realism* and Dogme

Festen- Practicality of Digital and revitalization of national cinemas

There is something perverse, or at least backwards about transferring digital media into an analogue format. What do you gain from playing a digitally mixed album on a vinyl record? 

[digitalages]

Digital Versus Analogue

For good or ill, digital video is more accessible than film ever was. Celluloid creates in individual frames a seamless image by chemical process. Digital relies on a pointillist array of pixels interacting with each other based on encoded data.

I’m surprised to find in class discussions that so few of my classmates had attended (at least consciously) analogue film screenings. I’m not sure if that has more to do with the difference of a few years in age between me and my classmates who were born after the millennium or if I just happened to live in parts of the world where there still were handfuls of repertory cinemas, art houses, and cinematheques that would screen 35mm and 70mm prints. Maybe I was just lucky enough to have parents who would drag me to them as a child and the interest to seek those out as an adult. Maybe it was my mother very literally enforcing John Sayles Night.