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I’ve been working YouTube music links into this column for as long as I’ve been writing it—at first wherever they fit, later as a send-off. Usually the chosen song has some vague thematic connection to the topic at hand, sometimes an ironic one. At other times it’s whatever I happen to be listening to, and almost invariably it’s an afterthought. This time around, though, I’d like to use last week’s kicker as this week’s jumping off point.
LOL Boys (Feat. Heart Streets), “Changes,” posted July 30, 2012
For many of us, the Onion headline, “90% Of Waking Hours Spent Staring At Glowing Rectangles,” rings all too true, and the computer screen has become far-and-away the preeminent glowing rectangle of our time. This is an unspectacular fact that cinema, which by its very nature is spectacular, hasn’t addressed and perhaps cannot address. But what of work produced explicitly for these computer screen?
What I’m interested in is the screenshot aesthetic—that is, the work that unabashedly uses the computer screen as its canvas—toolbar, cursor, desktop icons and all. In particular, I’m interested in the different iterations of this aesthetic that variously-budgeted music videos explored about a year ago, which I’ve yet to see grouped and discussed thematically. In the trend-voracious world of contemporary music journalism—the shape of things to come for those of us in other branches of criticism—you might as well be talking about something that happened a hundred years ago when referencing a phenomenon from last year. Given that my other big wad of verbiage this week was on Raoul Walsh’s The Big Trail of 1930, however, I’m feeling downright contemporary. While I’m not particularly expert in Net Art, these are works that seem significant for how they address our contemporary interface with the glowing rectangle, and how it has affected our perceptions; bear with me while I parse them.
Exhibit A: LOL Boys, which is Jerome LOL, a.k.a. Jerome Potter, and Markus Garcia. Potter is LA-based, Garcia is Montreal-based; the two met over a message board, convened IRL in Chicago in 2008, and have been producing and performing together since. The song “Changes” is the title track of a 2012 EP, released not long after the cob-nobbler NY Times’ ‘Fashion & Style’ section ran their lamestain piece on “seapunk,” a hashtag “micro-genre” that LOL had been grouped under. In a “My Life Online” appearance at Vice.com, 25-year old LOL defines “seapunk” as a “Tumblr aesthetic of early Web 1.0 art, a lot of water visuals” courtesy of antique platforms like Geocities and AngelFire, while at the same time disassociating himself from it.
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There was a lot of talk about LOL late last year when the Internet decided that Rihanna—or, more accurately, whomever handles that text-to-speech program designed to deliver asinine consumer fantasies to a bored and horny populace called “Rihanna”—had co-opted LOL’s aesthetic as backing visuals for her Saturday Night Live appearance of Nov. 10, 2012. LOL speaks to this, quite fairly, in both the Vice piece and this Fader interview, basically echoing Lev Manovich and Bernard Shütze’s line of discourse on sampling: “Remix actively negates claims of originality and origin, and equally does not aspire to any finality or final work. By the very logic of the process, any remixed material can itself be submitted to further reworkings in the heap.” At any rate, LOL had by then already moved on to different things. Here he is at Wistia.com, describing the making of the ‘Changes’ video:
“…I asked a bunch of friends to record themselves using any sort of webcam or camera phone while listening to the song ‘Changes.’ I also asked them to take a screenshot of their desktop. I used Photoshop to composite the backgrounds with the Photo Booth windows. I edited all the footage together in Final Cut Pro, and then refit the video into the Photo Booth windows, also in Final Cut.”
Among the friends visible are Schlohmo (1:19), an LA-based producer of analog soundscapes who remixed this very song, and Daytona Beach “Tumblr-wave rap game upstart” Kitty Pryde (1:02), best known for singles “Okay Cupid” and “Orion’s Belt,” the latter a collaboration with Riff Raff, the Houston rapper who recently announced his intention to sue the parties responsible for Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers for $8 to $10 million dollars, claiming his persona was pilfered to create James Franco’s character Alien.
Unicorn Kid, “Boys of Paradise,” posted Sept. 26, 2011
The “Tumblr aesthetic of early Web 1.0 art, a lot of water visuals” that LOL describes is exemplified by the desktop video for Unicorn Kid’s “Boys of Paradise.” Unicorn Kid is the stage name of Oliver Sabin, an electronic music wunderkind who hails from Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland. In a Dummy Mag interview, he seems in one breath to take credit for and disown what eventually snowballed into #seapunk and that Times piece. Having first cut his teeth in the chiptune scene, Unicorn Kid has discarded more genres in his 21 years than many of us knew existed at the same age. It’s all forgivable for someone who was a teenager when seapunk “broke”—not so the elder editors and writers who will clamor after a messageboard inside joke just so they can say they got there first.
The “Boys of Paradise” video’s setup is fairly simple: A QuickTime window, sometimes two, atop a desktop background. The background displays a shifting field of palm trees and Scuba visuals, anemones and tropical fish, tendrils of sunlight rippling on the ocean floor. The QuickTime windows display mostly ‘90s rave ephemera: Yin-Yangs and Smiley faces, strobe-lit hands-in-the-air dancing and, finally, a girl on the beach making frolicsome poses, wading out a little bit and manhandling a dove. For all the vacay imagery, one wonders just how often these plugged-in kids, pale as cave fish, actually get any sun or have a swim. Which reminds me of a joke that I wrote a couple of years ago:
Q- Why doesn’t the pool at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs have a deep end?
A- Because there’s no VICE Guide to Swimming.
Have I mentioned that I adore “Boys of Paradise”?
Modeselektor (feat. Otto von Schirach), “Evil Twin,” Jan 13, 2012
Compared to whippersnappers like LOL and Unicorn Kid, the Berlin electronic duo Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary, a.k.a. Modeselektor, are a venerable established institution, having been around since the mid-‘90s and having collaborated with universally-known quantities like Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. (Though Unicorn Kid, it should be noted, was doing official Pet Shop Boys remixes when he was still in short pants.)
The prankish video for Modeselektor’s “Evil Twin” is, accordingly, less of a homemade affair—although in some respects it’s the most minimalist of the bunch, played out against a gray, neutral backdrop and black-and-white, cardboard-and-electric tape props. The track comes from 2011’s Monkeytown, and the twins of the video are, appropriately, simian. Summoned from desktop icons with a couple clicks, these grudgeful, competitive twins wear cartoon monkey masks atop nylon bodysuits: One is black, the other orange. The twins’ struggle takes place variously inside and in-between one or two restless QuickTime windows. A busy cursor is constantly manipulating these windows, re-sizing them, adjusting their placement, or swiping them across the screen to-and-fro, vertically and horizontally, in the process creating interesting fractures and distortions in the twins’ bodies.
Within these parameters, several very delicately-calibrated and logic-defying spatial gags play out: The duo tug-of-wars a cereal box, then a banana, over the breakfast table; they battle to hog a “stage”; and they finally have it out in a wildly choreographed mock fistfight. The competition may be read as a comment on the tetchy collaborative process—or about the ways in which the desktop is a battlefield between open windows, locked in an ongoing struggle to hold our attention. The execution is as deceptively simple and as artfully complex as Antonio Prohias’ “Spy Vs. Spy” strips in Mad Magazine.
“Dent de cuir,” the video’s identified director, turns out to be yet another duo working remotely: Benjamin Mege (Paris) and Jean-Philippe Chartrand (Montreal). Dent de cuir’s website describes them as “a collective of directors who loves [sic] to work on Music videos, Commercials & Mmotion design projects.” More recently, they made the video for Hamburg-based Neosignal’s ‘Planet Online’ (2013), which, though it doesn’t use the desktop format, is just funny enough to warrant a look:
Neosignal, “Planet Online,” May 15, 2013
Jean-Philippe describes the video: “The idea… was to look at how the next generation are interacting with the internet and are faced with an ever expanding range of content. We employed early 1990’s advertising aesthetics so we could recreate the Internet by using toys as the media.” In a mockery of a Saturday morning cartoon commercial spots, two boys gawp at a tabletop playset littered with sold-separately accessories, all of them stand-ins for popular Internet destinations, personalities, and phenomena, past and present. Gradually, the boys become mired in the red-light district, which is comprised of barely-disguised versions of NSFW sites (YourPorn [YouPorn], Rotted [Rotten]: Pure Evil Since 1996), a playful way to refer to the fact that anyone growing up online can fairly easily load their brains with images beyond Caligula’s wildest imaginings before they get their driver’s licence
Diplo & Oliver Twizt, “Go,” Feb 16, 2012
If anyone in this discussion should need no introduction it’s Diplo, the DJ/ producer responsible for, among ten thousand other things, Usher’s soft-knocking panty-peeler “Climax,” and whose Mad Decent label is home to none other than Riff Raff.
The video for Diplo’s “Go” isn’t purely desktop-set, but has enough screenshot elements to warrant consideration. More than anything, the sludgy, low-res visuals reminded me of the Eye-Tripping Psychedelics series of VHS tapes that made the rounds among the ‘90s shroomin’ crowd. The elements of “Go”: Some old video player window that looks more outdated than a horse and buggy, encrusted with barnacles of glitch, surrounded by a gnat-like cloud of swirling digital detritus. A girl, the top half of her head obscured by a superimposed rabbit ‘mask,’ repeats a cryptic phrase; the video’s YouTube Comments section is full of guesses as to what it is: Pandas? Francis? Kansas? Feathers? The only detectable “theme” is an abundance of greyhound imagery, including degraded race track footage, tapering dog heads topped with browser bars that almost resemble doric columns, and a canine viewed in full slo-mo stride, like that proto-.gif, the Muybridge horse.
The video, as well as the “Go Bunny” app used to create the rabbit-girl, is the work of Pinar Demirdag and Viola Renate, who run their own multi-platform design studio in Amsterdam, along the universally-curious Renaissance model. Pinar & Viola are self-described connoisseurs of “contemporary digital folk-art,” whose overwrought wares—including webcam masks to support Occupy Turkey, digital paintings, and limited-edition beach towels (€600–€750)—come with stated political agendas. In a recent interview at Triangulation Blog, Demirdag describes the immersive Internet research process through which the pair cull web imagery, pausing to take a slap at seapunk: “[w]e’re not spending 2 minutes on framing a Tumblr image and then calling it art. It’s unacceptable to us. We’re allergic to dolphins, palm trees…”
Nothing drives home the absurdity of progress like the sight of something that was recently state-of-the-art turned freshly obsolescent. While it is somehow possible to watch Henry Hathaway’s Call Northside 777 and still be dazzled by the police technology of 1948, the c. 2000 ZIP discs in Mission Impossible 2 are almost unbearably hilarious. Is the fetishization of quaint Web 1.0 kitsch, which exemplifies this phenomenon, a species of backwards-looking futurism, sprung from nostalgia for the just-missed experiences of the older brothers and sisters of the last generation? Or is it an extension of the program of flagrant, guiltless consumerism that defiantly embraces all things giddy and idiotic, cheap and colorful, airbrushed, bedazzled and Blingee, boardwalk and mall-derived, things like Lisa Frank throwbacks at Urban Outfitters and the Spring Breakers “Skittles” look?
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It’s a bit of both, methinks. What’s certain is that, among the works mentioned above, only Dent de cuir’s, particularly “Planet Online,” suggest any satirical intent, any desire to stand outside of rather than exhort and exemplify. For Jerome LOL, Unicorn Kid, and Pinar & Viola, the virtual world is the best of all possible—there’s no place like homepage. (A very old man bit of punnery, that.) Here is Demirdag, again arguing all the more eloquently for ESL clunkiness: “Life happens on the Internet! I stay more at the window of my computer than at my flat window. I don’t considerer Safari as a bunch of animals anymore. IRL is the replica of the dirty underground streets of the Internet. IRL is the mainstream of the streets of Internet.”
This begs the question: Can the screenshot, if indeed it is the vital vantage of the age, be of use in dramatic work? As willfully delimiting aesthetics go, it seems to me to have greater potential than the enforced monotony of the camcorder POV/found-footage model, which has migrated from horror to science fiction to ubiquity. Speaking of which: I recall one of the better episodes in the 2012 horror anthology V/H/S, “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger,” being filtered entirely through video chat. (As if to deliberately ruffle my perfectly-organized filing system of dislikes, it was directed by Joe Swanberg, whose work I revile.)
Surely there are other examples, but they’re escaping me. In the early aughts I recall hearing about, but never seeing, an all-screenshot French feature film (just try Googling that vague memory). And of course the exclusive screenshot format has been used in several web series: You Suck at Photoshop, cam roundelay The Guild, or the Lisa Kudrow-created web series-cum-Showtime property Web Therapy, which takes place in the iChat interface. Rather closer to my sense of humor, though, is the oeuvre of Eugene Kotlyarenko.
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Kotlyarenko’s most recent work is a music video for the artist Slava (3:01 in the “Changes” video), but more germane to the subject at hand is his eleven-episode miniseries from 2010 called “Instructional Video #4: Preparation for Mission,” a.k.a. “SkyDiver.” Filmed entirely “in computer,” it’s composed almost entirely of screenshots, of (surreptitious?) Skype conversations, Chatroulettes, Facebooking, and other sundry web-browsing. The director stars as “Eugene Kotlyarenko,” a filmmaker who, in the wake of romantic disappointment, is drawn towards the rhetoric of radical cleric Wanar Ibn Ali. Eugene begins living a double-life, divided between the usual rounds of online socializing (“In the eyes of my parents and many of my uninitiated friends, I was exactly the same as always…”) and plotting a terrorist act—exploiting for comedy the unresolved conflict between a belief system steeped in medieval wrath that relies on 21st century tech for Fatwah, and applying the language of contemporary media-savvy schmooze (“How can we present this so that it will become viral?”) to the staging of grave acts. In the moment of the #DzhokharTsarnaev Rolling Stone cover, it’s essential viewing.
In Kotlyarenko’s follow-up, 2011’s 0s & 1s, he transposes the trappings of the Internet onto an IRL narrative. “The predominant screen of our time is the one you’re looking at right now,” Kotlyarenko writes in the Director’s Statement, “Why not acknowledge that we are speaking this new language? Why not use this new language to tell a story?” And though it may be that the fickle Internet culture that the screenshot aesthetic was meant to address has already rendered it passé, taken together, the above works certainly tell something of the story of our times.
That brings us to this week’s kicker—a track from Ft. Lauderdale metalcore band Morning Again’s The Cleanest War (1996) called ‘America On-Line,’ which I adored when I was sixteen, and which is about how the Internet is just terrible.
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Nick Pinkerton is a regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine and sundry other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow Nick on Twitter @NickPinkerton.