More than a series of new media, the colossal volume, variety, and accelerating circulation of moving-images today need to be understood as a new social environment. Vast segments of the global population have become regular video makers and editors, generating behaviours that upset our understanding of distinct media objects. For example, numerous rituals, contemporary to Web 2.0, are invented and spread visually via videos on social media – from ‘gender-reveal’ baby-showers to politically repurposed Sufi rites in the Arab Spring. The birth of these practices coincides with their first digital images, disrupting the previous chronology whereby the establishment of a social practice was followed by its depictions. Beyond the socially productive power of these videos, the latter’s forms and structures also spill out into ‘real-life’, determining behaviours through ways of performing for the camera, and through individuals’ internalisation of the rhythms and aesthetics of editing. Yet we still lack the language and theoretical tools to grasp these phenomena linked to what we might call an edited life. As art historians, we can learn by turning to artists who both examine such moving-images and use them as a privileged medium to convey social insight. Several artists who recently rose to...

Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a form of experimental games that originated in the early twenty-first century. Most games in this category, including Microsoft’s The Beast and 42 Entertainment’s I Love Bees, function as collaborative experiences that use the real world as a platform, blurring the lines between games and reality. To accomplish this fusion, these games incorporate a wide breadth of everyday media types including text, video, audio, print, phone calls, websites, email, social media, locative technologies, live streaming, and live performance. In ARGs, players interact directly with characters, solve puzzles to advance the narrative, and build a collaborative community to coordinate real-life and online activities. This presentation examines two science fiction ARGs, entitled A Labyrinth and ECHO, which I co-directed with Heidi Coleman and developed with the Fourcast Lab. These games were created from the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as a networked response to this emergent and unfolding crisis. These ARGs used techniques of performance, gaming, and networked media cultures to co-create a sense of community that was shaken during this period. The media flailing of transmedia production became a collective and affective response to an uncertain historical present....

For this presentation, the production of digital memes will be inscribed in the long term, that of a history of composite images conceived for political purposes. The idea of contagion will be considered in two ways: in the sense of the virality of images, their capacity to spread in the public sphere, but also in an iconographic sense: contagion of one body by another, hybrid characters, chimeras and monsters, generated by a desire to disqualify people or political entities. The notion of composite imagery can also be understood in two ways. It refers both to the hybrid nature of the images, conceived by montage of pre-existing images, and to the figuration of composite beings (human-animal, human-object, animal-object). By their irreverence towards all aesthetic criteria, by the manipulation of pre-existing images they bring into play, by their viral circulation, contemporary Internet memes are indeed part of this history of composite imagery with a satirical aim. I hope to show that internet memes can be understood with the intellectual tools of art history, be it formalism or iconology, but also how new media can carry the afterlife of past images. Max Bonhomme holds a PhD in Art History (University of Paris Nanterre - HAR). His dissertation deals with the political uses of...

Circulating mainly as captioned pictures and videos (but being a form of thought in the first place), memes are featured with vivid synthetic qualities and easiness to be modified and personalized; in this respect their pre-digital phylogeny may include: anonymous art (from Surrealists’ “exquisite corpse” to Banksy), political mottos (prototypical catchphrase “Keep calm and carry on”), remix cultures (from Aristophanes to subvertising), vernacular religious iconography (the countless, diatopically diverse representations of the very same saintly figure). On the one hand, memes feature a striking, “whimsical” (Shifman) element, a punctum (Barthes), which is a mistake in a very broad sense (from the broken English of LOLcats to the exaggerated physiognomy of emoticons and rage faces). On the other hand, they feature a template, a modular “serial syntagm” (Geninasca), being “rickety” (Eco). Memes can be created according to three main “radicals” (Frye), which outline both a chronological and syntactic-pragmatic typology (a digital update of Lévi-Strauss’ “bricolage” and Genette’s “hypertextuality”): sharing, remixing, and remaking. There is no such thing as the alleged “formula of virality” whose myth is being elaborated within digital marketing; in fact, virality itself embraces the...

« By far Grand Theft Auto is the most beautiful environment. It’s also one of the most terrible games. It’s really aggressive » says in an interview Joan Pamboukes during the exhibition Open 1 World: Video Games & Contemporary Art. In fact, video games, and more precisely Grand Theft Auto, became a source of inspiration for many contemporary artists. Some of the specific features of GTA make it a particularly used video game for its creative potential: the fact that it’s an « open world », its different social and political interpretations, and even its technological functions. Consequently, GTA became an artistic medium and a media in itself taking part in the phenomenon of visual contagion, as a framework for reflection, between hybridization and remediation of contemporary images. If Joan Pamboukes uses GTA V in order to create abstract photographs, in a similar way to Benjamin Bardou in his work Do Computers Dream of Electronic Sheep? (2013) by creating the futuristic urban atmosphere of the movie Blade Runner anew (1982, Ridley Scott), other artists twist and employ the game in order to understand its ideology such as the audiovisual installation Finding Fanon 2 (2015) from Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, questioning the post-colonial condition or the video 11 Executions...

Digitization changed the technical characteristics of video drastically. The flow of scanlines has been superseded by numerical images composed of pixels, the magnetic video tape by digital storage devices, the TV-monitor by flat screens, tablets or high-definition projectors. Moreover, the Internet, smartphones, the rise of social media platforms and the so-called clip culture they foster, altered our relationship to the moving image fundamentally. In short: digitization and the internet made video omnipresent and has through technological developments both in hard- and software “widened the spectrum of its visual expression”. Consequently, digitization of video also had an immense impact on how artists employ the medium today. It opened up a new range of possibilities to produce, edit, playback, present and circulate moving images. Digital video not only offers more options in manipulation, the internet also extended the space for the display of video art into “virtual and global spaces”, which in return triggered a shift of how video art now often embedded in an expanded field of multimedia components is perceived. My paper will focus on this “widened spectrum” and “embeddedness” of digital video. Discussing works by artists such as Meriem Bennani, whose 2 Lizards (2020) was...

Visual contagions are very common in the creative process of many artists nowadays. I have been studying the creative process for many years now, through a phenomenological approach, that is, I am interested in the creative process as a lived experience. I am using the explicitation interview as developed by Pierre Vermersch. This interview technique was developed as a way to interrogate the subjective experience in a manner that is objective and reproducible. Using that technique, I have interviewed numerous artists about their creative process, and in particular I have questioned them about moments that they, themselves, considered important in their process. That includes among other things moments when decisions were triggered by other works, theirs or the works of fellow artists, and in particular by images. A lot of these visual contagions are multimedial, that is, artists are often inspired by images outside of their medium of predilection (for instance, it’s very common for a filmmaker to be inspired by a photograph or a painting). In this contribution, I will describe what I found out about this process of multimedial visual contagion while transcribing and analyzing some of those explicitation interviews. I will also show how the enaction paradigm developed by Francisco...

Fused with references to video games and comics, manga and science-fiction, fantasy worlds and electronics in its lyrics, album covers, films and mythologies, rap music as a genre has – since its very humble beginning – built an intimate rapport with geek culture. "Early adopters" of consumer technology – often corrupting its original application in acts of sabotage or experimentation –, rappers are notoriously characterized by their heavy consumption of both new media and pop culture. For a few decades now, hip hop has dominated the cultural conversation. With the advent of a generation of digital native rappers – whose Internet uber-literacy includes mastering the mechanics of virality and diffusion –, the frontier, the battleground space for innovation and relevancy, has shifted online. This research will explore the role of the Rapper in the circulation of Internet vernacular, reflecting on the sheer efficiency of the Rapper as an outlet of taste expression, as an agent of spread of new media aesthetics, culture and ideology, from the fringe to the mainstream. As case studies, a curated array of rappers will be considered, featuring both established acts as well as up-and-coming contenders. Their faces covered in tats, sporting candy-colored dreads, rainbow grillz, eclectic or...

Among the literature dealing with the circulation of images, the endless flow of pictures seems to be a recurring metaphor. This alarmist and iconophobic discourse is illustrated and sometimes even reinforced by certain contemporary artworks. In order to consider this hybrid and elusive object of study, would it not be necessary to build a made-to-measure methodology? Taking as a starting point the art project No Ghost Just a Shell (1999-2002) initiated by Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe the two artists buy a character from a Japanese character design company before distributing it among a group of artists, allowing each one to produce artworks with the fictional character I propose using the concept of “latent image”, a term borrowed from analogue photography, in order to imagine an investigation method specific to the transmedia mutations of images. Through their circulation, these images change status, properties, substances and may overflow our need to circumscribe them as completed and stabilized forms. Rather than establishing yet another typology of images, I will propose to study these visual entities within their mode of existence: an indeterminate state, in which all the potentialities are still open, existing simultaneously. This concept urges us to reconfigure our...

Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, typically refer to practices where audiovisual mediums and life-size role-playing games are intertwined – such as Cicada or historical reenactments. They are limited in time, and will often present players with cryptic problems that require a collective effort to be solved. More recent contributions to the genre have relied heavily on discussion boards and social networks to create a new brand of ARG, one in which the individual viewing experience is absorbed into a collective exegesis. These can be internet videos, fictional video games, music albums, etc. The one commonality between them is the fact they are presented neither as a game nor as a problem awaiting resolution; their creators, in fact, try hard to hide the fact they are ARGs at all. However, the viewer will notice audiovisual or narrative inconsistencies that create a divergence between the actual viewing and the “ideal”, unsuspecting viewing. The “game” for the viewer consists therefore of understanding there is a game. The viewer will then be led to other mediums (video games, websites, geographical locations, mp3 files, etc.) relevant to the ARG – indeed a cross-platform experience. Because the spectator will gain access to these other mediums through hints within the ARG, their...

The paper observes how videos and images are produced and circulated by videogame players across social media to negotiate their agency within the ludic simulation. It argues that players’ renegotiation of agency resonates with some of the visual responses circulated in relation to the COVID-19 crisis, particularly in relation to the assumed ableism of citizens and their capacity to exercise their will on the surrounding environment. The paper looks at the videogame Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games 2018) as case study. In the game, set in 1899, the character Arthur Morgan dies of tuberculosis. The videogame does not provide a cure for the disease or a way to prevent it. It is presented as the consequence of an invisible action. The research is based on a number of YouTube videos and memes in which players respond to their loss of agency by claiming to have identified the moment of Arthur’s contagion, and elaborate strategies to prevent or cure the disease. The paratexts preserve a conception of agency based on representational premises, which assumes the storyline to be organized around visible and actionable narrative forks, and the non-playable characters to be disposable and instrumental to save the main character. The paper explores the performative and affective potential of...

Memes have never been more popular than in times of the coronavirus pandemic (see Google Trends for “meme” between 2004 to 2021). Currently, many memes are circulated by users on the Internet to reflect and criticize the crisis. In other words, the pandemic itself went viral. Originally, memes were strongly associated with viruses. For popular biologist Richard Dawkins, who coined the term in 1976 long before social media, memes are viruses that spread from mind to mind, infecting anybody that is not immune against religious ideas, political ideologies or catchy songs. The transfer of the term from evolutionary biology to the Internet raises the following questions: Are Internet memes and memes the same thing? How do memes relate to viruses and viral content? Whether these terms are used or not, the conceptual change of memes from viral infection to digital picture practice is highly underexplored. In my talk, I propose to discuss the transfer of the term in a historical perspective, challenging the assumption that the concept is literally translated to the Internet. This raises the question, when and where the concept of memes did change. As a starting point of investigation, I turn to the forums of Something Awful, 4chan, and Reddit, where Internet culture originates from. 4chan and...