Extreme Animals’ The Urgency (2014) + Paper Rad’s PjVidz #1: Color Vision
Since his work with Paper Rad, Jacob Ciocci has continued to explore Internet glut and malaise alongside composer-performer David Wightman under the moniker Extreme Animals. EAI is pleased to present one such collaboration, The Urgency (2014), alongside Paper Rad’s PjVidz #1: Color Vision (2003), available through April 6th. The two videos are accompanied by newly commissioned writing by Chloe Lizotte, who writes on Ciocci’s use of Katy Perry, the Monster Energy logo, fake blood, and more.
Additionally, on March 25th at 8 pm ET, EAI and Screen Slate are pleased to co-present a free screening of Ciocci and Wightman’s newest work, Psychology Today (2020), followed by a live discussion with the two artists, moderated by Jon Dieringer. Learn more.
Extreme Animals (Jacob Ciocci & David Wightman), The Urgency
2014, 37:49, color, sound
The viewing period for this work has ended.
Paper Rad, PjVidz #1: Color Vision
2003, 30:05 min, color, sound
The viewing period for this work has ended.
In videos cultural anthropologists might call “textbook early YouTube,” tween girls stare into the lenses of their webcams and start to lip sync to Katy Perry’s “E.T.” Jacob Ciocci’s long-form video The Urgency (2014) overlays a handful of these vlogs in a surreal, soupy mural: disembodied eyes and mouths materialize in front of the girls; an animated figure made of paint breakdances across the foreground. The source audio has been slowed to half-speed and stripped back to a vocal stem, which adds a menacing dimension to bubblegum hooks like “infect me with your loving.” A subliminal image strobes into view—the Monster Energy drink logo, gleaming in a man’s pupils—never to reappear.
This is “TAKE ME,” chapter three of seven YouTube-centric vignettes that comprise The Urgency. The work sprung from Ciocci’s underground music project with David Wightman, Extreme Animals, whose sample-heavy practice joyfully melds eclectic genres with pop-cultural reference points—one such song featured in The Urgency sets the Harry Potter theme to a trap beat and palm-muted power chords. Ciocci has said that his videos can act as the band’s lead vocalist, which highlights the shared interests found in both Ciocci’s audio sampling and found-footage remixing. On the one hand, there’s the visual density of sequences like “TAKE ME”—collating YouTube videos into intricate collages, often strobing like the net.art cousins of Ken Jacobs’ work. On the other hand, there’s Ciocci’s careful curation of these individual elements, which refract unexpected moods depending on their placement. The darkness of a Katy Perry lyric, the Satanic Panic meme currency that a 2014 viral video gave to a Monster Energy drink: Ciocci’s pieces wrest raw angst from cultural iconography in a process that YouTubers might call Pandora’s Unboxing.
Ciocci may be best known as a founding member of Paper Rad, the art collective that formed in Boston in 2000. Across zines, animated videos, websites, and more, the group—whose central trio was Ciocci, his sister Jessica, and Ben Jones—embraced an exuberant, colorful aesthetic, like filtering ’80s Saturday morning TV through Flash-animation textures. Inspired by Providence’s Fort Thunder, the DIY art space that incorporated a dizzying array of stuffed animals and discarded trinkets into its walls, Paper Rad strove to channel the exploratory feel of childhood creativity, which kept their retro vibes organic and inviting rather than solely referential. At the same time, they were genuinely interested in the art-making potential of the Internet and other emergent technology; in 2005 Paper Rad collaborated with Cory Arcangel, Ciocci’s former classmate at Oberlin College, on Super Mario Movie, which took place within a jailbroken Nintendo cartridge. In hindsight, Paper Rad’s web presence also captures a decentralized era of an Internet before social media monopolies, where the hyperlinks and animations of a personal website could constitute a hidden, singular world of their own.
The Urgency is more ominous than the best of Paper Rad, but Ciocci preserves the collective’s sense of play. A frequent motif in the piece is paint: tubes of animated paint are squeezed out in serpentine loops, while found videos indulge in splatter-painted canvases, kids donning blue face paint to dress up as Smurfs, or people dunking themselves in paint-like full-body slime cleanses. The gooey tactility has a chaotic appeal, out-of-bounds in a way that eludes the mundanity of adult life; there’s a similarly romanticized rebellion to the way that Ciocci plasters “NO RULES. NO PARENTS. NO GODS. NO MASTERS” across a mud-BMX montage. But Ciocci also draws a visual link between cartoon paint and cartoon blood, which, as fake as it looks, introduces the potential for something to go awry in this creative utopia. Those moments come in flashes: as one girl shoots a video in her room, her flimsy closet door comes off its hinges and topples forward onto her.
By collecting so many vlogs, The Urgency assembles a sharp portrait of American young millennial upbringing: emo makeup and Harry Potter Halloween costumes pop out within the generic interiors of suburban houses, rendered uncanny by Ciocci’s disorienting fragmentation. Within those walls, the kids experiment with the cultural modes they’ve been given to understand themselves, although that impulse is often entwined with distress. Self-help platitudes appear throughout the piece, and in what seems to be a baroque youth-group performance, a teen is tied up in chains by actors who represent the seven deadly sins.
Identity formation is also the subject of Ciocci’s latest video piece Psychology Today (2021), but in this newer work, he focuses on a more contemporary landscape of meme culture; as one example, a depressed animated Shrek embodies a dead-end businessperson. The piece is structured around a group of children watching algorithmically-generated YouTube Kids playlists. As Ciocci writes in his essay “Appetite for Destruction,” “We can’t look away from the train wreck of algorithmic culture because it reminds us of our own attempts at finding patterns in noise.” Distinctions between supposedly low and high culture are meaningless when gargling an algorithmic mishmash: the only certainty is that everything is in the mix, seeping into the subconscious. Even Shrek becomes a tool to understand our own frailties.
At the conclusion of The Urgency, members of a group called the “Institute of Retired Professionals” resolve to break out of their limiting “boxes” in confessional interviews. A computer, TV, or smartphone screen is certainly one of these boxes. But when that box—and the stream of visual culture it beams in—so drastically shapes a person’s perspective, and vice versa, is it possible to live outside of it?
Chloe Lizotte is a writer based in New York. She is a regular contributor to Reverse Shot and Screen Slate, with additional bylines in Cinema Scope, Film Comment, Vulture, and the Metrograph Journal. She has also worked with the Tribeca Film Festival as an Assistant Programmer for their New Online Work section.
Jacob Ciocci (b. 1977, Lexington, KY) is a multimedia artist and musician. Ciocci was a member of the influential art collective Paper Rad whose work in the field of net.art—one of contemporary arts' recent movements of the true avant-garde—helped ignite the genre, and is considered formative to a generation of younger artists whose works deals with the digital. He is also a co-founder of the long running electronic music and performance group, Extreme Animals. In his videos, installations and performances, the cultural symbols and technological tools of our time, both the popular and the obscure confront one another and the viewer on a visceral, emotional, and experiential level.
Ciocci has had recent solo exhibitions with Interstate Projects, New York; And/Or Gallery, Los Angeles and Prosjektrom Normanns, Norway. He has exhibited and performed his work at a range of venues, including MOMA, the New Museum, and the Tate Britain. Recent activities include a series of cell-phone charging sculptures for the Difference Engine group exhibition at Lisson Gallery (summer 2018) and 'Appetite For Destruction' a short essay about the online “Finger Family Video” phenomenon. Ciocci is also the second Google Image result for the phrase 'making friends with computers'.
David Wightman is a composer/performer whose music has been performed in concert halls, bars, art galleries, basements, institutions, and secret underground utopian environments. He creates music that is truly of our time—quoting, sampling, and appropriating the rich and varied songs that surround us at every turn. The resulting work turns ecstatic fragments into large-scale, buzzing, and dramatic pieces.
2021 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.