Proto-Vines: an Inquiry

I spend a bit of time on TikTok, mostly so I can keep minimally abreast of my son's cultural life. I find it occasionally amusing, but as a platform it's extremely circumscribed. I'm not referring to the time limit, which was recently expanded from one to three minutes. I'm actually thinking about the platform's algorithm, which is all about boosting various iterations of memes -- particular routines, dance moves, and sound clips. Secondarily, the algorithm sends you content based on your (apparent) identity categories.

But one account recently caught my eye. It's all about Vine, the short-video platform that Twitter launched in 2013 and discontinued three years later. Unlike TikTok, with its algorithmic engine of hashtags and lateral interests, Vine was unpredictable. And for this reason, Twitter could not properly monetize it. Posting Vines on TikTok is not exactly subversive, but it does clearly demonstrate the distinct content that each platform tended to produce. The most popular Vines were one-shot comedy bits, orchestrated with a recognition that brevity and (in many cases) real time were the essentials of the medium. Buster Keaton and Ernie Kovacs would have really dug Vine.

Recently I've been going back and looking at some early video art, mostly from the 1970s and early 80s. What I'm finding is that certain artists of that era were also making work that foregrounded the strengths and limits of their medium: TV, videotape, and image processors. While some of this work is still shown quite a bit here and there, such as Three Transitions by Peter Campus or Richard Serra's videos Boomerang (with Nancy Holt) and Television Delivers People (with Carlotta Schoolmann), a lot of other like-minded video art has faded into obscurity.

Yesterday I rewatched an old episode of Alive From Off Center from 1985, and was shocked to re-encounter the work of Terry Dibble. More of a video comedian than a technician, Dibble adopted the performative gestures pioneered by Vito Acconci and Laurie Anderson and condensed them into one-liners, focused on his own bland, institutional white-guy appearance. His piece The Sound of Music is particularly interesting since it does seem to call back to work like Kovacs, using black-box sketchwork as a means for critiquing our alienated society.

I would not make any grand claims for Dibble, or his nearest kindred spirit in video art, William Wegman, who wisely surmised that there's nothing as comical as a bored dog. But in these works we can see a particular spirit, characterized by a casual performance style and above all an ability to identify wry absurdity out in the wild. 

Vine allowed its makers to use their phones to capture the world around them, in all its ridiculousness. (I'd go so far to say it was a populist form of Capitalist Realism.) TikTok, by contrast, is the tool of influencers and power-users who, together with the platform's own internal logic, work to induce conformity under the guise of creativity.