LOL Jerome "Blockz"

In a complete departure from the previous posts, today I'm going to post about web 1.0 art, frequently attributed to artists like LOL Jerome. I'm personally not too into this kind of stuff but it holds an important place in popular video art this year, which also includes 'gif art'... you know, animated gifs, something that has been around for a very long time, but is only recently being considered valid artwork by the art world. When Rihanna did her green screened performance on SNL everyone was up in arms, both positively and negatively, including myself. It was the first time in SNL's history (to my knowlege) that a musical guest had not used the SNL set as the backdrop to their performance. Using a green screen seemed inventive and the artwork going on in the background seemed pretty cool, though perhaps a bit gimmicky. Even I questioned who made the video art behind her. I'm still not sure who it was (you can @ me on Twitter if you know!). As I googled, looking for an answer all I found were articles and posts about LOL Jerome, a music producer and video artist, being ripped off. This didn't surprise me too much considering David Lachapelle had sued Rihana a year earlier for ripping his work off in one of her videos.

A lot of people claim to be the pioneers of this aesthetic, I recently read an article on Interview Magazine's site by a couple claiming Rihanna ripped them off - however those people have never actually produced anything that was widely known. We've all made gif art at some point in our lives I'm sure. Campy, "ironic", purposefully "bad" "junk" as a joke or a joke that is meant to be taken seriously I suppose. And now, according to a lot of art world articles and magazines it is, arguing that many pieces have deeper meanings about technology and art. I guess this is the direction video art is headed for a lot of people... at least for now, though according to some Rihanna's SNL performance was the death of it.