There was a time when graffiti was a global folk art, it was the eighties and early nineties when street artists didn’t dominate the scene and scribbling on the wall wasn’t automatically labeled “gang graffiti.”
Now YouTube has supplanted graffiti as the global folk art. The audience is bigger and posted videos can be seen simultaneously in Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Paris and Mexico City–got to love that type of instant distribution.
The DRAMATIC PRAIRIE DOG that dominated YouTube this week and popped up on cable TV (I saw it on MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann) is a great case in point.
I’ve pooled a wide sampling that blossomed soon after the original posting and demonstrate–remember it has only been three days since the original surfaced. {Apologies to those that read this in email form, but I think a visit to my site is worthwhile to see the crazy spectrum of material.}
*** THE ORIGINAL ***
This one uses subtitles.
Dramatic Priarie Dog as vintage camp.
Prairie Dog falls in LOVE with Paris Hilton here.
The gangsta rap version.
With Kill Bill music…
…and with Kill Bill stylings.
Some people think peeps should give it a try…
…and some people will turn anything into a commercial.
The are those that envision Drama Dog as a mobster whacking Hilary Clinton…
…or Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.
Drama Dog could be Psycho or…
…or up against Die Hard.
This is my favorite, a highly-artsy version with a 1960s feel.
This one is more 80s.
This one suggests what precipitated the Prairie Dog’s dramatic moment.
This video activist uses Priaire Dog to push for YouTube to reinstate categories…
…and so does this one.
Here’s a silent post-modern pastiche of Dramatic Prairie Dog that is pure art…
…and this is the same art with sound.
Some are just demented.
Then there are some dramatic cats envious of the attention Prairie Dog is receiving…
…and a dramatic cockatiel.
Then there is one video response which is rather sophisticated. It considers the 5 sec. Dramatic Prairie Dog clip too long and distills the fascination into a fast action one second granny boxing snippet. Not the same, but the message seems similiar.
And it’s reassuring to know that kids love it too!
I’m not 100% sure why this rodent with soundtrack is so riveting…it’s rather inexplicable.
We’re starting to learn more about the interaction of video and sound, we’re going to need to develop a new aesthetic understanding that makes sense of all this. No one could’ve predicted that a certain episode of Pokemon would cause some kids in Japan to have epileptic seizures like it did nine years ago, but it did. Where’s Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan when you need them?
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