Review of Dialogues on CoreCore
& the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde (2024) and All is Nothing to Us
Shirley Au, who runs the project @artfilminsider wrote a very thoughtful review of the book Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde (2024), which threads together glitch aesthetics, guerrilla video practices, and algorithmic exhaustion in order to examine how TikTok-born subcultures recycle and resist the infrastructures of late capitalism. Moving across the visual language of collapse—from meme montages to DIY cinema collages—the text questions whether image-making can reclaim autonomy in a system built on attention capture and disposability. With references to Tiqqun, Derrida, and Lyotard, this is a lucid and melancholic meditation on the psychic debris of online life and the fleeting, fractured communities that form in its wake.
Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde (2024) recognizes the contemporary art practice dubbed “CoreCore” as nothing new, neither as an aesthetic movement, nor as a practice centered on seemingly aimless moving images (“nothingness”). We can look back, for example, to the 1960s when avant-garde artists also used junk objects to confront the problem of capitalism. Watching CoreCore is analogous to, and intertwined with, the contemporary culture of sorting through the junk images of strangers from anywhere and everywhere, and the witnessing of this mass recycling by collective makers at 2am is like a bedtime ritual to rewind and detox.
The CoreCore-themed Internet DIY cinema/conference event All Things Are Nothing to Us (2023), created prior to the writing of the book, begins with Redacted Cut’s collage: a sequence of random videos pulled from various devices, indicated by differing frame sizes—like archaeological discoveries or mental flashbacks surfacing from the back of our psyche. In the background, the sound of dripping water echoes through an empty chamber, evoking hollow souls. A repeated montage of a crying girl in green sets an indefinably nihilistic tone, whether from the 2010s or today.
We can imagine that the amateur filming style—getting too close to the phone camera—has evolved into a visual posture, shaped by emerging technologies and aesthetics. The hyperreal nature of these clips results in degenerate taste: numbness and estrangement toward unknown places, people, and objects, conveyed through rapid montages of Japanese manga, gaming footage, stock charts, cats, catastrophes, and used keyboards. The culture behind these images is deliberately emptied out—stripped of context and meaning.
It leaves me wondering how the human-machine relationship, now largely visual, is being subverted simply by becoming reflexive about its own medium. I find myself lost in the disoriented navigation of the Internet labyrinth, leading endlessly to recycled image dumps.
Referencing Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis (2000), All Things Are Nothing to Us visually embraces opacity and autonomy in a similar spirit:
“To become opaque like fog means recognizing that we don’t represent anything, that we aren’t identifiable; it means taking on the untotalizable character of the physical body as a political body; it means opening yourself up to still-unknown possibilities. It means resisting with all your power any struggle for recognition.”
One can reimagine CoreCore as a zone of opacity. As Dylan Smith writes in “Info-Poetry: A Thesis” in Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde, it embodies informational autonomy and the circulation of cultures. The alternately governable and enclosed structure of the digital realm becomes a form of the uncommon—one that resists categorization and perception as a stable or recognizable existence. It presents a kind of real-time “material reality” devoid of external or representational reference points.
According to Smith, in All Things Are Nothing to Us, Mason Noel explicitly references Tiqqun, while John Rising engages with adjacent lines of thought.
In the broader spectrum of Internet cinema that rehumanizes the CoreCore concept, autonomy is understood—as Tiqqun defines it—as “self-organization, auto-poïesis, self-reference, self-production, self-valorization,” standing in opposition to the closed feedback loops of cybernetics. If culture involves mobilization across time and space, trespassing into unknown Internet territories and giving form to the inaccessible psyche, then TikTok communities represent a composite of indexed images. Here, artists converge and migrate visual concepts from various digital sites.
In a narrative of social history, John Rising’s second video surveys the evolution of media devices by revisiting VHS holograms, old television footage, and vintage computer advertisements archived online. This journey culminates in a portrayal of the inescapable surveillance network that defines hyper-individualized existence. The footage is arranged in montages—rejecting the vertical scroll native to social media—in a return to the mechanics of home editing and home cinema. Even as smartphone editing makes this practice more mobile and decentralized, the screens that surround us increasingly resemble panopticons, where individuals are compelled to self-extract and dehumanize.
When the rat race is designed for machines rather than humans, individuals become atomized, their movements constrained within seamless surveillance sites, all in the name of mobilization. That moment—when one realizes the reach of the infrastructure—is a spark of enlightenment. The media system has been deskilled and outsourced to amateur creators who self-entertain, while algorithms act as centralized distributors of attention, operating under a winner-take-all logic.
On TikTok, the idea of community functions more like community-based management. Individuals are made responsible for contributing to a form of “collective intelligence” in informatics—without interrogating the industrial imperatives behind the platforms, as Tiqqun suggests. Despite the focus on expression and craft, the use of online footage often creates only a fleeting sense of unbound communication between strangers—immediate, yet almost forgettably transient. What emerges is a vague approximation of community. The aesthetic echoes the disposable culture once critiqued by the avant-garde, where content is endlessly replicable, consumable, and ultimately lost.
Mechanically, this so-called community is computerized and composed of harvested data, fueled by individuals desiring desires. Yet, some TikTokers resist this commercialized desire by engaging in non-referential acts—embracing inaction or counter-productivity—as a way to respond to and reject external demands for performance.
Dylan Cherry’s (@itsomethingunforgettable) video collage problematizes representation and perception in the act of internet scrolling. It is full of glitches, incomprehensible images, and half-formed thoughts. Paying homage to early net art, these glitches are intentional—corruptions of image files that evoke a metaphysical language. Cherry experiments with visual, textual, and audio forms, where abrupt shifts between sound effects simulate the interruptive soundscape of mindless scrolling. Dozens of inner dialogues fail to form responses to real-world chaos, disappearing mid-thought, never externalized. Hopping from one chat box to another, inaction becomes a motion in hidden net territories
Ironically, to resist the enmeshment of late-capitalist disaster, one must turn to AI-generated images of nature—to deceive the mind into calmness. This introduces a paradox at the heart of our digital affection: is the scrolling screen a self-contained space of non-resolution, or a fragmented representation of both internal and external reality? It becomes an empty ritual.
In Monolingualism of the Other, Jacques Derrida writes, “I have only one language; it is not mine.” How does one use the language of the oppressor to invent language within language? When emptiness is inherently peripheral and infinitely reproduced in today’s culture of making and consuming, the question becomes: can the recycling of images refill the mimetic void—or does it only reproduce its constraints?
Mason Noel’s video employs a contextualized guerrilla tactic that closely echoes Tiqqun’s method of subverting cybernetic control. Among the line-up, Noel’s work curates the darkest imagery that recurs throughout CoreCore: porn, memes, cinema, media headlines, games, labor, and politics. It resembles a motivational montage—once intended to boost productivity—but now recontextualized into melancholic commentary. It also reads as a political collage, referencing independent and radical sources. These digital communities become a site to test ideological and political limits.
Though Noel does not directly cite Tiqqun, his reference to Rebecca Smith’s commentary on the fragility of electric-transmission substations resonates strongly with Tiqqun’s ideas of networks, systems, nodes, and lines:
“[…] a selective attack, designed on the basis of precise research into traffic and aiming at 5% of the most strategic core nodes—the nodes on the big operators’ high-speed networks, the input points to the transatlantic lines—would suffice to cause a collapse of the system.”
As the climate crisis escalates, Noel subverts the apocalyptic narrative. The profit-driven techno-infrastructure continues operating at the cost of natural ecosystems and human labor. Trees are felled, and Gen Z and millennials are scapegoated. Doomed scrolling diverts attention from mass extinction. These visuals are not acts of real-life resistance, but interventions—gestures toward what could be. Substations are located in the video, but who would risk disrupting the fragile infrastructure of their surroundings?
In a review of The Cybernetic Hypothesis, Lander Govaerts writes:
“[…] it is the reader’s task to find out how to deflect capture by capital and the state, how to flee/escape as Deleuze asked himself, and how to produce autonomy at last.”
Noel’s work responds to this challenge by experimenting with visual communication that navigates between capital accumulation and governmentality. Within the constraints of the image—its short attention span, its psychic scrolling—he proposes action as a method to counter-monitor expanding power grids.
In Alice Aster’s Are You Tired of Being a Failure Because You Are Broken as a Person?, somatic situationism reflects how socio-cybernetics hollows out the individual into an “infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes.” The video echoes Lyotard’s theories of dehumanization and rehumanization, where the psychosocial becomes economized for ultimate performance.
Dana Dawud’s (@dansdansrev) PalCoreCore reclaims archived footage of traditional Palestinian dance, parkour, and hip hop from YouTube, layered with the voiceover: “I witness you witness me.” It responds directly to the current use of AI by the Israeli military against Palestinian civilians and evokes Tiqqun’s guerrilla tactics, which draw inspiration from T. E. Lawrence during the Arab Revolt: “The battle itself is no longer the only process involved in war, just as the destruction of the heart of the enemy is no longer its central objective.” Here, the struggle is waged through bodies, architecture, and silent resistance.
Cinema culture has become a digital mass identity, shaped in part by fandom: fan remakes, soundtracks, scripts, edits, and film stills. These layers circulate outside traditional production and distribution channels. In Eddie Hewer’s video, The Lighthouse, Perfect Blue, Hellraiser II, and True Detective converse with how media is remixed on TikTok. Fan edits blur with scenes from canonical cinema, constructing a multi-perspectival historicism of existential crisis. There is no return to the classics. These slow, expressive sequences resist the rapid, numbing logic of doomscrolling. Hewer’s minimalist experiment challenges the commodified nostalgia trend, which recycles cinematic icons until they become tasteless, bitter, and emotionally exhausted.
The final video by Coincellpro collages fragments from Tokyo’s porn industry, body horror in games, glitches, and images from 9/11. It exposes the darkest corners of digital space just before its collapse. Rather than distancing from devices, Coincellpro chooses immersion—liberating the body by diving fully into techno-capitalist spectacle. The video opens with Odori, a traditional Japanese dance from the Awa Festival, layered with the gestures of Michael Jackson, techno dancers, and unknown bodies in motion. Yabujin’s “Chalice of Mind” and the hardjumping style of his music seem to momentarily defy gravity.
Reading Dialogues on CoreCore & the Contemporary Online Avant-Garde, I feel immersed in a state of extinction—the collapse of hyper-individualism under late capitalism. This is a melancholia of nothingness, the final nostalgia of a culture drained, industrialized, appropriated. CoreCore was a fleeting trend: born fast and buried in algorithmic hype. When I revisited its media presence in 2021 and 2022, it felt already gone.
In Hong Kong, where TikTok is banned, CoreCore remained largely unknown until I encountered online cinema culture—a reverse understanding of culture emerging from internet cinema rather than traditional platforms. While local news portrayed the TikTok ban as a geopolitical move between the U.S. and China, the underlying reason was to restrict pro-Palestinian content. Ironically, though U.S.-based social media often shadow-ban such material, TikTok’s algorithm—briefly—amplified dissent. In doing so, it allowed CoreCore videos to circulate, intervene, and even go viral. However short-lived, these moments of algorithmic rupture made space for cybernetic subversion in different parts of the world.
Shirley Au (@artfilminsider)