I wanted to make something in re: to the way my community was reacting to the Rihanna performance in a way that was both sympathetic (like i said, i had already xperienced that feeling of co-option) but also helped them realise that this is how the cultural convo worx. a few years b4 some of the artists in this community had made an xtremely influential glitch art piece using a Rihanna music video ... & though i’m not trying to equate an underground artist’s appropriation of a large pop star w/her appropriation of an underground artist (there’s a clear power-imbalance there) it’s important to remember that in a way we (net artists) had already started this cultural remix “conversation” w/her. So bax to Rihanna, when this happened i couldn’t help but feel like my fellow net artists weren’t seeing the bigger picture on social media, this is part of how culture worx, no one owns the conversation (it wouldn’t be a conversation if u were the only one allowed to have it). even though the video itself might had been a little lame (>_O)).
![kanye west datamosh kanye west datamosh](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/irBP5FnksKc/maxresdefault.jpg)
Kanye hadn’t “co-opted” glitch, he simply joined the conversation & of course (given his status) had a big impact on it, the results of which where both good & bad (but in my opinion, mostly good. the story behind the Kanye video is interesting, but i don’t want to digress too much… the reason i bring it up is b/c it was a big eye opening moment for me as an artist, at the time i felt glitch had been co-opted but i realised that was too simplistic a view of how culture worx. the reality however was that glitch art had now been introduced to a much larger community, after that Kanye video glitch became much more popular, so much so that my glitch friends & i were able to organise a glitch conference (called GLI.TC/H) 3 years in a row (which Antonio also helped out on) as a result of the increased popularity we’ve now got A LOT of shi//y glitch art online, but at the same time, most of my fav glitch artists are folks who didn’t discover glitch until after the Kanye xplosion. so when the Kanye video dropped folks in the community were pissed, i had friends claiming that glitch had been co-opted & it was the beginning of the end. glitch art is another community i’ve been heavily involved in for years & before the Kanye video this community was relatively small, few people (including artists) had heard of glitch art. I think it was sometime in 2008 when Kanye West had released a music video for his track “Welcome to Heartbreak”, this video featured a glitch aesthetic (specifically a technique known as datamosh). as someone in the net art community i was seeing a lot of my friends making upset posts on social media re:the situation & it reminded me of something i had gone through a few years earlier.
![kanye west datamosh kanye west datamosh](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/F1HYOZKWxPI/maxresdefault.jpg)
![kanye west datamosh kanye west datamosh](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/rSmEOk5AiN0/maxresdefault.jpg)
that community got pissed, feeling their aesthetic/scene/culture had been co-opted & online publications were quick to write about the backlash (the knowyourmeme entry for seapunk has a good list of articles re: the Rihanna “controversy”). the images/scenes she was superimposed over seemed weird/trippy to most, but more than familiar to a small group of net artists which also overlapped w/a small online-subculture which was being referred to as ‘seapunk’ at the time. Ok, i’ll try to answer as many of ur questions at once as i can (^_^) > not sure how much u know about the story behind the Rihanna SNL performance, but in Nov of 2012 Rihanna performed live on Saturday Night Live (SNL) in front of a green screen (so that the audience would see her superimposed over other backgrounds), not xactly groundbreaking, but tbh i don’t think i had ever seen someone do that on SNL. Nick Briz, Diamonds (Green Screen Version)