The Art of Pooping in the Age of Digital Remediation

When I was younger, I was obsessed with YouTube Poop. Every evening I would sit transfixed in front of one of two computers I shared with my family, and let the images flow over me. No doubt my parents were concerned, or at least confused, by the cacophony of discordant and loud noises that emanated from the dining room or the bedroom I shared with my brother. I imagine that they would not have approved of the foul language that was emanating from classic cartoon characters like Spongebob, made to say words like ‘fuck’ or ‘shit,’ or how the sudden elevations in volume may affect my eardrums. Or better yet, how these flashing colours and strobe-like visuals would dry out my eyeballs.

You may not know YouTube Poop, but you can certainly recognise it. It’s around us all the time. The above description could have come from any era of Gen Z internet, whether from staying up late consuming brainrot Instagram reels, or sharing dank memes on Facebook in 2016 from some account called ‘viva la memeolution 2: electric boogaloo.’ YouTube Poop is the pre-eminent definer of our visual language in the Age of the Internet. Fast-paced content, rapidity of images, an eternal flowing out of recognisable memes and iconography. It all began with an edit.

YouTube Poop (YTP) sprung from internet forums in the mid-2000s, but found a place on the video streaming platform YouTube (hence the name). An edit of The Super Mario Bros Super Show inspired other anonymous users to share their edits, made possible thanks to the concomitant emergence of cheaper at-home video editing software. Soon YouTube was flooded with similar edits, and no doubt you would have seen some of these in your time, or recommended to you by the almighty algorithm. Youtubepoop: Toy Story Poop, Youtube Poop - What is Spaghetti?, Youtube Poop: Everybody Loves MAMA LUIGI for dinner. Rudimentary in nature, these edits carved out a signature style and were recognisable to anyone trawling through the net.

Besides the moniker of YTP and recognisable memes and phrases such as ‘spadinner,’ ‘mama luigi,’ and ‘spingebill,’ many videos would feature sporadic cuts and edits to repeat a single word or syllable, reversing clips, changing around the letters and words to make a character say something they didn’t, and the sudden elevation of noise to unbearable levels. These techniques had names in their community: stuttering, sentence mixing, and ear r*pe (it should be noted that, as a relic from the early 2010s, a lot of terminology is not politically correct). As YTP became more prolific, and editors flexed their skills, it became more complex, the edits more sporadic, and the connection between the original source text more abstract. Users such as IMAPERSON, MycroProcessor, OrpheusFTW, MountainDewMaNN, and madanonymous pushed the form and turned what was a weird internet meme into something resembling an artistic genre of the video medium.

I remember upon discovering these videos I immediately set about making my own. Using rudimentary editing software such as Windows Movie Maker, and editing the only source of videos I had on hand (home movies shot by my brother and I on our family camcorder), I began to remix, rejig, and edit these videos. Over time, I learnt how to use softwares such as Sony Vegas Pro and eventually Adobe Premiere. I downloaded episodes of SpongeBob and laid them down on the track. I knew the list of plug-in effects available on Sony Vegas like the back of my hand. I could shift the axis of the frame, splice together incongruous footage, make Patrick say 'cum’. Reality could be bent to my will. I became a pooper.

Poopers, the term used for creators of YouTube Poops, forged a community forum to engage in discussions of all things Poop. No longer available, YouChew.net hosted a hub of threads and forums. Poopers had codes of ethics. They supported piracy, they refrained from bullying newer members and instead welcomed them as they were learning the ropes. Within YTP there were various sub-genres. Some poopers stuck with their particular niche while others branched out.

YTP Music Videos (YTPMVs) would edit clips to sync up with a song, or they would pitch the sounds of the clips and remix in a way to make a new song entirely. YTPMVs were so popular they even branched off into their own community with prominent users, inside jokes and recurring songs. Some classic YTPMVs include Ronald McDonald insanity, Robotniktrousle, Soldier Vs. Masked Spy, THE JOJ, and PATRICK USED TO AVAST ASSES, THEN HE TOOK AN ARROW IN THE KNEE LOLOLOL IM FUNY AINT I XDDD!. YTPMVs never fail to inspire awe in me at the level of time, skill, and dedication it would take to find the perfect sounds, clips, and audio to create something that sounds melodically perfect.

Tennis Poopers would often go back and forth editing each other’s videos in what were called ‘rounds,’ the number of which would be agreed upon by the users. The rounds could go on for as long as they wanted, and the number of users involved could be just as large. I remember being a part of a 20 round match between 5 different poopers. The videos would be edited beyond comprehension. There was so much joy in seeing the original source video turned into a kaleidoscopic collage of loud sounds, bright colours, and amorphous shapes with each passing round. There would be no winners in these matches, it was all in the name of friendly competition.

Of course, these techniques and styles are nothing new. Remix cinema has been around as long as cinema has existed. As soon as George Melies realised he could allude audiences by splicing his footage of a simple magic trick, making his subject disappear in the blink of an eye, space, and time could be manipulated behind an editing desk. At the same time, it proved that with cinema, the final re–write occurs at the last stages of production. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is an early remix film, superimposing street scenes to have cities folding in on itself, speeding up and slowing down footage, cross cutting to create associations between contrasting images. Despite crediting Vertov as director, one could argue that it was his wife, the editor of the film, who could be the real authorial voice of the film. Karen Pearlman’s short After the Facts (2018), highlights that the editors of a lot of early cinema were women. At the same time, sampling has long been used in hip-hop, a technique that YTPMV finds its basis in, and points to the ways in which a lot of innovative genres often build on the innovations made by women, African Americans, and other marginalized groups.

The remix film as we know it today emerged in the 1950s with Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958), which combines various incongruous clips together to stitch together a humorous narrative. Other remix films often use the viewers’ awareness that these clips have been taken out of their contextual milieu, to elicit humorous or shocked reactions. This is not too dissimilar to Dadaism, and the ways in which artists of this movement would use collage techniques and deliberately avoid any explicit meaning in order to speak to a particular time and place in post-WW1 Europe.

So too, does YTP draw on pre-existing material to elicit responses from the viewer, oftentimes using nostalgic TV shows and remixing them for comedic purposes, humour arising from the knowledge that these clips have been altered since their last memory of them. Meanwhile, poopers often dismiss any attempts at intellectualising the genre. Academics such as David Bailey attempting to find a message to the madness ended up finding their own videos remixed. The snake eats its own tail.

What YTP offers us that earlier forms of art do not is the way its aesthetics can speak to our particular milieu in the Internet Age and the proliferation and over-consumption of information. At the same time, in a period of corporate oligarchies, and capitalist control over images and content — be it via streaming services or video sharing apps — embracing the remix means taking back control over our content. Before I explain this, however, I need to explain the current media space we find ourselves in.

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Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin attempt to describe our changing relationship with media over time in their book Remediation: Understanding New Media, by using the terms immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation. Immediacy is a direct relationship with the world of an image. You have a painting of a landscape and it is rendered in a realistic way to bring you closer in proximity to that landscape. They act as ‘windows’ to another world. According to Bolter and Grusin, however, “[i]t is important to note that the logic of transparent immediacy does not necessarily commit the viewer to an utterly naive or magical conviction that the representation is the same thing as what it represents,” but rather a “contact point between the medium and what it represents.” (p. 30) When thinking about YTPs we can consider an unedited piece of source material as offering us, generally, a sense of immediacy. A typical cartoon show will not undercut its own sense of reality or the viewer's connection to its world like a YouTube Poop might.

Hypermediacy on the other hand undercuts this transparency. Bolter and Grusin use the example of a desktop, wherein right clicking on something might produce a text box. In this instance, you have a visual field of icons interrupted by the literary world of drop down menus and text boxes. “In current interfaces, windows multiply on the screen: it is not unusual [...] to have ten or more overlapping or nested windows open at one time.” This “heterogeneous space” of “[i]cons, menus, and toolbars [...]  Unlike a perspective painting or three-dimensional computer graphic, [...] does not attempt to unify the space [...]. Instead, each text window defines its own verbal, each graphic window its own visual, point of view.” (p. 32, 33) Representation is thus, “conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as ‘windowed’ itself”. (p. 33) In this way, this is what happens in a YTP when text appears or multiple source videos appear in one. Here, our visual relationship with the source material is being interrupted by not only multiple other visual sources but also auditory and written sources too.

At the same time, however, “the logic of hypermediacy” is to “express itself both as a fracturing of the space of the picture and as a hyperconscious recognition or acknowledgment of the medium.” (p. 38) In this way, when watching a Poop, not only are you aware of the various media interacting within the video, but you are also conscious of the construction of the work by the user in the editing of these clips.

While hypermediacy may borrow mere images or sources, remediation aims to represent a medium in its entirety. At the same time, these windowed worlds often remain separated, there is a clear border separating the cut-out piece of a collage or a desktop window, whereas in YTPs these borders dissolve and the distinction between one medium and the next is blurred. “This tearing out of context,” Bolter and Grusin suggest, “makes us aware of the artificiality of both the digital version and the original clip. The work becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the individual pieces and their new, in-appropriate setting. In this kind of remediation, the older media are presented in a space whose discontinuities, like those of collage and photomontage, are clearly visible.” (p. 46-47) Remediation is all about feedback and user interaction, the rendering of something old through digital processes, with YouTube Poop existing as an essentially digital version of this process. Digital remediation takes the old, swallows it, and ‘poops’ it back out. It is, as Bolter and Grusin suggest, the “defining characteristic of the new digital media.” (p. 45) 

This description could easily apply to a YTP, wherein the medium of film, audio, video, etc. are run through digital programs and edited, divorced from their contexts, made to shift, stretch and interact, their discontinuities made apparent.

Just as YouTube Poopers attempt to remediate older mediums such as film and television, film and television can seek to remediate YouTube Poops: “remediation operates in both directions.” Luiz Eduardo Kogut’s Videotape (2018), for instance, is a montage film overlaying various videos captured both on computer screens and out in the real world. The not quite opaque image gives the illusion of staring through a window, with the film directly drawing attention to this at various points, such as the reflective surface of the computer or the laundromat dryer. The film trips viewers up with its meta-textual framing. Several times when the cursor on the screen or the YouTube timeline popped up, I had to check I wasn’t interacting with my laptop at all. Kogut’s short utilises the remediative techniques of YTP to create a beautiful and emotive piece that blurs the lines between different media and digital spaces. Windows inside windows, and it all collapses into something that touches the soul, but I can’t quite explain why. Jon Rafman’s SHADOWBANNED (2018) more closely resembles the random combination of sights and sounds we’re familiar with. But here, we go behind the walls of the digital archives, rendered through 3D modelling as both an ancient ruin and an endless series of hallways, full of wires draped across the floor ready to be tripped on, and sparks flying out everywhere. Rafman’s short embodies the chaotic nature of being ‘plugged in’, and evokes the scrawl of conspiracy laden posts that flood our social media feeds, with a constant cutting of images drawn from various sources, too much information for one person to fully comprehend. Here, the techniques of YTP are made to embody a different psychological state, not one of tranquility, but of horror. This idea of entire worlds within the video recalls Yabujin’s AZEROY series, which speaks of the eponymous Azeroy as some mystical land locked behind gates. There, “everyone is happy in Azeroy,” there are “no broken bones in Azeroy,” and “all of my wishes” are in Azeroy. The series becomes a pilgrimage of sorts to an Edenic paradise, or perhaps we are already there. Again, images and videos weave in and out, creating associative ideas, at times comforting and other times unnerving. Despite YTP no longer being as prevalent as it once was, you can still find its traces in meme videos while scrolling through Instagram or TikTok, the random, excessive miscellany of abrupt sounds, images, and text reminding us of its predecessors. “No medium, it seems, can now function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of cultural meaning.”

In our era of seeming infinite possibilities, source material is increasingly cut off. Films are cut from release schedules and pulled from streaming services. Remediation is important as it relates to remix culture and the fight against copyright law. Remediation, as the defining characteristic of our modern media culture, is useful to understand in relation to the terms RO and RW culture that Lawrence Lessig introduces in his book Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.

Here, Lessig is borrowing from the computer terms ‘Read Only’ and ‘Read/Write.’ He is suggesting culture is defined as either ‘RO’ or ‘RW’. In an RO culture, artistic objects are created by a few specialised people and handed down to the masses for consumption. In a RW culture, artistic objects are created in the same manner, but the consumer goes away having absorbed that and then creates something new from it. The best example would be hearing a song, then singing it yourself. In this process of singing — this amateur creativity — you are learning how to sing, how to produce music, so that the world may gain more musicians, and more creatives.

RO culture dominated the twentieth century due to the limits of technology. Creating music was limited to the elites because to create your own professional remix of a song required massive amounts of money unavailable to the average consumer, and the same applied with remixing cinema. Copyright law was also in place to protect the lenders of these cultural products, and to regulate consumers. Lessig traces a history, then, where technology and the elites come out of lockstep. Soon, technology becomes cheaper and easier to access and use. Nowadays, anyone can edit an episode of Spongebob on their computer as long as they have an Adobe subscription (or if they pirated it). The Internet lends itself to a democratised RW culture that copyright law is falling behind in working with.

Remediation is the perfect exemplification of RW culture rendered digitally, with YTP as the zenith of this history of remixes that have been going on seemingly forever. A lot of poopers would be hit with copyright strikes on their videos despite the obviously transformative nature of their work. In a way, their garishness and abrasiveness could be seen as the ultimate rebellion against copyright law. What they are attempting to create is not another product that can be so easily consumed as something like sampling in mainstream hip-hop. The aim is to transform, to destroy, to play, to put the product in the hands of the creator, and mix it like  silly putty. To stretch, to bend, to dissolve the boundaries. This is exemplified in the poopers’ deliberate attempts to eschew meaning.

YTPs are what's left when an increasingly RW culture must fit within the restraints of an outdated RO culture, in which elites hold on to the power and money that limits creative freedom: it is shit, it is poop, it is YouTube Poop, it is the detritus of our internet, and RO culture that has festered and risen to the surface. Through remediation we can fight against the RO world that copyright creates — remediation is exactly this process of taking things, creating something new and feeding it back into culture that Laurence Lessig argues for.

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Regardless of whether you are fighting the oligarchies of copyright ownership with piracy or you are burning your retinas right before bed with a healthy dose of brain rot, YTP speaks to our current moment as a culture dominated by internet aesthetics. Past media have been consumed and regurgitated and consumed again in this massive digital soup of ones and zeroes. Our visual field is constantly bombarded by screens, and those screens are divided within windows upon windows of content. Despite emerging as a genre in the early 2010s, and dying a slow death, these aesthetics have not died, and mainstream media is slowly catching up, and as more filmmakers who have grown up on these videos start to make their mark on the industry, we may see more and more of the YTP aesthetic in these coming years. While my pooping days are over, I can’t say these videos haven’t affected me profoundly, and made me look upon the world with newer, more fragmented eyes.