In the often impenetrable world of internet culture, one species of meme reigns supremely inscrutable: the post-viral video. These videos feature absurdly literal titles such as \"The Entire Bee Movie but every time it says bee it speeds up by 15%\" and \"All Star [by Smash Mouth] but it's a Bach chorale following the conventions of the Common Practice Period.\" Their form consists in the subjugation of a preexistent cultural object to a gamut of arbitrary rules. Though the rule sets themselves are often simple algorithms, the resultant viewing experience is overwhelming and even somewhat sublime. In the search to explain this seemingly anomalous cultural form, we can oppose these videos with the standard viral video. Where the viral video is quickly apprehensible, short, and easy to reappropriate into modern advertising, the post-viral video is baffling and unpleasant to watch. The internal contradiction between the post-viral video's internet success and its un-watchability affords these memes an incipient aesthetic autonomy in an increasingly homogenous cultural landscape. In order to understand this new cultural phenomenon, we can draw a historical analogy to the comparative use of musical topoi, or oft-quoted motivic material that stands-in for a cultural reference, in Haydn's oratorio The Creation and Mozart's \"Jupiter\" Symphony. After we return from the eighteenth-century, we then examine the modern affective turn of advertising, one of the key catalysts for the post-viral video. In the final chapter, we craft a typology for our meme videos, and demonstrate how their creation is a collaborative performance, a critique of history through art. The path which created our post-viral video is generalizable, and can lend insight to processes of meaning-making and the evolution of sign systems in cultural forms.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["All star","Bee Movie","Shrek","Replacement remix","Remix","Topic theory","Viral","Sublime","Affect","Advertising","Frankfurt","Adorno","Culture","Music","YouTube","Haydn","Mozart","Internet"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 23853