Semionaut, Signifying Everything

We all want to be young, the voiceover begins. The video continues with a vertiginous collage of movies that depict the first steps in the liberation of the 1950s youth, blessed as they were by the gods of rock and roll. The film enthusiastically moves on, decade by decade, in engaging evolution.

We All Want to Be Young from box1824 on Vimeo.

The body of the film is comprised of movie scenes and numerous cultural fragments, gracefully thrown on the screen. This is perhaps one of the most powerful aspects of the piece. Its high energy stems from something the world's greatest DJs have been familiar with for quite a long time: themash-up. The mix-and-match overlaps of cultural fragments define a new order of meaning, because not only are the images involved illustrative, but they also have a context background in our minds and in the mind of culture itself. The voiceover creates guidance in meaning, but the side stories are created by images 'stolen' from the cultural screen.

Beyond the aesthetic purposes of a DJ’s tricks, the most relevant essence of mash-ups arises when they are used to reveal peculiar kind of ethics; in this case: the youth ethics. As spectators of the piece, we experience a sense of guidance. We understand a sequence: the birth and evolution of the 'spirit of youth' along the course of time. 

The spirit of youth’s firstness: 

The seed of rebellion that had been planted in the 1950s finally breaks through in the 1960s, taking root in the 1970s.  In this time, the new idea of youth is expressed in firstness, striking the world with a new order which can only be felt, not yet explained. This is the moment when the idea of the 'spirit of youth' comes to fruition and begins to grow, in power and influence. At this point, although culture bears a strong expression of the 'spirit of youth', its signified is still vague; as vague and as powerful as the words of order that mark the birth of this new paradigm: Freedom, Peace and Love.

The spirit of youth’s secondness: 

The 1980s introduce the imperative of consumption, fascinating young people, who become voracious consumers. Now, after winning freedom of expression and gaining a measure of power within the system, youth not only becomes consumer, but is also consumed. The image of youth is systematically engulfed by market logic, and this phenomenon expands naturally over the course of the following decades.  We may say that this new idea of youth comes into secondness with culture.  Its relationship with the cultural order is by now intense, to the point when youth and culture cannot be told apart; the two have become firmly locked into a feedback loop. The notion of tradition becomes obsolete. Everything is being recreated.

The spirit of youth’s thirdness:

The plot thickens. The 'physical' exchange between youth and culture is intensified, in the 1990s and 2000s, when technology expands at the center of this system. More than subject and spectator, the youth is now the programmer and the program of the new order. While technology appears to be an encoded system for the grown-up world, youth regards it as something simple and natural.  Far from the revolutionaries and rebels of yesteryear, we have come to identify them as the 'digital natives', almost as a form of cult or an evolution into some nearly post-human being. 'Digital natives' handle information the way we handle our biological needs: naturally. But our wonderment is merely youth deification: it essentially disregards the challenges and troubles this generation goes through, finding itself in a world that dreams of soft, but is in fact much harder than it looks.

The manifesto of now:

On the other hand, we do handle information more naturally than previous generations did. In a way, we are the youth (or the idea of youth) in its state of thirdness, armed with the critical capacity to look at the system and at ourselves.

We have become a kind of metaculture; one that is able to analyse itself with the materials it gets from its very culture. We are the multifacet of punks, grunge kids, skaters, surfers, clubbers, hipsters, gipsters, and so many others. We get to experience whatever we want through our individuality, but we lack the authentic, the original. We have a full range of styles laid out to our convenience, and the only originality we get to experience is mixing and matching. These mash-ups are used to create new, aesthetically pleasant hybrids, but, in order to gain critical intelligence in the face of history, we must learn how to organize them. Only then will we be able to lead mankind into an actually new world.

This video does that. Young people today think of strategies; they reflect and integrate with the framework.  I am hoping the first global and pragmatic youth is able to really cause a fissure in human culture and finally realise the founding dreams of its spirit: Freedom, Peace and Love. It seems we now understand these words not only as distant ideals, in firstness, but as ideals which are now active and alive within culture, disguised as other words. Food for thought: could it be that the good old Freedom, Peace and Love are hidden in the buzz words: Individuality, Sustainability and Cooperation? In the end, it seems the spirit of youth has been helpful to everyone. Now that it is over 40, the 'spirit of youth' may finally be old enough to take the whole world in its hands.

© João Cavalcanti 2010