The New Genres: Video in the Internet Age

The internet has fundamentally changed the way we encounter, create, and share the moving image. While online video is deeply indebted to past modes of cinema and television, many of the nearly one million hours of video created online every day do not fit into their systems of classification. Westerns, musicals, and sitcoms are all readily available online, but it is the vlog, Let’s Play, and unboxing video that are native to the web.

These new forms are the result of an accelerated genre-making process, made possible by the pervasiveness of affordable cameras and network connections, the staggering number of new voices this technology has enabled to produce and distribute video outside traditional mainstream methods, and the new ways by which we actively engage with this media.

Meanwhile those more traditional methods have been paying attention, seeking out these new genres for inspiration, commentary, hybridization, and self-transformation. This ongoing series, concurrent with The New Genres exhibition, highlights films that have engaged with internet-based videos as source material for both content and form, work that has served as antecedents and models for these new forms, and that has sought to provide context and backstories for new genres and those who make and appreciate them.

Organized by Jason Eppink, Curator of Digital Media, and Eric Hynes, Curator of Film.