Cartoon about tween girls discussing the nature of reality

A life inBTween from Charlie White on Vimeo.

"A Life in BTween" is an animation by artist Charile White to accompany his exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), "The Sun and Other Stars: Katy Grannan and Charlie White." The exhibition runs from July 22 through October 14, 2012.

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan

Ah. Another frustratingly unwatchable vimeo. Just what I need.
- chgoliz
  
  You’re not missing anything. In fact, I am jealous of YOU.
  - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
    
    I once had a professor who said, in frustration with students who complained that there was no reason to learn the history of science, that maybe the last good reason to be educated is so that you’ll get more of the jokes.
    
    You don’t have to have read everything by Heidegger and Foucault, but it does help you get more of the jokes when the video directly references them.
    - hypnosifl
      
      What aspects made you think he was referencing Heidegger and Foucault specifically? Reality vs. ideas and imagery/fantasy is a subject that’s obviously been discussed by many different philosophers, so what particular phrases caught your ear as clear references?
      - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
        
        I’m no expert, but right on the face of it I think he starts off with the title, the in-between, suspension of the being hovering between being and becoming, always on the breaking, curling cusp of transition because of the perception of the self as a being ” in the world” of both existential existenz and of social constructs, endlessly reperceiving the self and the world.
        
        They launch right into Sartre’s Nausea, then move on to the craving for an outside condition from which to observe… to pull away from the unbearable presence of the reality of the thing in itself. The earlier philosophers craved perfect objectivity, the postmodernists like Foucault reversed it, claimed total subjectivity and relativism, until your grip finally slips entirely loose of reality with Derrida and Baudrillard and you crave only a perfected construct to inhabit.I think Nicholson Baker approached the same perspective in The Mezzanine.
        
        That said, don’t take any of that as my own belief – I had my fill of the continental philosophers and think it’s mostly a circle-jerk of self-referential denial.
        
        Today, the best fundamental philosophical work is done by physicists.
        
        Or I could be totally wrong and it’s just valley girl voices.
    - chgoliz
      
      If only you knew how funny your assumption is.
      - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
        
        See – you do get it!
http://twitter.com/auilix Ami B

Argh. This is like watching a more modern version of the Fashion Club (daria)
- http://memoid.tumblr.com/ memoid
  
  Exactly what I thought.
- http://twitter.com/MartianEmpress Rezeya Montecore
  
  Oh, god, that’s it exactly. It’s Daria without anybody to sympathize with.
winkybb

Not, like, anywhere as, like, annoying as , like, real-life conversations between, like, girls of this age. Like, and in the, like, cartoon they don’t, like, say “like” nearly enough for it to be, like, realistic.
- vrplumber
  
  Like liked.
- MadRat
  
  I couldn’t stop thinking, “I’d rather spend 24 hours a day with The Annoying Orange than those kids.”
fleshflood

He did a very similar series in 2008 called OMG BFF LOL, it is easily found with google.
- swordmage
  
  Was wondering if anyone else would remember that series…
http://twitter.com/MartianEmpress Rezeya Montecore

Well, every bright, independent tween girl who doesn’t behave like that has just gotten herself screwed right out of existence again. Speaking of making up realities. *sigh*
- humanresource
  
  Four and a half minutes of animation can do that? Screw all bright, independent tween girl young women out of existence? There should have been a warning of some kind, at the very least.
  
  Seriously though, if I were any kind of artist, I could not work at all if I felt obliged to accurately reflect all the nuances among the members of a group.
  - http://twitter.com/MartianEmpress Rezeya Montecore
    
    Nobody’s saying that. But you see the alternatives so rarely, it’s aggravating to see them YET AGAIN, in a context that I feel does unthinkingly try to equate “tween girls” with the gabbing hairsprayed idiots we see above. And that’s just not fair, because girls come in all shapes and sizes.
    
    It’s rampant, and while no, of course no individual piece of art should be condemned for failing to be the one that changes this, I don’t see any reason at all not to register disappointment when one doesn’t. People are happily expressing all sorts of opinions, mostly negative, and there’s mine. $0.02 total; pay at front desk; you have no further obligation in this matter. :)
    - Mantissa128
      
      Sturgeon’s Law applies to people too, I’m afraid. A corollary is that all competent people will find themselves to be outnumbered by idiots around them.
http://profiles.google.com/joshuabardwell Joshua Bardwell

Horrible. Unimaginative. Trite.

Of all the things to be annoyed about in media, the one I’m annoyed about most lately is the total erasing of fat people. Don’t take it personally, creator-of-this-video, but you’re on notice!

EDIT: OMG I kept watching for 30 more seconds, and there was a fat person after all! I was totally wrong!

Oh wait. He was “gross.” Nevermind. Fat people who are gross are not any better than fat people who simply don’t exist.

EDIT THE SECOND: OMG I KEPT WATCHING IT. IT JUST GOT WORSE! WHY, BOINGBOING? WHY? WHAT IS “WONDERFUL” ABOUT THIS? UNICORN CHASER PLEASE!!!!
- feltmountain
  
  I think you are missing the point completely
  - http://profiles.google.com/joshuabardwell Joshua Bardwell
    
    If you’re suggesting that it is supposed to be satire, then I submit that satire that is totally indistinguishable from that which it satirizes is just another example of that which it means to satirize. As others have pointed out in the comments, it starts out trite, and stays there. It never gets to a point where it is actually commenting on anything.
    - hypnosifl
      
      When you say “undistinguishable from that which it satirizes”, what do you think it is satirizing, exactly? Actual shallow teenagers? I don’t think real teens who are as shallow as the ones in the cartoon would spend their time having quasi-philosophical conversations contrasting the ugliness and boringness of the real world with a Platonic ideal reality inspired by TV.
http://twitter.com/mwiik Michael Wiik

I was hoping this would get progressively deeper. It seemed like it might when they were talking about things being better on TV, I was expecting some intelligent media criticism etc.
http://www.facebook.com/roger.brumlow Roger Brumlow

Gag me with a spoon!
http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki

fucking ass holes talking non stop at the top of their voices in a crowded bus.
simonbarsinister

Argh! I watched all the way through waiting for the meta-commentary. When the girls started talking about breaking the fourth-wall I thought that would be the moment that they stepped out of their trite world and reflected on it. Or not.
PaulDavisTheFirst

from wikipedia: Tween (demographic), preadolescence, that is, the stage between middle childhood and adolescence in human development, in the range of 10 to 12 years old

so … not high school. these are not tweens. or they are not in high school. or something.

otherwise, incredibly vapid and free of content.
- chgoliz
  
  Not only not high school, but basically still in grade school. By the time a girl is in middle school/junior high, she’s already starting puberty.
- http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
  
  One word:
  
  Dasein
  - PaulDavisTheFirst
    
    heidegger?
    - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
      
      And Sartre… at least that’s what the bit brought to mind, to me, especially with the title.
      - PaulDavisTheFirst
        
        if this is what an exploration of heidegger, let alone sartre, derrida, baudrillard and foucault needs to look like in order to “fly” these days, then i think we should feel entirely comfortable ignoring them all.
        
        but of course, its not what it needs to look like. not even remotely.
Boundegar

Too annoying. I made it half way.
bcsizemo

“Some people just want to watch the world burn.”

I love how Disqus doesn’t support animated gifs…
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  If you link to it rather than inserting it, it should appear and be animated.
  
  Mostly.
  - http://lemoutan.blogspot.com/ Lemoutan
    
    Or not?
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      It works just fine, but you have to click on it. The alternative would be to force everyone who loads the page to download the gif, which might be a large file.
jim_x23

Can’t. Freaking. Handle. Their voices.

Bailed on the content as it was overpowered by the suffering induced by the style.
- Jorpho
  
  I readily imagined a group of 30-year-old male MA’s taking lungfuls of helium between each take.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Flugfrei-Jones/1403604860 Flugfrei Jones

why, mark.. why?
grs

Is this a buddy of yours or something, Mark?
- hypnosifl
  
  I can’t speak for Mark but I know he’s a fan of pop surrealism, and I’d say Charlie White is a pretty excellent example of that genre…not as clearly in these videos but check out some of his sculptural/photographic work to get a better sense of him, like the Understanding Joshua series or some of the other series he has pieces from on his website. And I see Mark also linked to his non-cartoon video Pink in an old boingboing post from 2006, so he must have been familiar with White’s work for a while.
  - grs
    
    The link in the link you linked is dead. Here’s the wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowbrow_%28art_movement%29.
    
    So it’s trite for the sake of being trite? I’m not seeing the humor, surrealism, nor any satire in this piece.
    - hypnosifl
      
      The article linked to in Mark’s pop surrealism post seems to now be hosted at a different URL, see here.
      
      I think it helps to see the cartoon in the context of Charlie White’s other recent work…in the last few years White has done a lot of pieces that aren’t so surrealistic but which deal with teenage girls in America, and especially the role they play in the media’s imagination, in advertising and such (a lot of his work, especially the photos, has this glossy colorful look that reminds you a lot of advertising or commercialized entertainment, but which has some “off” elements that make you look at that kind of imagery in a different way, sometimes surreal/weird elements but sometimes elements of reality that these fantasy images usually ignore). Here’s an interview with White about this large project “The Girl Studies” he’s been doing that I think helps clarify what he’s trying to convey with these kinds of pieces, including some specific comments about the OMG BFF LOL cartoons and how they fit with the rest of the project (and I also think seeing the non-cartoon pieces that are part of the project might help in terms of context, see this article about his film “American Minor”, which he also discusses in the interview above, and you can see some pages from his book by the same name on this page–one photo is NSFW.)
      - chgoliz
        
        Yes, it is more engaging to know the deeper context in which a specific artistic piece is anchored; however, if a piece cannot be appreciated without that context, that’s a major failing.
      - hypnosifl
        
        I don’t really agree that you should be able to appreciate a piece of art, especially a fairly conceptual one, without knowing anything about the larger context it’s coming from. I don’t think you’d really need to have seen the rest of Charlie White’s art to appreciate this either (although it’d certainly help), just to approach it with some charitable assumptions like “this isn’t really how the artist sees teenage girls and he would be capable of much more nuanced works about them, but here he is intentionally playing with the most flattened images of teen girls presented by the media.” It seems like a lot of the criticisms were based on uncharitable assumptions about the context and the mindset of the artist–for example, a bunch of people were annoyed because they thought the artist was just trafficking in the same kind of stereotypes that it’s satirizing, or perhaps that the artist was trying to satirize the stereotypes but was too inept and un-self-aware to realize that he wasn’t really doing anything but repeating them. I don’t know if it would even be possible to approach a work of art without thoughts about the artist’s intentions and mindset figuring into your judgment, except for maybe something very non-conceptual like music or abstract art.
      - http://www.jjsaul.com Jim Saul
        
        That interview is quite interesting. It’s a relief to know I’m not entirely deluding myself about a wealth of subtextual intent:
        
        And OMG BFF LOL is kind of the ugliest most popular form of representation. So one of the things I’m looking at is a kind of Mary Kate and Ashley type, but I’m also looking at a kind of flat, and I mean this figuratively, not literally, but very two-dimensional representation of the young girl to be sold back to the young girl as a form of identification. So I took that as a pretense and then used it as a vessel to carry slightly complex information.
        
        [...]
        
        They’re actually carrying in their dialogue a kind of a complex Marxist track. I mean, they’re talking about consumer fetish and materialism in a complex way. So their jokey banter of is it better to want than to have, I love to have but, you know, I also like to want, and wanting is kind of hell, and having is heaven. These things are ultimately become far more complicated as you give them a little bit of time and allow them to sink in.
      - chgoliz
        
        @ hypnosifl
        
        In a way, you’re making it sound like a Poe.
        
        People have the right to create art for themselves. However, if they want a public audience for their art, they have to be willing to create something that isn’t entirely insular, or else accept that the public doesn’t ‘get’ their work properly.
        
        We as the audience have no responsibility for caring about artists or how they represent ideas in their art. It is not our responsibility to study the artist to know what they really meant to say. Either the piece is worth engaging with, or it isn’t. The added contextual layers are just that. The core needs to be there first.
      - hypnosifl
        
        chgoliz,
        
        I don’t really know what you mean by “entirely insular”–like I said, I think appreciation of this piece really depends only on some basic charitable assumptions about the artist’s mindset. Do you disagree that many of the people who disliked the piece were themselves doing so largely on the basis of what they inferred about the artist’s mindset and intentions? (not to say that some people might still think it doesn’t work or isn’t very interesting even if they do have charitable assumptions about the artist, of course) More generally, I don’t think there’s anything all that “insular” about creating pieces that are meant to be seen in conjuction with other works, as in an exhibit–if someone creates a collection of interrelated short stories and publishes them together in a book, and you look at one story in isolation and it doesn’t make sense to you, do you think it would be “insular” if the author suggested you really needed to read the other stories in the book before making a judgment? How about a serialized TV show like “Mad Men”, is an episode a failure if it won’t appeal to a person who’s never seen another episode and doesn’t know anything about the characters or ongoing plot threads? In the case of the above cartoon, even just seeing a few of the other OMG BFF LOL cartoons like Bathroom and Bedroom are enough to give you the sense that the artist is doing something a little more complex than just trafficking in stereotyped depictions of teenage girls, if you weren’t willing to make that sort of charitable assumption from the start.
        
        I also think the idea that a work of art has a “core” separate from “contextual layers” only makes sense as a very rough approximation, the boundary between the two is actually quite fuzzy. For example, you would probably not say that a knowledge of the English language is a mere “contextual layer” for the appreciation of a book written in English, even though it really is a type of context that not everyone will be familiar with. But what about all the implicit cultural knowledge that goes into understanding the use of metaphors and idioms in the book, the allusions to other works or to historical events, etc.? If an educated English-speaking person from some other culture with little knowledge of American (or Western) culture can’t appreciate a modern American novel, or if a modern American reads a Shakespeare play without footnotes and finds the language and allusions too confusing to appreciate much of it, is it valid for them to complain that they shouldn’t have to learn anything about the context of the work, and if they can’t appreciate it immediately that’s a failure on the part of the artist? Of course I wouldn’t say that the animated piece we’re talking about requires such footnotes, anyone with knowledge of the image of teenage girls in Western commercial media and a charitable attitude about the artist’s mindset could potentially find it entertaining/interesting (and like I said, maybe they still wouldn’t like it), but your comments about what makes for good art were very general so I’m responding to them in a general way here.
      - chgoliz
        
        @ hypnosifl
        Disqus is no friend to discussion. We’ll have to find another venue to continue.
http://twitter.com/Epers Eddie Perkins

Well, that’s an hour of my life I won’t get back.

Edit: OK, if their wishing to be on TV because reality sucks, while at the same time not being real and being (kinda) on TV, is supposed to be deep or profound, well, gotta say, even the Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse web series does it better.

Speaking of which, a new episode may have come out yesterday. I should check.
- malindrome
  
  An hour? Are you experiencing lost time? The video I watched was less than 5 minutes long.
BarBarSeven

Screw all of you who don’t get the satire in this piece. It’s genius! It actually sums up a lot of teen culture malaise in the 2010s quite well. And as far as OMG BFF LOL goes, I realized how brilliant his work is when I saw this specific part of that piece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5fF4F7uaq8

EDIT NOTE: Okay, the URL to a video above is what I intended to post; “Bathroom.” The “Bedroom” clip that Disqus actually embedded is good, but I misremembered the title. Enjoy both!
- http://nelc.livejournal.com/ NelC
  
  Yeah, no, I’m not getting it. Would I understand it better if I had tween children of my own?
  - chgoliz
    
    I do. No, you wouldn’t.
humanresource

I like it; the idea that we’re aiming to enter some kind of narcissist nirvana by becoming an idea, a trending topic etc, is pretty potent, and this was a good way to explore it. Its not just tweens that play to the fourth wall, after all (eg: was it really necessary to install a feature that lets us know how many people like a given comment in a BB thread?)
- millie fink
  
  Are you saying you’ll be mad at me if I “Like” your comment?
  - humanresource
    
    On the contrary, a few more “likes” and my life will be complete.
    - malindrome
      
      Tooootaalllly.
- Boundegar
  
  All the cool websites are doing it.
http://marrickvillian.blogspot.com/ Al Corrupt

I like how I could turn the volume down when they got annoying, unlike in real life.
anankesf

Perniciously invasive stereotyping.
geoffhing

I find this problematic as, by using pretty heavy-handed stereotypes about youth, it makes a cultural commentary about media and attention in a way that doesn’t implicate the artist or the audience. For sure, you could rip a version of these conversations from a middle school hallway, but I hear versions of this from adults at bars and on transit as well. While I don’t think the artist intends to suggest these cultural framings originate with tween girls, the presentation makes it easier for the audience to overlook our own investment in life with an audience. While stereotypes might be good for a quick yuck, it seems like a bit of a cheap shot rather than leveling criticism at fellow adults who have far more agency and responsibility for creating the cultural environment the tween characters are referencing.
- Mark Dow
  
  I thought it was aimed at an adult audience, not the stereotyped youths. Why would tween be in the titles? It may be a cheap shot, but it hits the target.
  - geoffhing
    
    I think it’s most definitely aimed at an adult audience. That’s why I don’t like it. It lets us adults laugh at the silliness of youth and makes it easier to avoid considering our own attachment to the values the characters reflect.
    - humanresource
      
      I read it the opposite way – as suggesting that the entire culture is starting to operate on the level of a bunch of vapid 12 year old girls.
Spezz

I think a lot of the commenters in this article need to have a long hard think about who this video is satirizing.
- millie fink
  
  Thanks for the explanation.
  - hypnosifl
    
    Well, see my second reply to grs above for some attempt at an explanation.
vrplumber

With the static visual style and the brand stingers separating the acts, this feels like a strung-together series of web comics, lightly animated and masterfully voiced.

I found it entertaining but mildly grating, due to the voice acting, but I suppose that was what the actors were shooting for.
erratic

Baffled by how many people here didn’t get it.
- millie fink
  
  Thanks for the explanation.
http://twitter.com/gths Graham Freeman

Uncanny Valley High would’ve been a better name for this
smallteam

“My turn! My turn! My turn!”. She then takes off on the water skis. Scarlett watches on and hums a tune, which develops into a scat singing improvisation session.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvJJiLX3K20
- hypnosifl
  
  Those are great, I hadn’t seen them before–found a playlist with a bunch of ‘em here.
- bcsizemo
  
  My absolute favorite one is Computer:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE_czPc7o5Y&feature=related
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_SVV4BXZ3NUPXI34WH3EERSF64Q Seriously

I thought a tween was a 10-12 year old. In between child and teenager. This looks like high school or Jr high to me.