Dark Green by Jacob Ciocci
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Jacob Ciocci’s six-minute pop odyssey, Dark Green (2010), plays on ecological terminology—to ‘go green’—in characterizing the circulation and appropriation of images within networked media culture. An adolescent girl at the beginning of video says it best: “We recycle a lot”. This can perhaps be the tagline to the Digital Native generation, those kids raised online steeped in the ready access of pop cultural reference. The piece, which borrows and layers imagery from YouTube videos of sources like Star Trek: The Next Generation and the 2010 Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards, leads the viewer through this media landscape as Carol Anne from the 1982 horror film Poltergeist; the little girl lured by malevolent forces that called to her through television. This media saturation is likened to being caught in the muck of image culture; to ‘go green’ by way of its slime. The video speaks to photographic theorist Susan Sontag’s call to an ‘ecology of images’, or a responsible means of viewing and reproducing visual content. Here, her ecology gives way to pollution at a nuclear scale. Despite the ‘dark’ characterization of the networked image, Dark Green is ultimately about itself: a dizzying collage of pop culture spanning thirty years, gutted and remixed from the Internet.
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