“There is in IBM…a phrase that information overload produces pattern recognition… When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition — in other words, to structuring the experience. And I think this is part of the artist’s world. The artist, when he encounters the present, the contemporary artist, is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task”

Marshall McLuhan (from a conversation with Norman Mailer, 1968)

Half of the clips in Duplicate Content, are taken from video art from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. During this period the moving image was made more accessible to artists, in particular due to the availability of video cameras often accessed via art colleges. These were far cheaper and easier to operate than film cameras and gave immediate results. Despite the technical limitations of early video cameras and editing suites artists from a range of perspectives turned to video as means of making art.

The other half of the images are taken from videos posted on social media platforms in recent years. During this time there has been an unprecedented explosion in availability of video cameras with most people carrying one with them at all times empowering an unprecedented volume of video production.

While artists’ early experiments with video frequently asked the question “what is art?”, online creators today are asking “what can be content?”. These two groups, despite their differing motives, have inadvertently arrived at many of the same solutions. Old patterns have resurfaced from the information overload of social media. The memes of early video art are being repeated. Duplicate Content is an imperfect catalogue of these memes.

The majority of the videos included involve people alone in a room filming themselves performing for the camera. Speaking about filming himself for his early work, Bruce Nauman famously said "If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art.” A viral TikTok song by an unknown creator says “everything is content, don’t forget to film it”…