A woman weeps into her phone camera, followed by a series of seemingly unconnected clips of people dancing and crying on TikTok. Next, a clip of CNN or an Amazon product review. The video showing you this plays dour music in the background. You’re not sure what’s happening, but one question becomes clear: am I spending too much time online?
This is CoreCore. Although it’s nominally a satire of online culture, CoreCore is not an easy genre to pin down. Is it a hard critique of social media or a disinterested mirror held up to our faces? Is it a digital trend? An art movement straight from Gen-Z? Or a mockery of all of the above? The contributors who have created and sustained it are not homogenous, either. Plenty of accounts have developed their own style and sensibility with which they post “CoreCore.”
@masonoelle i hope noel corp hires me.
♬ aquatic ambience – scizzie*+
CoreCore first appeared on Tumblr in 2020, but it was not until its virality on TikTok in 2022 that the movement trended and took the form it has today. It’s generally seen as a response to the internet culture of the 2020s. CoreCore speaks its language, uses its output, and sees with its eyes. The name itself plays on this culture by referencing -core, a suffix used to delineate trends and microgenres online.
-core or CoreCore?
First lifted from the musical genre “Hardcore,” the suffix -core within internet lingo has come to denote a trend, and any product of it, that fits into a recognizable visual language and set of motifs and ethos. For example, “Cottagecore” has spent its time in the limelight, extolling the image of pastoral living. People dress in old-fashioned cotton clothes, make sourdough starters, or take a walk in a pasture — anything that can be photographed, clipped, and recorded as proof of its veracity. Someone puts it online, and boom — it’s now part of Cottagecore.
@honeycottageshop Some of my favorite things I’ve purchased 🦋🍃 all 🔗🔗 in my bio! // #cottagecore #roominspo #amazonfinds #cottagecoreroom ♬ оригінальний звук – dreamyclips
Some will tell you that this is good — that it’s clean, healthy, fun, or even a pushback against “late-stage capitalism” by resisting the image of an industrialized world. But your average CoreCore video will leave you feeling like it’s bad. There, -core seems symptomatic of a world in which offline experience becomes grist for the online content mill.
CoreCore Characteristics
However, the attitudes represented under CoreCore are diverse. Not everyone is looking to stage a social critique. Many are just jokes, poking fun at the digital landscape that creators and audiences inhabit. Nevertheless, there are several properties of the genre as a whole.
The first is a collage. Every CoreCore video is a collage of other videos, usually TikToks. The videos are diverse, coming from many different trends and circles on the internet. But in a CoreCore video, they’re superimposed atop one another and mixed together. The effect is self-referential –each video feels like the internet looking at itself.
Not all posts are from social media, but they reflect social media’s world. Videos of the Joker gesture toward a sense of alienation. Tech articles foretell grim surveillance technology with cheery headlines. All are acceptable fodder for CoreCore.
The second is critique. Although CoreCore can’t be collapsed under a single perspective or belief, the videos are largely pessimistic. They do not see the objects of their videos (online “content”) as serious or worth preserving. Instead, they emphasize the disorientation and isolation that comes with being “too online.” CoreCore videos will cram fifteen clips into fifteen seconds, leaving the viewer intentionally overwhelmed.
Trending online
The effect is to distill the contemporary online experience into one video. Creators also intentionally choose clips with depressing content: Incel posts appear next to U.S. military commercials, and trendy item reviews next to someone begging for rent money. Even clips that are innocuous on their own reveal a new truth when combined: We experience ourselves and others as an algorithm. We talk, argue, and enjoy as an algorithm prompts us to. The more we post, the more the companies who own these algorithms profit and encourage us to post. It’s a vicious cycle.
To emphasize this, many CoreCore videos play over melancholy instrumentals (often violin). Sometimes, this is ironic, mocking anyone who would weep over something online. Other times, it’s more sincere, and the music seems to genuinely mourn a lost pre-internet innocence.
But, whereas your average Cottagecore post fits clearly into its designated niche, CoreCore does not. Its self-referential nature, in both form and content, means that it’s always in danger of becoming the very object of its criticism: just another trend. Is this video a serious critique or simply saturating our already over-saturated minds? Does it reject the core trend or push it to the extreme?
CoreCore: getting philosophical
Although it appears as mindless content, it’s clear that some CoreCore creators and consumers believe that it can be more.
Rhea Nayyar, writing for ALLERGIC, has likened it to Dada, an artistic movement of early 20th century iconoclasts. She argues that the irreverent and destructive nature of CoreCore is similar to that of Dada. Both seek to strip the pretensions of culture (be that internet or fine art) away, revealing a wasteland that’s been taken too seriously for too long.
Eddie Hewer, an early adopter of CoreCore under the TikTok handle @Eddoeh, is in the more serious camp. The central conceit of his videos seems to fall along two lines of questioning: What effects has social media wrought on myself and others, and is there a threshold past which an offline life can no longer be recovered? He fills his collages with writing, either quotations or his own, that repeatedly reiterates these questions.
“I gaze at the gazing photo,” one reads. “It is an inferior art.” Then, a man standing in a boardroom. “A kind of metaphysical belief that algorithms can access your true self,” he says. “I hope they can, and will, send you exactly the content that you need to see at exactly the time you need it.” Central to the video is a pervaisve unease — that the lives we are leading are insufficient and dictated by an algorithm. We can see the effects but never escape.
So, is it art?
As much as CoreCore creators may scoff at the idea, it’s fruitful to read these works as art, worthy of more reflection than just a post. The alternative is to throw them back into the bin of endless content. As art, it begs the question: Can internet art bring us beyond the screen? Or is it just a more (un)satisfying aesthetic, seeking to look cool?
Enter Dove Land, a project formally distinct but thematically related to the critiques of CoreCore. Envisioned and executed by Hewer and fellow artist Ezekiel Cambey (@omanihirth on Instagram), Dove Land was a multimedia gallery exhibit comprised of paintings, digital art, installation art, and a zine of the same name.
@eddoeh im back!! come hang out and meet me and @omanihirth ♬ original sound – eddie hewer
Dove Land is a celebration of vitality and all things natural. The zine is mostly poetry and illustration: watercolor paintings of forests, wolves, and angels standing next to poems of romance, agony, and ecstasy. It serves an enchanted view of the world, reminiscent of the works of William Blake. It’s also an antithesis to the content streams of TikTok and Instagram Reels, which Hewer consistently portrays in his videos as demoralizing and dull.
Love in the time of CoreCore
The zine ends with an essay entitled Object Love and Intimacy Now, which makes the CoreCore connection more explicit. It claims that the digital reproduction of “Love” is a false image that replaces real intimacy but does not nourish it in the same way. The digital space is necessarily one of consumption. Something must first be captured and packaged if it wants to appear. To Hewer and Cambey, this kills the authentic facets of love.
@eddoeh you can do it
♬ original sound – eddie hewer
Philosophically, the essay can be read as a companion to the CoreCore TikToks — it is an attempt to explain why social media is often alienating, and how we can free ourselves from it.
Overall, Object Love and Intimacy Now feels unsatisfying despite the genuinely moving artwork that proceeds it. It is a choke point between the offline world of gallery art and the online world of content, and as much as the juxtaposition may be interesting, it also suffers for it.
The two concepts feel as if they are talking past each other. One gets the sense that CoreCore cannot say anything outside of itself. Instead, Hewer and Cambey’s idea of love is brought in as a surrogate, trying to enchant a disenchanted world from the outside.
If the purpose of CoreCore is to critique from within by using the very content it seeks to criticize, can we say that it’s been a success? Even with work like Hewer’s, who tries to envision a possible world outside of TikTok, CoreCore does not offer much. It seems to confirm its own worst suspicions — that the digital world is myopic and cannot do more than just repeat itself and its own miserable conditions. What good is there in repeating something bad?
Whither CoreCore?
@masonoelle, a popular CoreCore creator, still posts videos. But the trend has died down, and Hewer’s last CoreCore post is from September 12, 2023. Nonetheless, the movement has left us with a particular image of our media consumption — one that is wasteful, degrading, and compulsive. Once an idea like this has been introduced, it’s difficult to ignore.
Aside from Dove Land, CoreCore has not metastasized into anything artistically greater, but it leaves a lot on the table for Gen-Z artists working in digital spaces. As a digital trend, it’s artistically viable, opening the door for creators to experiment with social critique and media collage. As a work of art, it disseminates easily and massively across different platforms, unlike the cloistered and exclusive galleries where artists traditionally show their work.
But CoreCore also discovers the limits to internet art. As demonstrated in Hewer’s work, it’s difficult to express anything beyond the internet when the internet itself is your artistic medium. You become implicated in the same mindless scroll-ability you’re trying to resist. It flattens Hewer’s own voice — the tender, personal feelings of Dove Land are largely absent from his TikToks.
Ultimately, staking out a personal artistic voice and message will be a struggle. The internet takes an infinity of hopes, dreams, and voices and homogenizes them into consumable content fit for anyone’s screen. That’s what CoreCore is trying to prove. But it’s also the threshold of internet art. Even if unsuccessful, CoreCore represents a yearning to innovate and break through.
