Corecore and Hopecore: How to Manufacture the Human Experience
- Alex Stevenson
- 5 minutes ago
- 5 min read
A smiling George W. Bush stares at me while a singer I will never know wails about the loneliness of being human and I feel my stomach twist. I feel more seen than I have ever been by a piece of art. There is something unbelievably visceral about the images flashing by my eyes that perfectly capture that terrifying feeling being unmoored and isolated in a crowd. There is a knowledge of shared hurt that seems to transcend language. I find I cannot breathe with the relief of being understood as I’m told that it is not ever so dark that I can’t find some echo of connection. The music swells and I am elated that such raw sincerity has slipped into my life, leaving me blinded by the humanity we all share. I am feeling capable of being open and raw to the world around me. Then the video restarts.
I am watching one of the most fascinating forms of media that has arisen from short form video content, a corecore video on the Tiktok account the.committee.of.affairs. At the time of writing, this video has received 271,000 views – a modest number for this account yet an impressive reach nonetheless. This TikTok and Instagram phenom is widely regarded by fans of corecore as the leading creator within this genre. The actual confines of corecore remain blurry – there is often overlap with ‘nichetok’ and ‘hopecore’ as well. Despite this, the simplest test of whether a video may be considered corecore is the seeming irrationality of it, as a number of seemingly unrelated videos are put one after another with a song or audio file playing over the top.
Admittedly, I am about two (let’s be honest three) years late to these discussions as corecore’s origins have been explored in depth, with meta narratives or historical meanings derived by people with a much more accurate sense of location when it comes to the social pulse. Yet, I think that the story has continued to evolve past the explanation articles that populated every magazine in 2023. Corecore has stayed true to form and followed the ‘cores’ of our time, this time in the form of radical sincerity.
In an article published by Flash Art in 2023, an author known as Y7 discussed the triple interpretations of corecore, highlighting the necessary lens of irony that defined the early genre. Corecore, from its name is a reflection on the nature of microtrends, meant to cynically attack the consumerist nature of social media trend cycles and so any piece that comes from early corecore must be seen as either an overwhelming torrent of stimulus relating to a trend, an ironic reflection of that stimulant, or somehow a mixture of the two. The videos use discordant imagery from popular videos and audios and contrast them to archival film and photography in an attempt to explore the continuity or deviation from the human experience. In doing so, the creator demonstrates both a knowledge of the current cultural discourse as well as a higherbrow connection to visual media, serving as both a form of commentary and display of cultural capital. It is, by most people’s reckoning, an absurd reflection of the function of aestheticisation of life.
Yet to call it a cultural criticism, an ironic flagging of your cultural awareness and conscious dissociation from it, also doesn’t feel fair to the artistry in their editing or the intentionality with which they trigger responses. There is a focus to these strange videos that is meant to evoke more than just a sad recognition of the state of the world. In that overwhelming flood of content, there is an attempt to communicate a story or a feeling through a utilisation of the absurd and the artistic skillset of curation and editing.
Debates about what can be classified as art are a minefield I have no interest in attempting to traverse (with film being a particularly thorny area) especially as they appear to have no definite end. Despite that, I would posit that this genre of video does share a number of characteristics with the philosophies that guide postmodern art with the rupture of narratives and the revelry found in the discordance of concept. Perhaps the genre’s single unchanging feature (other than its name) from the beginning to now is the absurdity of the pieces and the attempt to confront the viewer with a challenge to their thinking, or lack thereof given the kind of mental numbness that hours of doomscrolling so often causes. However, this may present another, perhaps more depressing option.
It is no surprise to anyone who has been online any time in the last decade that social media pushes content meant to inspire large reactions. Posts that insights outrage or sympathy will go farther than posts that simply spread information. Ragebait, as it is commonly known, is created with the express purpose of garnering engagement. Would it then be so surprising that these corecore accounts are doing the same thing with a broader palette of emotions? Dramatic reactions manufactured to feed the algorithm still wrack up views, collect comments, and ultimately make money. Through their demonstration of cultural know-how that are meant to be universal, these videos push us to engage in a highly addictive, dopamine fueled pattern of watching and scrolling through the responses they naturally garner. In a truly cynical twist, it is also possible that a genre that has been understood to be an artistic and absurd confrontation of the state of social media now is simply another kind of algorithmic cheat code.
I’m not sure any of these are solely right. Corecore videos speak their own language and the community around #nichetok is one that engages in some fascinating online behaviour, yet the discordant nature of the videos don’t always correlate to any actual social relevance or connection. So maybe they’re art? They surely make me and others feel and think deeply with one commenter, @morelikecyqe rather bluntly asking below of the same video I watched; ‘is this meant to be relatable? I think this is art.’ There remains the question of whether the deafening stimulus of a video overwhelms any artistic nuance it might show. Maybe they were never meant to be anything more than a dopamine rush to interrupt hours of scrolling.
As with many internet phenomena, trying to find any particular answer is likely to be a fool's errand, and at the end of the day, corecore videos continue to evolve. Their value as a mirror for the era in which we find ourselves, an age controlled by the ‘almighty’ algorithm, means that regardless of how we understand corecore, corecore may just as well understand us.
Edited by Hania Ahmed, Creative Editor
