The Role of the Video Clip in Modern Visual Culture

Abstract

The article examines the role of the video clip in modern visual culture as part of the mainstream audiovisual media subculture and its impact on the development of entertainment television. It reveals the interaction of the verbal and visual components in the current digital environment and its effect on the sensory perception of audiovisual content. It also dwells on the formation of audience’s stereotypes based on the rapid growth of digital technology. The author points out the connection of these stereotypes with the evolution of screen language, where the music score, as one of the structural elements of film and TV content, adds new meanings to the narrative arc and supplemental psychological characteristics to audiovisual images.
Special attention is focused on two prominent phenomena: conventional art and underground, highlighting a special type of their symbiosis in the era of digital culture. At the same time, the author emphasizes an apparent increase in the competition between the old music content distribution and new forms of video representation, since modern clip culture has gained access to a wider audience via numerous podcasts, rapidly ousting TV music channels. It is noted that the Internet and new technologies have created a powerful tool of self-expression for the younger generation which does not expect the information to have any cause-and-effect relationships. This leads to an increase in selective visual "snatching" of information, in compliance with formula "I see it this way", which seems to suggest: your life should be colorful and relaxed, as in "pictureepisodes," quickly flashing on the screen, where the quick pace creates the illusion of kaleidoscopic events.
This simplified semantics of "picture-episodes" appeals to the young due to its picturesque flippancy. Such is the structure of most clips which reflects the mosaic thinking molded in the postmodernist era, combining elements of popular art and design. The emergence of new format soundtracks as part of the story’s dramatic pattern alters the musical film language structure. Music videos integrated into entertainment industry allow for a quick promotion of musical compositions. This influenced the change of the cultural atmosphere, filled with new spectacular forms of entertainment, where video clips became a media advertising showcase and created new associations in collective consciousness, which led to the illusion of combining real life with an on-screen "life". It became difficult to separate real events from those on the screen, a fragment from the whole, to draw the line between actual and virtual reality. Eventually, a person begins to feel safer in the virtual world, since it is easily amendable. But at the same time, one has to make a choice between two paths: one to himself, another one to an imaginary world.