William Hoffmann, Daniel Mercadante, and Julius Metoyer III, Words, 2010

Here is the link for their website "Everynone" which has more videos by this trio of New Media artists.

Also, here is an article explaining the Youtube Play. A Biennial of Creative Video celebration at the Guggenheim museums.

In this film, Hoffmann, Mercadante and Metoyer III base the premise of their film around the infamous rhetoric tool, the pun. With shifting situations moving from shot to shot, they create a mesmerizing, innovative, humorous, and inspiring film. Based on information from their website, Hoffmann, Mercadante and Metoyer III are part of a group called “Everynone” which is somewhat a pun of itself in the name. The website explains how the three artists have collaborated their thoughts and ideas to create similar pieces to Words. “Everynone” explains itself as a production company in New York and Los Angeles. The film was one of many others for the Guggenheim’s (New York) top artistic Youtube films of 2010. Although Youtube films may not be considered “academic,” the fact that the Guggenheim chose to be apart of this revealing supports the importance “online” videos have in the shaping of the artistic New Media world. As director of the Guggenheim Foundation, Richard Armstrong, states, “The Guggenheim, together with YouTube, and HP and Intel, harnessed their collective expertise to create YouTube Play to celebrate this art form and the Internet’s power to catalyze and disseminate new forms of digital media.” With New Media art mediums, the accessibility to art is broadened and the world of Contemporary art is celebrating that, this event and competition being an example.

Particularly in Hoffmann’s, Mercadante’s and Metoyer III’s film, the exploration between language and our relationships with certain words and experiences is celebrated. Thus, the varying connotations of certain words range in a variety of ways all aiming to define different situations, which is why this film succeeds in its artistic make-up. Language in itself is an abstraction of sorts, and this film, Words, plays upon that pun in a new manner and representation. The definitions of one word vary not only in literal meaning, but vary in how one uses the word depending on what situation one is in. For me, this is what makes the film so enjoyable in that the artists are saying more about the experience one has with words and giving importance to how one uses words in daily life.