The internet is full of cats. I know this, you know this, these guys wrote a song about it. Indeed, I'm willing to bet that you've probably scrolled past a couple of cat videos today already, or double-tapped on something hashtagged #catsofinstagram. The people at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York, know this too, and felt that the time has come for Internet Cats: The Exhibition, or to use its proper title: How Cats Took Over the Internet.
The exhibition attempts to "take a critical look at a deceptively frivolous phenomenon" through charting the rise of the cat video, and asking what it is about cats that so captivates us. It begins by screening highlights from the Internet Cat Video Festival, which, according to the curators, "confirmed the cat video as a significant cultural form". The Internet Cat Video Festival was founded in 2012 and alongside home videos there're also artist films, animation and some truly weird music videos; thus proving, as if there was any doubt, how far the cat video has permeated popular culture.
As well as this, the curators have created a kind of timeline-come-internet-scrapbook documenting the Rise of the Cat Video. It starts by looking at the history of the cat in the moving image, and we learn that cats were there right from the get-go. For example, in his early experiments with capturing movement, Edward Muybridge took a series of photos of cats trotting along. The exhibit documents all the important milestones in the internet cat video oeuvre; from early cat forums, to lolcats, "cat breading", and more recent phenomenons such as "Trump your cat" (making your cat look like Donald Trump, the multi-millionaire business mogul currently running for Republican candidacy in America, with a very distinctive barnet).
The exhibition also looks at some of the statistics and reflects on what they say about our feline fascination. We learn that in actual fact, dog videos make up about 23% of YouTube viewings in the Pets & Animals category, as opposed to just 16% for cats. However, cat videos are more likely to go viral and get shared on social media in a short space of time. In general, dogs and cats share roughly the same amount of space on the internet. So why did "cats take over the internet" and not dogs?
Well, the exhibition offers a few hypotheses, ranging from our desire to anthropomorphise cats (give them human characteristics like drama or surprise); to recent research that suggests that watching cat videos is actually good for our emotional well-being; to cat videos playing a pivotal part in the rise of user-generated content and the democracy of the web. It also explores animals that have particularly captured the public imagination in other countries. For example, according to the curators, Britons are "particularly susceptible to the charms of the online goat" which I didn't know, but I'm willing to go with.
In essence, this exhibition is a lot of fun - what else could it be? It doesn't take its ambition to critically examine the cat video phenomenon too seriously, but does offer food for thought about why exactly kitties abound online. But maybe, as I overheard one young visitor say, the reason we watch so many cat videos is simply because "they are funny and awesome."
How Cats Took Over the Internet is showing until February 21, 2016 at Museum of the Moving Image, New York
Image: Jonas Löwgren via Flickr
OMG, Trump Your Cat...! Sounds like a truly NY exhibition and so nice to hear from you Cathy!