Human Connection in the age of Isolation

On “Core-Core”, “The Pinegrove Shuffle” and Treasure Hunting

Right now, there are thousands of people dancing a similar melancholic dance, to the same song, over and over and over. But somehow it doesn't feel sad at all, it feels uplifting. In fact, it reminds you of how beautiful humanity is. It reminds you of our willingness to participate in life together, and share an understanding of one another's inner world. Our willingness to connect to something more than just our own individual selves. Our willingness to see eachother.

Everyone replying the same thing in the comments, “I get it”. 

If you’re not familiar with what I'm directly speaking about, it is likely that you don’t have tik tok. And if you're one of those people who are so avidly against tik tok that you can't see the deeper picture here, I urge you to give this article a chance to surprise you. Because this trend I'm about to speak on is more than some quick internet dopamine hit, it has roots in something more fundamental to what makes us human. It's truly moving, and forming a new generation of art and a way of looking at and reckoning with our current world. 

So let me first explain to you what the pinegrove shuffle is, and corecore (and in doing so, explaining it to myself and what it means to me). 

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First of all, these two things are heavily intertwined. So I will explain what the pinegrove shuffle is first, and then get into their foundational blocks and their inherent value to our current society at large. 

The pinegrove shuffle is a trending dance that people are filming themselves doing, set to the song "Need 2" by Pinegrove. 

But it's not just a typical tik tok trending dance to try to look cool and move on to the next trend. It's collectivized in a way of deep feeling, understanding and a desire for catharsis from emotional repression. 

It's very simple, basically just swinging your arms open and closed while shuffling a bit forwards and backwards with your feet. Nothing very remarkable about it. But it's more about the thought and emotions behind it, the fact that we're all doing this thing together, and it stemming from something more seemingly hidden. 

When I saw the first video, it was just this sort of fratty looking dude in his front lawn swinging his arms to this gloomy-ish song. And I thought it was sort of touching. The contrast between this typical kind of buff guy with a deeply emotional look on his face dancing a goofy looking dance to some midwest emo. But I didn't think much about it and scrolled on, as is the nature of tik tok. 

Then the next day I started seeing constant reproductions of this trend. You'd try to scroll on and there it was again with a new person looking like they just want some kind of constructed connection in this disconnected world. Like "hey, look at me, I get it. I get it too. I know what this feels like. Do you see me?"

At first I thought this was a little annoying to be totally honest, seeing the same thing over and over, but then I saw the bigger picture quite clearly. 

(Here's the lyrics to the song this dance is done with for context. "Need 2"by Pinegrove):

The lyrics themselves are really touching and point out a similar sentiment which is shared among Gen Z and below recently, which basically states "This world is hard to care about nowadays, everything seems to be going downhill.. But at the same time, I still find something within me that urges me to continue caring, and I can't really explain it in words". (But perhaps we can find a way to express this unexplained caring in abstract emotions, music, and performance, some kind of other subtle form of expression).

And then there is the trend itself, the fact that you couldn't really get away from this seemingly simple and boring dance on such a fast paced app like tik tok, really slowed you down. Really made you stop and think, what is this? Why is everyone taking their time to reproduce this and join in? even in the comments, all saying "I get it, I get it". (Not "I get it" like in an annoyed way, but "I get it" as in "I understand this").

There's something here that is birthing a feeling of being connected to one another. There's something here that we can all stop our scrolling to join in on, to decipher, to relate to, to understand. To participate in, in a world where we all have less and less desire or option to participate overall.

Like, "I don't know how to move forward in this world anymore, we are bursting at the seams, but I'm going to keep dancing through it all. I'm going to keep FEELING through it all, no matter how hard that gets". 

Now to really make sense of this dance-trend, you need to understand corecore as well.

Here is corecore, which I think sparked a lot of these hopeful-melancholic trends which have started to sprout up more and more often lately. 

(I will explain exactly what corecore is in just a moment below)

But first, I need to express that I hate to call corecore a trend, because I really attribute corecore as a new type of artform. Would you have called cubism a trend? Would you have called abstract expressionism a trend? Would you have called film a trend? Just because this artform is inherently digital, new and on a specific platform, does not make it only a trend.

You may think it's silly to give so much credit to corecore as being a new form of artistic practice, but that's the same thing they said to surrealist artists, it's the same thing they said to impressionist painters etc. They said that this isn't real art, just because it was something new, something they didn't personally like, something that didn't move them as an individual and so they discredited it as a movement as a whole and didn't give it a chance. 

Corecore is more than a trend. It is shaping a new way of seeing the world. A way of morphing our, now common, feeling of disintegration into hope and collaboration. 

Corecore is an inherently collaborative artform, almost like digital moving collage. Always with a specific theme, story and message in each piece. 

At its most foundational, corecore is taking videos from all around the internet or from films, movies, podcasts, etc and cutting them up, chopping them out and finding little hidden gems within them all. Parking them with other clips that have a similar underlying message and setting it to an audio track or mini score to pull it all together. 

It's typically captioned/titled with one line from one of the videos that encapsulates the overall message or theme they're trying to relay in the full piece. 

For example, it might be a video composed of twenty different clips, all from vastly different origins. But in one of the clips someone says a particularly impactful line and then they will center (and caption) the whole video around that one line. And will use it as the jumping point for the theme and message they wish to convey with that particular piece. 

Corecore videos are almost always (as I mentioned earlier) hopeful-melancholic. They typically have a vibe of showing how our world and society is crumbling, but at the same time, how these individuals and how art is dealing with that destruction and moving forward anyways. 

Some corecore videos are more desperate, and some are more optimistic. But they all rely on emotional and deep concepts that aim to make us think a little bit more about how we interact with the world, ourselves and especially how we interact with each other. 

At first, I thought the idea that corecore being considered an artform was ridiculous. These videos were moving, for sure, but to say it's an art form? C'mon. These guys are just collaging other peoples work and calling it art. But then I started thinking more about it and came to my current conclusion. 

First, you have to think about if you consider physical collage art, if yes then your answer is already simplified for you, this is just digital collage so why wouldn't it already be art? But if you don't consider physical collage art, then let's take it a step further.

For all of human time, we have been collectors, treasure hunters I like to say. We forgot and dismissed this part of ourselves for a long time but it always was inherent in our beings. 

Obviously back in the day, this was a survival strategy, collecting food and materials to survive longer. Collecting anything that seemed useful. Nowadays we still do this, but lots of us think our INHERENT drive to collect can be unhealthy. And sometimes it is. It can turn into hoarding for example. 

But we all talk about, nowadays, how much STUFF we all have, and some people have gone to the opposite side of the spectrum, minimalism, denying our love for collection. But funny enough, these people often just collect in other ways. Let me explain.

There's now been a resurgence of treasure hunting, but in a more subtle way. Digital treasure hunting. There's a billion pages on instagram now just considered "aesthetic pages". They collect and archive photos and digital media from all over the internet which fits in one specific kind of aesthetic or "message/theme" and they post it all in one place on one specific instagram page for example. A page dedicated to pictures of spirals, or of clips of old arthouse films or of media that makes us feel specifically nostalgia etc. Or using pinterest, saving a million little posts or pictures into different saved and titled pin boards. 

We also collect knowledge to use for later. Sentimental photos or objects. Information about the people we love. Art, books, writings, songs. Antique shops, thrift stores, Treasure troves. Things that make us feel something.

If someone went to the beach with a metal detector and found some precious stones, and then they went to a thrift store and found some string, and they wove the string together around the stones and made jewelry, would that not be art? 

What if I found a premade canvas, and I went to the art store and bought some premade paint and I added that paint to the canvas in a way I wanted to, would that not be art? 

Nothing is fully original anymore, even at the earliest foundation, if you made 100% of your materials yourself, you’re still taking something from nature to build the materials up, the original artist.

Everything is just collage in a way, everything is just a collaboration with someone or something other than yourself. Whether it’s physical materials or ideas, we all got to where we are by following steps which were built by someone or something before us.

It's all just the finding of different pre-made materials, and combining them in a way which moves us, which pleases us, which makes sense to us.

This is how I feel about corecore.

I say corecore is a form of treasure hunting. And the artist find all of these treasures which bring them a certain feeling, they take the time to sift through the infinite content on the internet and elsewhere to put everything together in a seamless, unique and emotionally relevant way. Something which ends up being immensely meaningful and impactful in its outcome. 

These corecore videos, oftentimes, bring me to tears. They can make me feel more and understand more about our life here as humans than a lot of the standalone media can, and this is also because the collaborative/collage basis of it, is inherently perfect to bring forth these kinds of emotions. It shows that we are not alone. 

It says, "look at how many people are expressing this same idea. Look, I found them all and put them all together for you here, so that you can see what I see, and we can see that we all might interact with the world and life in a more similar way than we thought we did before". Maybe we're all more connected than we thought. 

I also just want to point out that I find it particularly impressive when someone can find these exact videos and edit them and put them together in such a way that it leaves a lasting impact even without any other context from the original full clips. And oftentimes, the original clips themselves are not even meant to be so impactful at all. But the corecore artist will shape it in such a way that it's almost like there was some hidden, monumental, heart wrenching meaning all along from some random clip from Elmo.

They truly can make something brand new out of something old.

And to place these clips together with such subtle strings attaching them but still making it all make sense in the end, is just impressive to me. And it's really beautiful to see this new art form morph and take its place here in the world as something that really does make a difference in people's emotional lives and the way we think about society and relate to each other. 

I think it's important and I think it's beautiful and I think it's cool that I get to be a part of it, of this generation, making something new and powerful out of the desolation. 

I'm happy that I'm alive to see it. 

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People may be quite pessimistic nowadays that we are more separated than ever, but watching so many people take part in these trends really sprouted a seed in me that made me feel hopeful. And I feel optimistic that we really do all have this kind of collective undercurrent of shared experience which is the inherent foundation of humanity, striving for understanding and connection through it all. (ESPECIALLY through an age of heavy isolation). 

We just now connect with each other in a new way. Something we haven't done before. Things always reach a breaking point. We went so far into isolation that we even figured out a new way of connection. To connect THROUGH the isolation, not just in spite of it. 

We will always come back together. We will always know one another. Whether it's through a song, a hug, a party, a collaboration, or simply just through a feeling. We are humans. And we do cute human things, no matter what. 

I recommend looking up a montage of the pinegrove shuffle if you have never seen it and then afterwards, looking at some corecore videos. For corecore videos, @highenquiries / john rising on tik tok is a great place to start. But I'm sure you can find john rising / general corecore videos and pinegrove shuffle videos all montaged on youtube as well. (You don't need tik tok to participate). 

I hope you can find what you're looking for, and I hope you "get it" too. 

:) 

(Also feel free to leave a comment to satisfy the destiny Gods).