TikTok: Art in 15 second slices – The Age

This is because TikTok doesnt know you yet. Where other social platforms connect you with friends, family or colleagues, TikTok doesnt care about people you may know. Its only concerned with what you actually want to see, and once the apps algorithm really gets to work analysing why one video holds your attention just a second longer than another, or why you swiped back three videos to watch one over again the AI powering its recommendations engine begins to feel scarily godlike.

Thats when the art of TikTok begins to reveal itself. It took the film industry decades to establish itself as a coherent system with its own internal logic, but in just a few years TikTok has done the same. What seems messy and chaotic at first quickly coagulates into a highly coded and creative ecology that pillages older media forms from Funniest Home Videos to vines and repurposes them to new ends.

The opening bars of AC/DCs Thunderstruck are recreated using only a babys gurgles. God invents seahorses: "what if baby saxophones could swim?" A woman correctly inserts a USB stick on the first try and a heavenly chorus erupts.

If this sounds like cringey internet fare circa 2005, its because the artistry of TikTok doesnt translate well into words. Its important that most of its videos are without speech, since the musical soundtrack does so much of the talking. When words are needed, theyre delivered via on-screen captions.

Nineteen-year-old Victorian Heath Kirley posted his first TikTok in January last year. Hes standing in his kitchen putting the finishing touches on a cryptic yellow costume with an oversized M on his chest as the early bars of Soulja Boys Pretty Boy Swag play out. When the bass drops, hes transformed into the yellow M&M.

A year later, he has 2.1 million followers.

"There were some weeks where 100,000 new people would follow me," he says. "It still blows my mind."

At first TikTok was just a private joke, a place to post whatever he thought might amuse a few strangers. "Until one of my videos blew up overnight. It got more than a million views and I was like, maybe this is more than just a creative outlet."

That video? "It was a joke around getting a tattoo of the word bread."

Again, its really hard to convey the humour of TikToks in words.

Most TikTok videos begin when the maker chooses its signature "sound", selecting a short audio track from the vast library the app offers. In most cases this is a song excerpt, though there are snippets from TV shows and stand-up routines too. The user then shoots a video to accompany the track, inserting their own take on the original.

The audio-first nature of TikTok means that almost every video is a kind of cover version, and a videos creativity emerges in the way each user delivers their own spin on an established product. Youll hear the same 15-second snatch of song hundreds of times, but with each iteration a user will respond to all of the previous versions by throwing in a last-second twist, a new punchline or jawdropping physical feat.

This format of creative expression within a formulaic structure extends to dance videos, lipsynchs, comic memes and skits. The TikTok algorithm rewards originality within set constraints most videos take their cues from a previous dance, joke, trick or stunt and then make it their own.

A sophisticated visual and aural vocabulary has quickly evolved. Comic videos almost always end prematurely, cutting off mid-sentence so the viewer has to finish the gag. Conversely, a moment of absurdity (someone catching a falling bottle with their butt cheeks) will freeze while the moment is repeated from eight increasingly extreme camera angles.

TikToks creators might be crafty, but is any of this art? The study of aesthetics has long held to categories such as the beautiful and the sublime, but US cultural theorist Sianne Ngai argues that more relevant categories for understanding art today are the zany, the cute and the interesting. Its the first of those that helps explain TikToks relevance.

"Zany" sounds like a backhanded compliment at best. It conjures something too busy, trying too hard, overreaching itself. If the zany is fun, its also stressful, perhaps even fun because its stressful. Think manic comedians from Lucille Ball to Jim Carrey, but also the visual too-muchness of Star Wars films today, the 100km/h delivery of Youtube personalities, the streaming series you inhale in one sitting. For Ngai, the zany is the experience of "too many things coming at (you) quickly and at once".

TikTok is undeniably zany. The majority of videos consciously cultivate a naive aesthetic, looking more like the home videos you produced at the age of eight than the glossed and airbrushed imagery on other social platforms. This in part excuses the dorkiness that comes with being zany TikTok is undeniably dorky, too because we dont judge the eight-year-old pretending to be a grown up with the same rigour wed judge a professional actor.

Ngai says that the zany is a category worth considering seriously because it reflects the experience of modern times. From the silent antics of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton through to the frantic, frenetic busyness of TikTok acts, zany humour collapses the distinction between fun and work, between the demands of everyday life and the supposed escape of privacy. Its hard to think of a better description of social media than that. With too many things coming at you quickly and at once, a zany response might seem the only reasonable one.

TikTok would rather its users be zany, too. More than any other social platform it sells itself as a low-conflict zone, promoting wholesome content and actively removing material that might provoke divisive responses (how it interprets that is another matter). Where other platforms increase views by ratcheting up the outrage, Tiktok appears almost entirely absent of capital-P politics.

At the level of lived experience, though, TikTok is rife with politics. Many of its memes straddle the faultlines of race, sexuality, gender and other seismically volatile subjects.

They do this with humour. Theres a popular meme that presents a scene with the caption "What I think I look like" before cutting to a variation captioned "What everybody else sees". In one iteration, an African-Australian teen is browsing a Coles aisle in a contemplative fashion. As the soundtrack switches up a notch, "what everybody else sees" is the same man stuffing items from the shelves into his pockets.

But even this is zany, and the slapstick element is jokes finisher: its only on the third or fourth viewing that you notice his hand gets stuck in a box, his keychain snagged on the shelf. Its a comment about racial stereotyping wrapped up in a clown suit.

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The content on TikTok appears to be far more diverse than elsewhere on the internet, though its entirely likely the apps algorithm is controlling that sense of diversity. Users have managed to gather a surprising amount of information as to how that algorithm works.

Melbourne high schooler Harvey Petito has a million and a half followers, but says that follower counts matter far less on TikTok than on other platforms. "The TikTok algorithm sends your videos out to people who arent actually following you too. Some weeks Ill look at my analytics and my content has reached over 20 million people, even though I have 1.4 million followers."

"The best part is that its not about followers," says Kirley. "Its about your originality and your creativity. There are accounts with zero followers and Im pretty sure, no matter what, the algorithm will still show their video to a very small amount of people. It all depends on how they interact with it."

Kirley is right. In the few hours after uploading, each TikTok video is seen by a few hundred random viewers, which is why youll be shown clips with just a few likes sandwiched between those with a million or more. How that small batch of viewers respond to the video is scrutinised by the app how much of the clip is actually watched, and how many times is it replayed or shared? The rule seems to be that if a video is liked once for every 10 times its viewed, its then catapulted out to a much larger audience. This is where the AI steps in and begins analysing content: is there hateful or divisive material in there, or anything that breaks the apps terms of service? If it passes the test, its shot out to an even bigger audience.

The next trigger is velocity a video that increases its likes by 20 per cent in a day will graduate to the next level of promotion, which is why TikTok is specifically geared for sudden viral spikes.

Engagement isnt based on the followers you already have, which is why first-time posters can rack up the kind of viewing numbers that would be impossible to attain elsewhere.

A relatively popular video will be circulated at this mass level for four days, and if it performs well enough a flesh-and-blood TikTok staffer will review the clip themselves and decide if it should be one of the tiny fraction of videos to go super-viral.

Reach that point and you might find yourself with one or two million followers. TikTokers wear their fame light, though. Harvey Petito is famous enough to be regularly recognised on the street, but hes more occupied by the same concerns as most other 16-year-olds. "It can be hard finding the time and energy to film when youve been at school all day and then had sports after school or something like that, then you come home and have to shower and get dressed to make tik toks when you know youve still got homework and stuff to do."

When Kirleys views went through the roof, things got pretty zany. "When it was all happening I felt it was something I had to do on the daily, to put all my time towards it, but Ive realised now and this sounds a bit weird that its not as significant as you might think it is ... Ive gotten to a point where I post what I want to post when I want to post it."

John Bailey is a contributor to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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TikTok: Art in 15 second slices - The Age