Some thoughts on the found digital blobjects plucked from the YouTube mass by ???pet??? on loshadka and originally posted by crispY468.
The spiritsurfers manifesto questions the axiom "finding is making" for lack of attention to the frame for the Internet found object. The manifesto seems to suggest that the frame's formal design (via html, CSS, etc) is the key to setting off or distancing the object, and that it requires "great subtlety." spirit surfers does sport elegant design and thus achieves its own purposes formally. (Although archives ready-to-hand would be nice.)
The Loshadka or Nasty Nets frames are also adequate to achieve distance for the found object on a design level--nothing fancy but no advertising clutter, graphics overpowering content, etc. At least equally important to the formal frame is, what are the surrounding posts like? What are the reader's expectations? What is being said with the appropriation and will the finder's intentions be communicated (or miscommunicated in an interesting way)?
???pet???'s blobjects are complete in themselves, needing no additional transformation. Because they are embedded YouTubes, they bring with them their own frame ("popular video site that mashes all video into the same rectangular format and where commenters say anything that comes into their heads about it without a second's hesitation").
By changing the context of the blobjects from the popular setting to the snotty, visually superior artist setting (sorry, Loshadka, that's a joke), here's what ???pet??? has done at least for this viewer:
1. further isolated already-isolated CGI trickery so that it becomes self-contained and iconic
2. allowed us with a minimum of distractions to contemplate digital abstractions of "waving grass" and "blowing hair" in all their ill-conceived misbegotten awfulness, while at the same time being dazzled by the technical cleverness and yes, even beauty of same. (The working method of these types of animations is to have multiple versions of a single motion-captured, photographically modeled strand, or group of strands, moving simultaneously in accordance with known physical laws and to use artful blurring where the motions become too complex to be rendered, under the assumption that the eye will not notice these, even though it does.)
3. given us a frame to think about these blobjects as the atoms or molecules on which all current movies, video games, and commercial spots are built--a small compact cluster of false assumptions.
[The false assumption being that the uncanny valley can be spanned and that we need to model all visual phenomena with 1s and 0s. There are certainly monetary reasons for doing so but what are the aesthetic ones, beyond an ironic love of the artificial and grotesque?]