After quickly perusing the Internet for Jacob Ciocci, I thought his work might be a gimmick, made of the same soft stuff that produces mustachioed teenagers and the book section at Urban Outfitters. It wasn't. Less than five minutes into his screening at Queen's Nails Projects, it was obvious that the infantilism in evidence concerned only the material. Ciocci is extraordinary at harnessing narrative arcs within spurious commercial imagery. His editing is aggressive and accessible. It retains the quality of a YouTube discovery that, upon finding, one immediately re-gifts via Facebook. Paper Rad, the artist collaborative to which Jacob, Jessica Ciocci (his sister), and Ben Jones belong, is a popular and ingenious demonstration of collapsed distinctions between public and private authorship, and where music, visual art, and the Internet are equal aesthetic platforms. They work fluidly within and without the Paper Rad name, subconsciously riffing off 60's idealism surrounding collectives. Instead of attempting something so predetermined, they opt for a more anarchic 'kids' clubhouse' arrangement: a loose collaborative of sober adults channeling the raptures of childhood. The screening at Queen's Nails Projects and a musical performance by Extreme Animals at Lobot Gallery the following night were parts of a tour of Jacob's independent projects.

I Let My Nightmares Go, July 2, 2009; performance still.

The twenty-minute screening was, to quote Ciocci, "exercise and exorcism." I Let My Nightmares Go encapsulated this with a crucial performative element involving Jacob dancing in front of a projection of Jacob dancing in front of a compilation of YouTube clips. Beforehand, Jacob introduced this background montage of pop religiosity (the band Paramore), recession prophets (Young Jeezy and Kanye West's Put On), media anxiety (preteen film reviewer Sexman), and racial catharsis (Eddie Murphy and Michael Jackson performing "What's Up With You?"). It sampled from cultural references with genuine appreciation for the human context that inspired them, remixing images and sound until they became agents for the characters involved, including Ciocci himself. Watching someone strip the limitations off kitsch by empathy alone was liberating. It hurt to watch him up there dancing awkwardly, but he seemed to say, the exposé is the exorcism.

The Peace Tape, 2009; video still.

Watching The Peace Tape video was akin to witnessing one's adult self barbarically intervening on childhood memories of sleepovers and footie pajamas, as it interjected a vitriol of three-dimensionality, dismembered animations, and Chris Marker-like cats into the already creepy world of Saturday morning cartoons. The alternate versions of these cartoon characters that exist in the fantasy worlds of our imagination suddenly become much weirder, distorted by the pixilation of re-recorded TV and, most essentially, time. It got me thinking about the 1960's psychedelic era. If its drug-fueled spirituality was in part a response to a nonsensical war, psychedelia was also a fierce subversion of the hallucinatory effect of image and sound already channeled by advertising and popular media. I think this aesthetic reappears every few years because it favors complexity over commercial finish and mass production over artistic autonomy, and its origins are still distinctly relevant. Radically, Ciocci exhumes psychedelia's narrative of ecstatic discovery carefully buried within the optical power of the medium itself. The staccato pulsations and dizzying colors are fun and trippy, to be sure, but Ciocci's work resonates because it lacks pretense and isn't far removed from our own misinterpretations of media.

Jacob Ciocci screening and performance was at Queen's Nails Projects on July 2, 2009. More information can be found at www.jacobciocci.org.

Dena Beard is the MATRIX Curatorial Assistant at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.