Casey Kauffmann’s It’s Over Bitch (2022) is a multi-channel video collage that brings together memes, GIFs, ads, and snippets from reality television shows, all filtered through the artist’s signature nostalgic sensibility. It is currently featured in the exhibition Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film, on view at LACMA through July 13, 2025. Here, Kauffmann reflects on the thinking behind It’s Over Bitch and how the work came to be.
The title of this piece, It’s Over Bitch, is from a scene in the film Jawbreaker, and it's me talking to myself as an artist. I’ve been making collage images, GIFs, and videos using mostly my phone for my Instagram project Uncannysfvalley for the past decade now. Instagram has served as the substrate for my digital collage practice for the past decade but its corporate control continually narrows its subversive, democratizing potential. That’s where the anxiety presented in the title over the move towards Web3 and away from Web2 comes in for me.
I originally made this piece for a 2022 show with John de Leon Martin at Human Resources, curated by John Bertle. I visited HR and they had a bunch of CRT TVs for me to use. I turned one on and it made that loud metallic BWOMP sound with a flash of white light that exploded from the center. That sound was so nostalgic—it transported me back to the Web2 aesthetics of my childhood and adolescence that continue to influence my practice. Social media and Web2 were rising during the early 2000s, alongside reality TV. I graduated high school in 2007, and the imagery in these collages—pixel art, screensavers, glitches, internet cats, and nostalgic brands like Limewire—draws from that era. The technical approach to making these collage videos exemplifies a copy-and-paste technique. Combining images that already exist and carry the weight of their circulation through online image economies to make new meaning within the new worlds I create.
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I love that this piece, which explores the changing landscape of online image economies, is in a show about the impact of accessible image-editing tech on visual culture. It’s Over Bitch speaks to the anxiety around rapidly evolving technology and planned obsolescence. I made this piece because the internet is not an archive, it’s an ever-shifting landscape documenting the push and pull between corporate ownership and user-generated content and exchange. As the communal potential for these platforms narrows, our interest in them fades. They transform into automized advertisement homogenization machines and that hopeful promise of sharing, agency, self-expression, and our delusional pursuit of “authenticity” fades and dies too. A necessary evil, a daily chore, a thief of our attention and self-worth, our understanding of Instagram and all platforms like it changes as we watch the simultaneously liberating and oppressive power of their invention unfold.
I guess it’s not really over, though, because my low-down, Tumblr-sourced, silly iPhone collage practice that started on an app that cost $1.99 now has found its place in this incredible show. Maybe it’s NOT over, bitch!