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TikTok & Video Design Loops

Arful Design Chapter 3

I am responding to Ge Wang's Artful Design, Chapter 3, and the idea of design loops. The most common medium of design loops today is in video-based social media. From Vine to Instagram reels and TikTok, automatically looping videos have slowly spread across the internet. In terms of design choices, everyone on TikTok knows their videos will loop, but only sometimes does that feature directly shape the content itself. In what I've encountered, there seem to be three major categories of overt looping on TikTok: the rhetorical, the crowdsourced, and the trippy.

The first very much takes after the Song That Never Ends, using the video's verbal content to tie together the loop rather than the visuals. For baking and other tutorial videos, this type of overt looping works well with the general format of displaying a preview of the final product before going through the process from start to finish. Conceptually, this is the simplest design of the three, but I personally have yet to see it executed flawlessly; below is a fairly good example, from the creator @chelsweets. Although semantically a perfect circle, the different cadences of the start and end speech somewhat break the illusion of infinity.

The second category capitalizes on TikTok's duet feature, which allows users to directly add onto someone else's creation. While many are just one back-and-forth, some duets grow into chains well beyond (what I assume was) the feature's intended use case. It reminds me of the Infinite Cat Project mentioned in Artful Design, a celebration of just how many people are online and how absurd group participation can become in that context. Below is one of the most popular duet chains, rooted in a video criticizing making duets when one has "absolutely nothing to add." Even when they don't have delighfully self-referential audio, these kinds of chains are designed with an awareness of their medium: each video latches onto the edge of a previous one, simultaneously completing the scene further and implying an infinite universe within the video.

The third category is where creators can really go wild playing with perspective to create seamless audio and graphics loops. In the example below, the animator @supertrip64 uses these extreme shifts in point of view to create a loop within a loop. As a viewer on TikTok looks at their phone screen, the first-person perspective within the video is focused on their computer screen. When the world within the computer screen engulfs the entire video, it gives the impression that there are infinite worlds contained within that one computer, let alone in the rest of the video universe or the entirety of the internet.