Decontextualization- Memes, Viral Content and "Weird" Art
Patricia Piccinini's sculpture "Young Family"
There's something I really resent about "weird" media going viral, mostly in that it loses context or becomes harder to find information about- such as original creator, or even the original unaltered video/piece itself. Rumors spread, urban legends even crop up about the content. It's interesting as a cultural phenomena but it's also kind of maddening. I especially dislike when something becomes permanently attached to a streamer, YouTube critic, or an influencer, moreso than the original creator. I also dislike the trend of YouTube videos "explaining" any media, including viral art projects. There's this ever-expanding economy of clickbait that self perpetuates and thrives on further decontextualization of everything, which has happened in part due to YouTube's own algorithms and the ongoing struggle that video creators have to be seen and get paid for their work. The trend of YouTube explained videos is also pretty dire when it comes to movies, series or games- where you'll find an exhausting amount of videos that just summarize what happens on screen beat by beat, with frequent repetition- or just people making stupid faces and overreacting to any given thing, which is its own genre of "content". You don't get analysis or discussion of themes so much in a video essay format, but you can find plenty of people summarizing the content as if you yourself couldn't watch the source material to begin with (or couldn't read a review or a synopsis somewhere either).
I'd said as much on twitter earlier, but what more do we really need about a piece of art other than artist's name, title, a link to their website, and an artist's statement if applicable. Feeling, imagining and interpreting is part of the magic of experiencing art. The demand to be spoonfed over-explanations or "lore" about pieces robs us of that by telling us how to feel. I suppose the fact that schools don't really teach Americans much in the way of media analysis anymore doesn't help, but it also feels like a broader problem with the way the internet and social media operates. Lack of context seems to be a virtue in terms of things going wildly viral to a huge audience and there's scores of accounts online that profit off of aggregating and redistributing all manner of things without attribution, so is it any wonder that compelling things end up in front of us with a new context from those eager to fill in the blanks?
I will say that there's a distinction to make between things that happen to go viral and stories/video art/concepts that were created with the intent to exploit the mechanics of virality- Slenderman, Candle Cove, Cervine Birth, etc. There's a difference between internet creepypasta and things that get co-opted as a part of it.
On the note of co-option, I'm very put off by the way that people, especially teenagers seem to reproduce the elements of big mainstream media "fandom" for small creator's art in a way that seems to assert ownership. This feels notable especially for artists that draw horror and creature art or short comics. I'm not sure what it is about monsters specifically that make people want every little detail explained to them- perhaps a means of control, to make something frightening easier to comprehend or deal with emotionally, especially for kids. But it seems that a lot of adults also want an excess of information about surreal or frightening ideas. Suspension
of belief becomes less important because people are operating on an
assumption that everything is and has to be literal versus metaphorical
or allegory. Frankly, I always get bored when a movie does a huge lore dump about how a world works or the mechanics of some fantastical situation or thing, but that seems to be both a trend of current media and what "fandom" wants. Once again, I blame Star Wars for its influence*- every minor character and vehicle got a backstory and a purpose in order to sell lots and lots of toys! Harry Potter also deserves the blame for both the time period it became popular, the associated marketing and fan culture, and its continued presence that is as cynical and money hungry as its hateful creator. Star Wars, Harry Potter, Marvel Cinematic Universe and Disney combine together so you can get all the lore and all the Funko Pops your heart desires.
One thing I've noticed is the way young fans interact with Trevor Henderson's stuff, turning creations like Sirenhead and the cartoon monster cat and dog into lorebound entities- which have become entirely their own thing on YouTube in the form of fan animations and Minecraft mods far outside of the creator's control. I assume he's made his peace with fan interactions like that, given there's an entire wiki about the various creature designs the artist has made and his style of horror creation both leans on and embraces the aspects of creepypastas and viral cryptid photos, but there's certainly been problems with people stealing his creations for unauthorized games and merchandise.
Okay.
Some of my own art has ended up on meme aggregation websites and art made by my friends has been stolen and used in hoaxes and fake cryptid sightings, put on t-shirts, stolen for flyers, you name it. It's frustrating to be an artist online, but there's not much you can do besides accept that any work you put out into the world won't be in your hands.
I'd recently watched a small interview with KC Green about his experiences with various parts of his comics going viral- Dickbutt, the "this is fine" dog, and other classics. It's not exactly a positive thing for Green- perhaps tiresome at best. You can make peace with the fact that you have no control over your work beyond a certain point, but there's no real net gain for most artists. Which is not to say that it is always a negative to gain a lot of eyes on your work, but it depends a lot on what your work is and who's seeing it and how. If the average streamer features your work, you're probably not going to have a great experience with their fans. If it's a big hit on a chan board, it's anyone's guess how unsavory things might become. In other spaces the results might be more benign. How things go viral and why can sometimes be completely random.
Maybe it's just a visceral reaction I have as a creator myself where there's definitely fear about things you create going wildly out of control- I mean, look at what happened to Pepe the Frog, Matt Furie's friendly stoner character that morphed so wildly into a hate symbol and beyond. Something of that nature happened to a friend's purposely strange and uncanny costumes, where the images were appropriated for some urban legend/scare that supposedly involved strangers goading others into committing suicide as part of an online challenge. That's been found to likely have been a social media stunt started by some musician in order to gather clout for his career, but a second iteration of the myth involves my friend's photos and teenage copycats trying to scare other teens.
A screenshot with an honest to god warning from police that was in the daily mail. The Goofy inspired costume is by DuskySam , whose costumes and creepy characters have often been the topic of internet "cringe culture".
I will say that I have a soft spot for older internet based material remixes, redubs and youtube poops**, though generally the source materials for those are not hard to find. Often these things depend on you knowing what the original material is- like the Fenslerfilm GI Joe PSAs, Teesside Tintin dubs or Boro Predator. It's easy to find episodes of the Super Mario Bros Show or GI Joe, watch the entirety of David and the Magic Pearl or the Colgate Dr. Rabbit video, or find the CDI Legend of Zelda games as a longplay video (and if you're feeling feisty you might be able to get the games running on an emulator). There's not the same obfuscation of material, somehow, and often the love and enjoyment of these remixes leads to fans who take on the role of archivist to make the original material accessible. Though I suppose it helps that usually the source isn't so obscure to begin with. I could be totally talking out of my ass here while wearing big rose tinted nostalgia goggles (also on my ass).
I wanted to write a bit about works that are known as memes, creepypasta, and in other formats that may be divorced from context. My aim here is to add sources and context to original works (without assuming intent when the creator hasn't given a statement) and to talk a little bit about where things have ended up online and how that's affected the creator, if at all.
Possibly in Michigan by Cecelia Condit
First a clip of the piece went viral after being shared on reddit, and later audio from part of the short film (the conversation at the perfume counter) became an inexplicable tiktok trend. There's a nice write-up about it from the New York Times.
I can't be really mad about the meme status of this piece, mostly since it's a rare occasion where positive attention has been directed back towards the artist and she's enjoyed more eyes on her other work. There's perhaps something heartening about the cross-generational connection between this artist and the younger generations who really click with her sensibilities and humor.
I will however, still frown at the YouTube explained videos about her art. Just watch the art.
Check out her website here
"Royco Cup A Soup" / A Short Message by Kaspar Guyaux
When you look up the animation now, you'll be inundated with parody versions and uploads by Youtube's more channy individuals instead of the artist's own post. What you'll also frequently see is the assertion that the animation aired as a real commercial, and that people don't understand the difference between The Netherlands and Denmark. I also remember this popping up on chan-adjacent websites. C'est la vie.
On a fun note, Guyaux's youtube updated November 2020 to preview a cute educational game and the corresponding code for it on github. My spouse works in dev and was totally charmed by it, so if you're code savvy you might enjoy it too.
Untitled 2004- Izumi Kato
You've probably seen this sculpture around the net before, it's a sort of big baby leaning in a corner with an unusual painted face. Izumi Kato creates many sculptures and paintings featuring stylized human figures, which often remind the viewer of stages of fetal development or of primitive depictions of human beings. They're very raw and primal and the artist describes them as being humans distilled to their pure essence, without race or gender. You can view Kato's website here
Folks online know this sculpture better as part of the SCP foundation, a community fan project/wiki of sorts dedicated to the containment and cataloguing of fictional anomalous objects and creatures. Generally (or at least in the project's genesis) the images used were just stolen art or things found around the internet. There's been efforts to change that, with special permission being obtained from original artists to keep the images paired with entries, and also a push for images to either be purpose-made for articles or only uploaded with permission. People are also fairly hostile and defensive about the project if you mention stolen art. A variety of artist-made costumes (SCP 1471 famously being a fursuit made by Clockworkcreature), puppets, and other works were also used without permission.
Very gracious of both Izumi Kato and photographer Keisuke Yamamoto to put up with this. I wouldn't be so nice, I think."I Feel Fantastic"/ Tara the Android music video by John Bergeron
This is an older work from 2004 that's had quite an online history as a "creepy" video and has had associated (completely false) rumors that the creator was a serial killer. Really, this is just outsider art from a hobbyist with an interest in music and robotics, who imagined his creation as an entertainer- honestly not far off from the animatronics in theme restaurants and theme park rides, if on a much smaller budget. Tara the android and her music video were created by John Bergeron and you can still find mention of them on a website dedicated to android projects
Game developer Yitzi Litt did some thorough internet sleuthing to find out more about Tara the android and her creator John Bergeron. You can read the nice write-up he made on medium about it here
Sadly, it seems that John Bergeron has passed away, so we don't have a chance to talk to him to learn more about his passion project.
Patricia Piccinini's hyperrealist human hybrid sculptures
The Offering (2009)
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini has had quite a few works that went viral and ended up with context removed or new contexts added. While Piccinini is an artist that is well-versed in drawing, video art, installation, photography and sculpture, she's best known for her hyperrealist sculptures of human-animal hybrids. These sculptures are crafted with fiberglass, silicone and sometimes human hair and are remarkably life-like. It's no wonder that they're sometimes passed around on social media with claims that they're evidence of secret government experiments with human DNA splicing. Transgenic futures and human DNA splicing are exactly the focus of these works, which imagine human and animal evolution aided by genetic engineering. You can view Piccinini's website here where she has all her work catalogued dating back to 1997.
Also of note, a humorous (and now deleted) parody article from SBS Comedy about the harpooning of Piccinini's Sky Whale was mistaken as real news by non-Australians, who saw a portion of said article out of context and did not pick up that the whole thing was a daft joke about Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
The Tumblr post that had lots of folks thinking Sky Whale was slain.
This is all happily disregarding that a lot of workers who can do at-home work are finding themselves having more time to relax, do household chores, cook, spend time with family, and pursue hobbies. And perhaps even get in a nice daily walk or a bit of weightlifting that they normally wouldn't be able to sneak in due to time wasted on a commute or time confined to an office. As has been well documented, people generally only have a few productive hours at work as-is (about 3 hours on average), with the rest being "pretending to be busy" but that's a whole other essay about labor and the benefit of shorter workdays and shorter workweeks.
The Caretaker- Everywhere at the End of Time by Leyland Kirby.
Album art by Ivan Seal for Stage 1 of Everywhere at the End of time. You can view Seal's work here at his website
The Caretaker is the alias/music project of English electronic musician Leyland Kirby. Both The Caretaker and Leyland Kirby's other music can be found on bandcamp (here as The Caretaker and here under his own name) and on Boomkat . The Caretaker can be described as dark ambient experimental music (though putting labels on music is a difficult task), with Everywhere at the End of Time being a studio album series depicting the progression of dementia in an Alzheimer's patient through gradually degrading music.
In 2020 I saw mentions of the project cropping up on twitter, with the primary example being a younger person giving a warning that listening to the album could be harmful to your mental health or potentially upsetting- fair enough. If you've experienced the heartbreak of dementia with a family member or a loved on, this album could be triggering. To a person without those experiences, it can at least be very sad to imagine yourself in the shoes of an alzheimers patient. Along with the increased attention also came some odd creepypasta-like assertions about the project, as well as a tiktok challenge where teens sat down to listen to the full 6 1/2 hours and shared their reactions.
A YouTube thumbnail for a video about The Caretaker- Everywhere at the End of Time.
Google search related results if you look up The Caretaker
Kirby at least has had a positive attitude about the work going unexpectedly viral, in part because it's brought attention to the work (though not necessarily financial gain) and in part that it's brought awareness of Alzheimer's and plight of dementia patients. Getting young people to think empathetically and to think about music as an experience isn't a bad outcome. In some ways there's parallels between the new young audience of The Caretaker and that of Cecelia Condit's work. Read about Kirby's reaction to going viral here in The Quietus
"Momo" / Mother Bird by Keisuke Aiso
For whatever reason, this sculpture by Keisuke Aiso of an Ubume- a type of monster from Japanese folklore thought to be the spirit of a woman who dies in childbirth- became viral online and associated with a hoax challenge similar to one mentioned earlier in this blog post. In part this was thanks to a cropped photo of the piece being spliced into otherwise child friendly-looking videos, much like the longstanding internet prank of adding screamers/jump scares to otherwise innocuous videos. There was also, supposedly a whatsapp challenge daring children to self harm (which of course, was not true). If there's anything you can count on, it's that rags like The Daily Mail will run any story like this as fact.
As a result of the hysteria, Keisuke Aiso got a lot of angry messages and death threats. Not exactly a nice experience and not at all acceptable behavior.
I'm not sure what to say about these kinds of panics aside from "don't let YouTube babysit your kids" because a lot of what YouTube deems as "child friendly" via inscrutable algorithms is not actually for kids. It's frustrating when any animation, regardless of original intended audience, is automatically made "children's" media. A variety of creators have complained about their own work being incorrectly flagged for kids- which also means that the comments are turned off and the video can't be added to playlists. If you're a parent? Do the bare minimum and review what your kids watch and don't give your tiny child unrestricted access to an ipad.
The artist stated that the sculpture which was made partially with rubber, had started to degrade so he trashed it before he'd even realized that the piece had gone viral. Keisuke is a special effects artist and part of the special effects workshop Link Factory, and you may have seen his work in the ABCs of Death 2 anthology in the "O is for Ochlocracy" segment.
There's a good write-up about Mother Bird, the online hysteria, and the artist on the Japan Times
Killswitch from Catherynne M. Valente's Invisible Games
This is a bit of a meta-work, in that it started as a series of 2007 blog posts about a fictional mysterious game company and it's equally mysterious games. I really like fictional accounts of tv series, films, books, etc, especially if the author weaves a particularly enticing story. It can give me a slight pang like when I read about actually lost works (for instance, silent era films of which only fragments or descriptions survive- and there's always that glimmer of hope that somewhere a film canister will be unearthed from a storage unit or a basement box containing the lost treasure). Other times, you can be thankful that the work isn't real, or know that the fleshed out work if it were created would not live up to whatever fantastical thing you've imagined. I'd once seen someone on twitter wishing that the Sutter Cane books from John Carpenter's In The Mouth of Madness were real- to which I say, no you don't, even if I can also relate to the impulse. If there were an official tie-in it'd completely suck by virtue of explaining the mystery, as so often happens. And also? The Sutter Cane books are supposed to be badly written and trashy- a pastiche of mass market paperbacks, with direct references to both Steven King and HP Lovecraft.
That aside, Killswitch (one of the fictitious games documented on the now defunct blog) is something that's had a bit of a secondary life online as a creepypasta and as fan-made games, being styled as a game that can make you go mad or kill yourself. The hook of the original posts about Killswitch is that it's a game that entirely deletes itself when your character dies or the game finishes, and only a finite number of copies exist. The creepypasta takes on it ramp up the stakes a little on what is otherwise just a compelling and haunting story.
It makes sense though that Invisible Games has some notoriety attached to it. An anonymous blog about fictional games operates on the mechanics of viral internet mysteries, urban legends and creepypasta by its nature. The author also apparently doesn't give interviews about the project. Maybe to maintain the mystique, or maybe she just doesn't want to be bothered. Who can say.
The internet certainly loves a haunted video game story, like the Polybius urban legend.
What if a video game could make you crazy and die? That already exists, it's called normal video games. I kid, I kid!
You can look at an archive of the Invisible Games posts here
Killswitch is also available as a short story in the collection The Melancholy of Mecha-girl.
Ninja Turtle Sex Museum by James Unsworth / "Pizza Party"
This is a favorite for several reasons. It's raunchy, humorous and over the top gay art with a twisted sense of humor. The video art piece is well known as a meme and can be found all over the internet in gifs and sometimes as reaction images. It features a group of performers in hilariously low budget crude Ninja Turtles Costumes, viewing porn, drinking beer, eating pizza, taking ecstasy and descending into a horny orgiastic frenzy of murder, necrophilia, decapitation and fisting all while jerking their monstrous cocks (which appear to be made with squeeze bottles of mayo or salad cream to simulate cum). The video itself was part of a larger gallery installation in 2010 at London's Five Hundred Dollars, which also featured drawings, photographs, and murals by artist James Unsworth.
The original video is not online anymore but you can find a re-upload on vimeo jokingly attributing the piece to Vinny from Vinesauce (I guess this was streamed there).
I think this is one of those cases where meme status actually works well with the art. Anything that causes a straight audience to be confronted with unapologetic gay filth (the Pink Flamingos experience) is pretty cool, so long as it doesn't result in threats or harassment to the creator.
You can view James Unsworth's work here on his website.
Shaye Saint John
Shaye Saint John is a character created by the late Eric Fournier, an outsider video artist and performer who had his start in the 80s punk scene in LA. In the 2000s he created the character of Shaye Saint John, a former super model who'd been hit by a train and had her body parts replaced with bizarre mannequin pieces. She featured in a series of campy youtube videos and also had a website and livejournal. Eric played the role of Shaye and never broke character, insisting that Shaye was her own person and that he only worked in collaboration with her.
The most known Shaye Saint John video is "Hand Thing", a video I've absolutely adored for ages. Shaye's videos are notable as being some of the earliest "creepy" YouTube videos, though I can't really view them that way myself. They're very playful and fun, clearly the effort of someone with a lot of fantastic ideas. If you know anything about LA art scene stuff I doubt you'll be surprised or creeped out by an art piece/persona that is just peak former "it girl" glam.
Sadly, Eric Fournier passed away in 2010 due to health issues related to alcoholism. His original youtube account was deleted in 2017, but you can still view revival accounts and reposts of Shaye's videos. There's a nice write-up from Vice in 2015 about Fournier which you can view here .
There's also a documentary from Larry Wessel called Eric & Shaye from 2016, though I have not watched it myself. The film can be purchased on BigCartel
Face Off (2000) by Xue Jiye
Xue Jiye is a Chinese artist living and working in Beijing who is known for his surreal paintings and sculptures. His work often deals with the human form, physicality, human/animal chimeras, and the body in relation to landscapes and harsh geometric figures. It's compelling work that I can't get enough of.
One of his paintings, a 2000 work titled "Face Off" featuring a man tearing the skin from his face, has long been passed around on the internet without any attribution. I've commonly seen it used as a reaction image in response to infuriating or horrifying subjects. The artist has expressed frustration over this and has a thread on his twitter account about the painting, studies he made for it, as well as mentions of copycats.
An SNL sketch featured art blatantly copying both Xue Jiye's Face Off as well as a sculpture copying Jon Beinart's work
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It's always important to properly credit and attribute work when you share it. It helps artists be seen and it helps others find and appreciate the work in context. There's also a lot of fun to be had in researching and learning about a strange video, song, painting, sculpture, or other artwork that you might randomly encounter on the net. As fun as memes or urban legends can be, I think getting to the truth of something is infinitely more pleasing. Just in researching further on the subject of viral art I've learned so much more about their creators, got a chance to revisit pieces I enjoy, and got up to date with new projects from artists who are still alive and creating.
* I also talked about a different influential aspect of Star Wars in the essay Cool Gun, Cool Mech, Cool Space Marine . I wouldn't even say I dislike Star Wars (the original films are silly good fun) but you have to admit they changed our culture permanently through the sheer brute force of marketing.
** Quite a few YouTube poops are still really really funny, but oh man so many of them are way more racist than I remembered. A lot of the humor of 00's internet is white kids realizing they cannot get in trouble for saying the n-word if they're anonymous.
*** Disabled people have been pretty vocal about the fact that "scary" image of being home all the time is their lived reality. The pandemic really highlighted the ways in which many jobs and many events could be accessible but just weren't until it suddenly related to the safety of able bodied people in certain fields. It should be noted of course that there's a big degree of privilege related to the types of office jobs that can be done remotely- whereas people in retail, hospitality, food service, factory work, agriculture/harvesting etc have borne the brunt of dangerous pandemic jobs.
https.://twitter.com/xuejiye66/status/1269510211691147266?s=20
Booming post. My approach is to view things not in terms of decontextualization, but as flat out _re_ contextualization. For instance, a couple years back a story by the first-time author Isabel Fall, who was in the early stages of gender transition, went viral, and the consequences of that were extremely harmful to her. It led directly to her detransitioning. On the other hand, sometimes recontextualization can be beneficial. I wouldn't have been able to engage at all with Dave Chappelle's recent statements about trans people if Jessie Gender hadn't done the work to recontextualize them into a broader trans-centered context.
ReplyDeleteThank you Kate, and you raise an excellent point. The situation with Fall and the way people recontextualized her story in extremely bad faith is not one I'll soon forget, but not every instance of new context is harmful or malicious. I've been thinking a lot lately about Carta Monir's deep dives on problematic depictions of trans people on film, how it can be both interesting and empowering to reclaim these things for ourselves, especially when for many of us those types of depictions were an awakening or a rare moment to recognize ourselves on screen.
DeleteThank you for writing this, it's so thorough too - I don't think I knew the source of the infamous 'ripping the face off' picture that was always a stupid reaction image. And it's pretty much more galling when its an independant artists work that's been getting the unwanted attention - it's also annoying when it happens to films (ie Xtro's infamous road scene becoming a 'skinwalker sighting', or hell, Phantasm's Tall Man being edited to become Slenderman) but yeah, totally agree otherwise.
ReplyDeleteAlso, not to reply with a tangent but that whole Polybius thing? Not even an actual urban legend, it was cooked up as a prank on an arcade gaming website in 2000 and the site's owner sent it to gulluble gaming magazines, so it's more or less the original 'forced meme'.
It's funny you mention the Xtro road scene because I'd had that on my mind too. Nearly included it in the article but this whole thing was already becoming too long and varied.
DeleteInteresting to hear that Polybius evolved from a prank. I'd known about it as a creepypasta/legend for ages but didn't really go in depth on it beyond mentioning it as well known example.