Among my oeuvre, my work in early 21st century “viral video” has been among my favorite explorations. By appropriating my own early Millenial standards of contemporary medium such as with “clickbait”, “shitposting”, and “algorithmic trend gaming” I have directly considered the abyssal depths of our shared psychic chaos, traveled wholly within them, and returned with signs of not necessarily meaning but certainly shared humanity.

How To Pick Up A Girl At The Gym (2012)

An examination of popular cultural forces of its time, How To Pick Up A Girl At The Gym subverts its contemporary misogynist philosophies at play, such as “pick up artist” communities built around the consideration of women as objects to be “slammed” not unlike barbells in the pre-Instagram fitness days when loud and overly attention seeking gym behaviors synchronized popularization of performative, more muscular, iterations of aerobics then becoming popular (such as the sort of militarized Jazzercise seen in Crossfit) and just starting to have a presence on the internet. The film received 9 million views in its debut week from an account that had 76 subscribers at the time of posting and went on to be licensed internationally for inclusion on comedic clip shows not in the least because of its decision to put jokes verbalized in English as tertiary to the entertainment focus of the piece. This work successfully drew insecure masculinity, only just finding its unique toxic expression in cyberspace, into the open and begged it to show its own, whole ass. Masculinity eagerly, joyously obliged.

Kid Comes Out Of The Closet And Parents Flip (2012)

On the heels of HTPUAGATG, Kid Come Out Of The Closet And Parents Flip explored the same low culture hallmarks of its form, namely an evocative and exploitative title suggesting found footage capturing a homophobic response from parents upon hearing their child is gay, and used it to explore alternate realities of tolerance. Instead of an emotionally violent, schadenfreude expression of genuinely sad human behavior, the film reveals a pair of ersatz stand-ins for parent figures, two young performers clearly the same age as their “son”. This choice invokes our certain reality: faced with an intolerant previous generation, modern youth of American and technological culture tacitly resolved to support and raise each other up in the void of compassion left by fraudulent revolutionary Boomers and exhausted, cool-ennui poisoned Gen Xers. These abstract representations of parents respond to their kids literal exit from a literal closet with literal flips. The stunts are performed simultaneously and in parallel, transporting the viewer into a surreal dream world in which it becomes safe for the child to mention that indeed, also he is “a gay”. The “parents” respond not with any sort of rejection, only relief that the fear in their sons’ voice and body was not about something actually scary to them. Not with uncertainty, only humorous and easy expressions of love and reassurance that they know who their son is and embrace him fully. Not with even a cagey fear for their child’s safety in a harsh and disgusting world, the kind of subtle homophobia easily dismissed as rooted in “realist” parental concern, only the adoring nonchalance of true parents. Here, it’s just another day of being people, no need to make a big deal of it, the show must go on, and how lovely is that? Further reinforcing the power of this work is its trajectory of viewership. Despite a tepid but extant reaction when it was posted in 2012, it was not until 2019, seven years later, that the internet rediscovered this work and sprinted its viewer count across the million mark. The video should have become out of step with its time, seven years after conception, exacerbated by the incongruent message of “VOTE” at the end of the video (a holdover, something which seemed relevant in the 2012 election year which saw some typical politicized homophobic rhetoric). However, with 118,000 thumbs up and just 1,700 thumbs down, the video has received overwhelmingly positive response which seems to still resonate with the viewer no matter their point of view, often receiving expressions along the line of how this video “was living in the future” (referencing a memetic turn of phrase common to internet parlance) and perhaps most satisfactorily summed up, at least to the artist behind the work, by the YouTube user FlameEmber who said “Is there such thing as a wholesome shitpost that actually took effort?” The artist’s ankles, which learned to backflip solely for this video, say, with a gratitude which only attends a sense of cosmic recognition and understanding: yes.

Moon Juice (2016)

A video which found its true success of over a million views in the peculiar ecosystem of Facebook Video, Moon Juice repurposed verbatim the self-described daily menu of new age self-care guru and Moon Juice founder Amanda Chantal Bacon as an incantation. A spell allowing our druidic performer to channel her privileged, wealthy spirit. As the wildly bearded man in a hood contorts his body it may occur to the viewer that this individual is himself an alternative medicine enthusiast, a yoga practitioner, and perhaps the mocking call is coming from within the house… But this realization only further layers the piece with ruminations on class, white witch appropriation culture, and an ouroborosific nutritional apartheid seen in the greater quilt of american culture IRL in the anti-vaccination and flat earth movements which would become increasingly popular among certain members of the wealthy elite. This particular work continued to unfold in conversation with its subject as Ms. Bacon, the caricatured straw woman at the center of the film, publicly expressed dismay at being “bullied” for what she described as “health-shaming”. This proved the work’s sensational ability to organically express itself in kaleidoscoping tesseract of “The Strong” appropriating what they perceived as a socially valuable “weakness” only possible in this new realm of the internet. Moon Juice presaged the callout culture which undoubtedly en masse presented social progress but which would also, in the hands of cynics, further incentivize victimhood as a “good brand” in a way only a cozy imperial capitalist educational system, uninterrupted by any major conflict for over a hundred years of comfortable indoctrination, could. This piece received mentions in The New Yorker and even years later in an Entrepreneur Magazine feature focused on Ms. Bacon. That particular reappropriation of the work, assimilating the film’s criticism comfortably back into something empowering, affirming, and fully owned by Ms. Bacon, serves as a final garland for the piece. An experiential reward which could not ever be fully explained, only felt for the terrific, dizzying somatic experience it is; a spiritual trepanation for the internet age.

You’ve Been Eating Bagels Wrong Your Entire Life… (2015)

A work of straightforward satire, You’ve Been Eating Bagels Wrong Your Entire Life… is in many ways a quintessential expression of The Murderbot Years. We see echoed themes of form in the timeless vaudevillian principles of communicating visually rather than with language, allowing the work to fully thrive in the unboundaried international realm of Extremely On Line. The simple sale of a minor fear as a jumping off point serves as a perfect spherification of the psyche of the Western Technological Citizen of The First World. Truly, in a life untouched by any true want, is there a more exquisite shame than to realize despite being a member of the greatest nation on earth you have somehow still not mastered even the simple act of nourishing yourself? You are still consuming calories in suboptimal ways, thus proving what a dunce you are and how deserving you are of the unfulfilled life you possess. Where the 80s unabashedly exhausted an appetite for material wealth as cultural cache, the 90s sublimated that into a concept of more subtle taste and aesthetic still rooted in a not fully demolished economy. The 2000s saw the toddling baby steps of modern fascism rooted in ubiquitous conservative shame dynamics and peddling the same old lies of meritocracy and self-mastery, embarrassingly humble carrots which set the stage for what wealth was truly allowed to be flaunted in the 2010s: the wealth of trivial practicalities, the kinds of gems children glom from their favorite cool third grade teachers. What greater wealth could be held in these times than to possess knowledge of the kind of petty behavioral oneupmanship expressed in the boom of life hack mania? What is better in this life than knowledge you could smugly present to your peers in the form of an impregnated breakfast bread (you buffoons, still doing your bagels like Jersey Catholics) without noticing your own hands and face now filthy with your masturbatory expulsions.

Look Down: A Rhyming Response To That Look Up Viral Video (2014)

Putting aside the unfortunate sincerity (and vanity) unconsciously expressed by the artist’s insistence on describing his snotty poem as “a rhyming response”, Look Down: A Rhyming Response To That Look Up Viral Video remains an adequate contribution to its family tree. Riffing on a popular format of the time, the “reply video”, this work put in its cross hairs the easy social currency that can still be had at any time by simply criticizing the prevalence of mobile devices in our lives. While some of these criticisms are certainly founded, as is evident by the way our culture utilizes our pocket anxiety portals as sort of belt grinders intended for use on our frontal lobes, the unoriginal lack of self awareness which drives the insufferably smug expression of these ideas belies the underlying motivation of those original works such as “Look Up” as not compassionate interest in the healing of fellow comrades facing down the barrel of a technology using humanity as a petri dish, but as a simple way to amass the “internet points”. Social currency commonly (and insufferably) described as meaningless by the very people who dedicate most of their waking moments toward pickaxing out of everyone else’s hearts. Toss in an easy dose of the latent anglophilia and monarchism seemingly implanted in the DNA of every capitalist American, a lazy voila conclusion, and you have a diabolically easy recipe for a veritable internet sensation sturdily capable of serving as a decent mimicry of self realized fulfillment. Something akin to the dopamine cascades a liberal Redditor might feel witnessing a cheeky DARPA sponsored STEM curriculum narrated by Bryan Cranston.